Dog Stones

My suburbian housemate is hoping it’s not witchcraft but they’re a little concerned about the stones. The way sometimes they’re there and other times they aren’t but mostly there’s a little pile of them placed mysteriously at the foot of the stairs.

When they finally muster up the courage to question a woman who is clearly a sorcerer, I cackle hysterically into the night. I tell them I’ve been up with the sun, walking with white people and the stones are for the dogs.

The dogs are what you forget when you’ve spent the last six years living in the centre of the city. There, you dodge speeding cars, sticky fingers and the porn star neighbours who were going at it all night, forgetting the paper-thin walls.

But in the suburbs, I find myself waking up to go for an early morning hike and knowing exactly when to pick up a dog stone. This razor sharp instinct and random rock collection is a skill I developed when I was a kid.

Growing up in a small town filled with folks whose dogs would roam the streets like mongrel mafia bosses, I got pretty good at gathering weapons. Sizing up small, palm-sized stones perfect for whizzing frantically through the air should I meet the unfortunate fate of bumping into a chaser, a barker or a stalk.

Chasers, as the name suggests, are the hounds that will run you straight out of town. Usually they appear moving at top speed, emerging suddenly out of a dark alley or through an open gate as you desperately channel your inner Helalia Johannes.

Unlike chasers, barkers are those dogs that are too lazy to send you screaming down a street. They’re not gonna run, you won’t need to hide but they’ll frighten you to death with their vocal cords.

As for the stalks, these guys are real sadistic sons of b*tches. They don’t chase. They don’t necessarily bark but they’ll trail you all the way home just so you’re clear that this is a dog town in a dog world and canines are the indisputable kings.

Oranjemund’s proliferation of chasers, barkers and stalks is why I’d walk home from school, sport or the cinema picking up and discarding the selection of dog stones I’d hurl should a local pooch decide today was the day.

Ask any kid braving OJ’s mutt-run streets in the mid-nineties and they’ll tell you we’ve all had them.

One sweaty, Speedy Gonzales afternoon when we’d walked past the wrong gate and spent the next ten minutes shrieking down the road pursued by dogs named things like Ajax, Shasha or Rocky.

Back then dogs ruled our little lives and brand new to Windhoek’s suburbs, I know that here it’s no different. The dogs are boss, the mutts are monarch and the pups are president.

Four weeks in, I’m yet to meet a chaser but barkers howl late into the night opening a sustained canine chorus that must surely be a prelude to poisoned water bowls. Stalks amble around like ladies who lunch, stopping to sniff piss as though they’re judging orchids at a county fair.

While I wait for the inevitable chaser in this new land of unleashed dogs, too-slow electronic gates and dog owners clearly lobotomised by their Labradors, I take inventory of my new neighbourhood’s hounds – the border collie stalk at the top of the hill, the wild-eyed barker on the corner – and I gather dog stones.

I bend over mid-hike to scoop up a goodie.

I pile them up at the foot of the stairs after a safe walk home.

And I assure my housemate that I am not a witch.

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