I never thought I’d die at the hands of a dog. Not until I came across a dog that could cut you up like a melon. The night I met this one, it turned out to be two, then three, four, five. I could just about make out their figures in the dark: the hands, the ears, the jaws. Five shadowy canines, unmistakable in their feral glory, facing off a weakly creature whose only weapon was a pocket can-opener. It was never meant to be a daring venture. The village where my friends were staying was a mere mile away. I had parted ways to sleep under the starry sky, away from the village lights. I was nineteen.

So here I was now, facing the wild bunch, seated in my sleeping bag, legs stretched inside, like the letter L turned ninety degrees counterclockwise. I tried to be still, barely breathed, hoping to pass as a curious, inedible thing. A few minutes passed. Or a few seconds perhaps. Time is illusive when you are run over by fear, when you feel death beckons and can’t see a way out. I closed my eyes. I think I did. I saw my mother’s face, broken, dazed.

A shove.

I jumped up, screaming.

‘What the heck do you think you are doing here?’ (Oh, that local accent, that feeling of having reached the shore, or the shore having come to you). ‘I was watching the sky,’ I said, ‘fell asleep, had a nightmare that wild dogs were attacking me.’ ‘You’re dumb, aren’t you?’ the local accent said, ‘the dogs left because I got here. You must have fainted.’

Every night two men from the village would stay up as guards against the ‘wild bunch’, he explained. That night they had noticed the dogs circling something, gotten closer but ‘them dogs’ had run away. I was dumb, he felt he had to reiterate. ‘Thank you,’ I said, ‘you saved my life’. ‘Thank the wretched calf they savaged last night.’ He was as genial as the death I thought he had averted. ‘They had enough time to make your ears your biggest piece. But they were full,’ he said, shaking his head in disbelief or in disappointment, perhaps, that the livestock had perished and not me, ‘they were full.’

Caption: This is roughly where a calf was sacrificed and I was spared!