Owondo's first few months

If that dog could talk, he’d have the craziest stories, some people tell me when they meet Owondo. I think that once he’s an amputee, we’ll get this comment even more. And the truth is, we both have the craziest stories, and Owondo has lived with me through most of them. Unlike me, he wears his stories on his body in scars and his leg, that fourth leg that harbored bacteria from our past.

When people hear that he’s a village dog from Cameroon, the village where I lived for two years when I served as a Peace Corps volunteer, they assume I saved him from the street. They couldn’t be further from the truth. His story is my story, and he was born in my front yard, covered in fleas and mites and ringworm from the untended bitch of my neighbor, my Papa in my new adopted family. My French still wasn’t great and I struggled to communicate even the basic things. When Owondo’s mom started barking at dusk, seemingly at random strangers, I had to go home to look up the word I kept hearing thrown around, “le rage.” Rabies. I assumed I was exposed to it, playing with a nursing puppy, and I abandoned him alone in my house for a day so I could travel to Yaounde, the capital, to get a post-exposure prophylaxis for rabies. I had picked a terrible day to travel, and I got off the bus before arriving into Yaounde since the road was shut down for the impending arrival of Paul Biya, the country’s dictator since 1982. Instead of waiting under the tall canopy of the roadside trees, I got a ride in a private car of a Chinese couple who spoke only a few words of English, and we rode the long way around the city. I kept trying to make small talk, but struggled because I kept thinking about tiny Owondo wandering around my house. When I came home later that evening, tired from being crammed into public transport and negotiating share taxis, my landlady who originally spread the rumor about rabies laughed when I told her where I had been. “It’s because someone ate a dog. The Yevol love dog.” I was relieved that I didn’t have to think about how to get rid of this puppy.

We lived in a two-bedroom cement house and I learned how to raise my first dog. Owondo was named in the Bulu language, a language shaped by the climate and food of the Congo forest. Peanuts are the main crop of women in this part of the world. They are planted by hand in wet soils twice a year. As I went to work in my neighbors fields learning how to plant and weed with a hoe, unable to hold my back perfectly horizontal like these women who have been doing it their whole lives, Owondo maniacally ran in between the manioc plants, chasing chickens and digging up peanut plants. He was my brown little nut job, since he fit perfectly in my cupped hands, and I decided he’d bear the name “Peanut”, a signifier of where he’s been and the story he has to tell. 

I took him wherever I could. We’d walk to Papa Jean’s house in the next village over and sit together on his porch. He’d recount stories to me of his old hunting dogs and remark with amazement how Owondo picked sticky seeds I’d collected on my pants walking through the bush, using only his teeth. He sat patiently in a market bag in my lap on the bus ride from Yaoundé to Bamenda, despite the threat from the bag chargeur who told me that he’d have to ride on the roof of the bus since there are many Muslims who take the bus, and they can’t be touched by a dog. I refused, strongly help my course, and gained sympathy from the fellow passengers, many of whom were Muslim and loved dogs. 

As he grew older, his ears became his significant facial feature growing disproportionately large to the rest of his body. He grew a new fur coat, shedding the dark brown coat of malnurishment and infection for a vibrant reddish brown, and he looked more and more like a fox each day. As his energy levels picked up, I realized that he wasn’t obedient, preferring to chase goats up the hill beyond the village and back down onto the road. 

I tried to channel his energy, turning him into my running partner once he became an adolescent. I preferred to avoid human settlements since other village dogs could be aggressive towards Owondo and I hated being yelled at, a spitting “Ntangan” or if I was lucky a more amorous, “La blanche!” Instead, we ran en brousse, away from the human settlements. We woke up early, put on sneakers, and hit the road, turning off the short stretch of pavement next to a stand of eucalyptus trees, to a dirt road that wound down a steep hill and back up again. The mist these mornings hung in the jungle trees, a cold damp that made me sweat immediately. I let him off leash, preferring to navigate the often slippery mud road untethered to a high energy dog. We would wind our way down the hill, passing women barrier fishing in the small stream. Sometimes they were my mama and sisters, and we’d greet in basic Bulu. Climbing the hill, we ran past small fields and a medium sized palm oil plantation where we would sometimes see men and women boiling the red palm nuts, or turning the oil press after the early morning harvest. Sometimes Owondo would bolt off, finding sweet red palm nuts in the fields. I’d call after him, and sometimes he’d come back immediately. Other times I’d wait for a while before returning home alone, wondering where he had gone. He’d return hours later, waging his tail as though he was surprised to still find me at home. “It’s you! You’re still here!” I could imagine him saying. I wanted to ask him where he had been, what he had gotten himself into, but dogs can’t tell you their stories.

Owondo's mom and his litter. He's somewhere in that heep o' puppies.

Owondo wrastling with his sister.

Owondo figuring out how to fetch a ball.