A New Roommate

Having spent more than a month now living with a man, I have a new female roommate for company. She’s got big round alert brown eyes, a white snout, a black body, white socks and a curly prawn tail. Our recent guest is Mayna – I can only hope that the name is correct. This mongrel with absolutely no hint of pedigree belongs to an officer currently on leave.

Sources have it that Mayna has spent the last month or more locked up in her mistress’ room during the night and tied up outside during the day. Feeling very sorry for the poor dog, who has spent nights whining in her room alone, we asked that she be brought to stay with us until her owner returns.

While she appears quite thrilled for the company she has now, Mayna also seems somewhat disconcerted at the sudden change. She slept peacefully last night, shifting place once in a while. That is more than I can say for overly concerned Ducky, who lost precious sleep checking on her every once in a while during the night.

This morning I bathed her – she badly needed some cleaning up. Initially, I was unsure of how she would react to a stranger dousing her with water, but she took so well to the bath that she’d put my two pedigree boys back home to shame. Not a whimper, not a whine. While one of my boys back home would have howled the place down like he were being slaughtered, the other would have slipped out to go flaunt himself out in the open, wearing nothing but soap suds. Mayna, on the other hand, just stood there while I applied ample amounts of Ducky's shampoo on her and gave her a good scrub. (I figured that after his super-short haircut this morning, he wouldn’t need much shampoo anyway.) The water ran black and I definitely needed a bath myself after that.

Mayna was given her marching orders almost as quickly as she was brought here – she turned out to be quite a handful to look after – the idea of cleaning up a strange dog’s poo did not appeal to any of us.