My Dog Marcus

                                                                                                                                       - Colin Howard

Anyone who has met Marcus, my huge, handsome, lazy, stupid St. Bernard, will not believe that he recently had an idea. This idea was certainly the first he has ever had and I cannot think how he recognized it.

The idea had something to do with making life easy for St Bernards. For it is Marcus' belief that a day should consist of sixteen hours of sleep, six hours of rest, and two hours of intensive eating. But he is occasionally called on to work - that is, to take a walk after breakfast as far as the nearest corner and back. A real dog would look forward to this, trembling with expectation. To Marcus, it is sheer, brutal slavery.

Roughly, then, his idea was this : "If I were deaf, I couldn't hear when they called me for my walk, and they wouldn't be able to move me, because nothing can move me. So I will pretend to be deaf."

The day on which he put his plan into action my wife came to me much disturbed. "Poor old Marcus has gone deaf !" she exclaimed.

"Deaf ?" I cried. "But he could hear perfectly well last night." I went into the kitchen and addressed him. "Coming for a walk, Marcus ?" I said.

Marcus, like a perfect actor, gazed at me with eager devotion, as though he would have given his last bone to have heard what I said. After a good deal of shouting, we left him where he was, and he went to sleep smiling.

It was some days before we noticed that Marcus was only partly deaf, he was still able to hear anything connected with food. I was carving a joint one Sunday when a tiny scrap of meat slipped from the fork and dropped on the carpet. Although Marcus was asleep in the kitchen - some distance away, he heard it fall. He hurtled into the dining-room and gulped it down.

"Hey !" I said. "I thought you were deaf."

Marcus' jaw and tail both dropped. He seemed to remember that he was deaf.

Not much later he failed to hear three repeated commands to come out for a walk - then leapt to his feet at the arrival of the butcher. In the end, my wife and I agreed that he had to be cured.

The course we took was not, perhaps, entirely sporting. Marcus had gone deaf; we would go silent. When Marcus was about we would now go through the actions of speaking but would not say a word.

Marcus' first reaction was to be lazily puzzled. Very soon he was really worried. Had he overestimated his power and gone really deaf ? The horrible part was that, for all he knew, we might be talking about food. The thought of what he might be missing was real torture to him.

As we mouthed silently at one another, Marcus would stare painfully into our faces, trying, I swear to lip - read. Also, as he was never called now for meals, I doubt if he had fourteen hours' real sleep out of the twenty-four, and he worried himself down to about three hundred pounds in weight.

We kept this up for several days. Then we decided to restore Marcus' hearing. I said in a loud voice one morning "Come on, Marcus ! Time for your walk, boy.

An expression of beautiful relief spread over his vast face. He was not deaf at all ! He bounced to his feet. He frisked to the gate like a lively pony. He joyously took one of the longest walks of his career - almost half a mile.

Marcus was not troubled again with his deafness; neither were we.