The Less than Curious Incidents of the Dogs that Bark in the Night
This will probably be a short entry as I shall probably fall asleep over my computer. The reason is simple. Throughout every night we are subjected to the deafening cacophony of a hundred Baskerville hounds seemingly baying for our blood. The effect is spine-chillingly awful. It can start with one puppy spluttering over a chicken bone and within seconds the whole of Rundu resounds to the howls of huge packs of pseudo wolves. They snarl and threaten each other. “You want a piece of me, you come and get me”. And they often do. One place for carving each other up seems to be just outside our bedroom window, and given the fact that there is no glass in it, just fine mosquito net and a few slats, a savage fight can sound alarmingly near. I have not dared put on the light in case they are actually in the bedroom.
Almost as annoying is the irritation felt at seeing these very same dogs the next morning stretched out under a shady tree snoozing the daylight hours away so that they can stop us sleeping at night. Rose took us on a tour of Rundu in her car. We passed many dozing dogs. “Swerve to the left,” I urged as we approached one, but Rose could not be prevailed upon to decrease the dog population by a measly one. Neither should revenge tempt you to give a dozing dog a hefty kick up the north pole. This is rabies country, after all. Let sleeping dogs lie. What puzzles me, though, is, if Africans are prepared to eat dog, then why are there still so many of them around? They are a good source of nutrients and they probably taste as good as a steak. Eat more dog is what I say.
Then the cocks start crowing. Don’t believe these creatures only crow at dawn. I can personally vouch for the fact that, given half a chance they will crow all through the night. There is a cock a few houses away. Its call is answered by one a quarter of a mile down the road, then by one a quarter of a mile further on and so on until the sound of the cock reached Windhoek seven hundred miles away. Georgina assures me that when her grandfather kept cocks he would put them overnight in a coop where the ceiling was so low the cocks couldn’t stretch out their necks to crow. Ignore the connotations of medieval torture. This sounds like a good idea.
In the rare and, oh so brief, moments of silence in the night I can hear something prowling in the garden. It sounds as if it has the weight and dimensions of a gorilla. It can’t be John the gardener as he only comes on Mondays and Thursdays. What it is and what it’s doing I do not and don’t wish to know. Besides, Georgina is safely between me and the window, so I snuggle down under my mosquito net choosing to ignore that a rampant primate would make short work of a flimsy bit of lace.
A new horror has emerged to destroy any chance of a goodnight’s sleep. Yesterday, a couple were married next door. Part of the tradition is to ensure that anyone within a one mile radius gets no sleep that night. They easily achieve this with what sounds like a hundred African drummers a choir of a thousand well versed in African chants and excessively loud ululations. You have to remember that our windows are neither double nor even single glazed. This facilitates the sounds travelling directly from their drums and voices to our ears with no let or hindrance. After 2 hours your brain begins to throb. After 4 you are on the verge of insanity. After 6, your thoughts turn to bloody murder. Each of our gardens in this part of town has a large and substantial air raid shelter plonked in the middle of it to protect the population against Angolan shelling during the regional uprising a few years ago. Contrary to popular belief, they were not shelling Namibia for helping their enemies in the war but, I believe, to stop the nightly cacophony of dogs, cocks and weddings. Unfortunately, they did not succeed.