Will a new Nusch help revive Jack and Winck?

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Since the death of Nusch, my fluffy mongrel, late last year, my remaining dogs have been in mourning. "Absurd," you say, "we expect better of you than such silly sentimental anthropomorphism." But it is true: their mood is uncharacteristically restrained, their playfulness departed and they do not bark. Nusch's bark had an urgent note that always triggered theirs, Winck's a deep-chested woof, Jack's a weird high-pitched croak hinting at hysteria but I've heard neither for two months or so and am discomforted by their silence. I mimic Jack but she does not respond - Winck is too low a baritone for mimicry; neither the barks of other dogs nor the eerie cry of foxes triggers a response, and even the arrival of herons to plunder the pond of dormant frogs goes unremarked.

My mourning, too, continues. I want another dog - three has for so long seemed the perfect number - yet memories of Nusch restrain me: I sense her presence still - in odd movements seen only in the corner of my eye and in odd sounds that only I can hear, and her name still trips easily from my lips when I call the other dogs. She came from the Mayhew Home for Animals just off Harrow Road near Kensal Green, so too did Winck and Jack, but now I don't know what I want and can't make up my mind. Nusch, not my kind of dog, had had a rotten early life and needed desperately to be adopted, so too did Jack, all but dead when taken to the Home, and Winck just fixed me with a stare and worked a spell; with all three I merely submitted to force majeure and did not initiate the contract.

I should and shall get my new Nusch from the Mayhew, but a friend took me, willy-nilly, to the RSPCA's Southridge Animal Centre, west of Potters Bar, where young dogs that are now discarded toys and dogs that have been bruised and battered wait for pity. I could weep for all the damaged dogs waiting to be produced as evidence in court, proof of their owners' cruelty, mute and fearful. I could weep, too, for the sad old bitch with only a year or two of life left in her, and for the tiny pup, the mismatch of Jack Russell and Chihuahua, so isolated from her kind and from human warmth that she will never learn naturally to be a dog. I longed to take home half a spaniel, three-quarters of a Samoyere and a crazed confusion of terriers but most of all the tall Alsatian cross, eight months old, leaping and bounding against the wire mesh, but I know that I no longer have the strength to be properly companionable to so magnificent a creature. But oh how she barked - a resonant base bark, a Fyodor Chaliapin of barks, a Boris Christoff bark, a beautiful bark that would, I am certain, restore the barks of Winck and Jack.