Hermes guides the dead and, via his alter-ego Thoth, has an affinity with Anubis and thus with all dogs. Thankfully so, at least on Monday in Mexico City.
Mexico City is not the kindest of places towards its human inhabitants, and it can be even crueller to its animals. You see a lot of stray dogs around, breeding and dying on the streets and, in a few luckier cases, being taken as pets. Like Miyu was.
Miyu is a sweet bitch, using the term in its technical sense, not the pejorative one. When she bit me, she never broke skin either time (there was no blood, anyway), and she was not impossibly demanding of attention; just normally so. Generally, I like dogs, and I liked her
Since her owner was preoccupied on Monday with the last awful day of a relationship break-up, I offered to take the dog for her caminal. Walking Miyu is easily a 20-minute proposition, since she is very picky about the places she leaves her body wastes, and her owner didn’t have a spare 20 minutes. I did, so off we went through the Centro Historico, Miyu tugging and pulling me past delicate, decaying facades from a century ago, her pulling on the leash and me stepping around the inexplicable holes and bumps that are standard on any sidewalk there. Nothing is level in Mexico City, a metropolis built on a drained lake-bed that continues to shift unpredictably in response to earth tremors.
Now, at one point, Miyu had paused to sniff a tree for the latest news, so, since we were tangled up, I switched her leash from my right hand to my left. On a doggy whim, she chose to make one of her enthusiastic lunges, and I dropped the leash. I tried to stomp on it, but she frolicked ahead of me, a tantalising stride ahead of my out-of-practice running. Calling her name futilely (I’m sure my accent was wrong) I tried to pick up the pace as a few locals watched the fun, then tripped, scraping fabric and skin on the sidewalk. You can’t run on a Mexico City sidewalk unless you are either a dog, or suicidal.
I hobbled on, limping, seeing Miyu head for the corner of Avenida 20 de Noviembre, a six-lane thoroughfare filled with Monday morning traffic. It had trucks, buses, vans, and Volkswagen taxis that should have died when Clinton was still the U.S. president, plus lots of impatient Mexicano drivers. I knew, from her prior behaviour at street corners, that Miyu had no traffic sense.
Now, you are finishing a five-year relationship, and also trying to complete a major project at work. Then someone comes back and tells you your dog ran off and is probably dead. It might be just splendid if you make a living writing country songs of the hurtin’ kind, but though Miyu’s owner likes to listen to Diamanda Galas and Cradle of Filth, she doesn’t write any songs.
I remembered a friend who had walked someone’s dog and seen it pull a similar stunt in Toronto. That animal died under a Toyota’s front wheels, and my friend and the dog’s owner never spoke civilly again. This was not going to be a good day.
So, too upset with myself to get frantic, I decided to stay out looking until I was sure Miyu’s owner had left for work, and could get her work accomplished without having further grief. I could then at least say I’d made an effort to find Miyu. Beyond that token gesture, as a traveller and a stranger, and thus a child of Hermes, I made the surrender, the concession to act amid hopelessness, that Hermes needs. For essentially, knowing the hard-heartedness of Mexico City, I gave her up for lost and dead. It was a city built on blood sacrifice, and the death toll in accidents and murders shows it continues to need it.
I crossed 20 de Noviembre to a small park where I figured dogs might congregate to discuss barking techniques or whatever offal they’d sniffed recently. Possibly, if I was very lucky, I could find her blood-soaked leash drooping from the jaws of a pit-bull (they’re popular in Mexico), or some other large hound with angry teeth. I dodged around a couple of trucks myself as I hurried through traffic stalled by the lights
And of course, there she was, trotting along, the leash dragging behind. She made no effort to dodge me, as I made totally inappropriate gestures of rewarding her for being alive, such as hugging her and stroking her head. But mostly, as I do when I know Hermes has intervened, I was thanking the protector who had cared for his own. With the relief cascading over me, I took her home to her owner, who had not yet left for work.
Miyu was very nervous of trucks and other large vehicles when I took her out again later in the week, so I figure she’d had a close call on 20 Noviembre. But she didn’t try to bite me again, so Hermes, via Anubis, had obviously had a small bark in her ear.
In fact, when a pit-bull did go for her a few nights later, she trusted me enough to dash behind me, whimpering in terror, while I kicked frantically at the brute until his owner came. I assume we’re now friends for life.
Hermes can arrange things that way.
Note: the title means, of course, 'lost dog'.