Our sixteen-year-old basenji, Bridget, died in her sleep last week, an event that fills us with both sadness and relief. Blind for the last three or four years, increasingly senile, with a sensitive stomach to boot, she took a lot of patience and a lot of care. She was the sixth of eleven […]
Archive | Basenjis
How to Start a New Year
I don’t know how to start this new year that feels already old. The usual resolutions seem irrelevant, the questions bewildering, the answers out of reach. I don’t know how to fix the mess the country has gotten itself into, a mess that is heading toward another crisis on Election Day. I can only […]
Chasing Bears: Another Basenji Tale
The natives of the Congo prize their basenjis as hunting companions who chase small game into nets. Some say these fearless twenty-five pounders chase lions and other big game also. I have no idea how true that is, but I can tell you about the day our pair treed a bear. We lived north […]
Twenty Years of Basenjis
Twenty years ago in Santa Barbara, my friend, Joyce, fell in love with the Scoop, the basenji belonging to the boarding kennel next door to her job. Then one day Spook’s owner showed up at her office door with a red and white pup. “How would you like this one?” Originally from Santa Barbara […]
Meet Dex
Have you ever met a basenji? We ask that question at least once in response to curious looks every time we take our quartet out walking. These barkless hounds from the Congo are still fairly uncommon, probably because they are “different.” It’s an attitude thing. Catlike, they have their own agenda and live on […]
