AMANI
WRITES.

Asante takes two pills every morning. One for his joints, one for his stomach, which has been bad since he came to us. He came to us with the bad stomach. The vet thinks it is from years of eating garbage, before he was rescued. We will probably never fix it completely. But the pill helps.

The problem is that Asante is not stupid. You cannot hide a pill in his food because he will eat around it. You cannot put it in meat because he will spit the meat out, eat the pieces of meat that do not have a pill, and then look at you. You cannot force his mouth open because he is a senior soul and he does not deserve that and also he will give you a look that makes you feel like a bad person for the rest of the day.

The trick is cheese. We do not have cheese very often, it is expensive, but Mama Grace from next door gives me a small piece every week from the goat cheese she makes. I break off a tiny bit, push the pill into it, and I hand it to Asante like it is a gift, not a medicine. He takes it from my hand very gently, like he is doing me a favor. He chews. He swallows. He licks his lips. He looks at me for another piece.

I give him another piece without a pill in it. This is the deal we have. He keeps his end of it. I keep mine.

The kitchen door has a rope handle on the inside. I tied it there a long time ago because the latch was broken and I never got around to replacing it. You pull the rope, the door opens. Simple. For a person.

Kibo has been watching me do this for three years. He pushes the door with his nose to come in, which works because the door swings both ways if you push hard. But to come out, you have to pull. He never figured out the pulling.

Until Thursday. I was cleaning the bowls and I heard the door open behind me and I turned around and there was Kibo, standing in the doorway, the rope still swinging from where his teeth had been. He looked very proud of himself. He looked at me like, see, I can do it too.

Now he does it ten times a day. In, out, in, out. I think he is showing off. The other dogs do not care. Bahati watched him do it once and then went back to sleep. Nia tried to copy him and could not reach the rope. Tumaini, who can reach the rope, has no interest. She prefers to wait for me to open it for her, like a queen.

I am going to have to tie the rope higher. Or maybe I will leave it. Kibo earned it.

A boy from the village brought her on Tuesday. He said his uncle found her by the bus stop on the Moshi road. She is small, maybe six months, brown with a white chest. Very thin. She did not let me touch her for the first two hours.

The first thing I do with a new dog is nothing. I sit on the porch. I do not look at her. I put water near her, not too close, and food, and then I sit and I drink my tea and I let the other dogs ignore her, which they are good at. Kibo wanted to investigate but I sent him away. New dogs do not need a welcome committee. They need quiet.

By the afternoon she came out from under the chair and drank the water. By the evening she ate. She slept under the chair again that night and I left the office light on for her, which I do not usually do, but she is small and the night is loud here with the insects and the dogs across the valley.

We will name her in a few days. I do not name a dog until I know her. Names should fit. Yesterday she followed Tumaini around the yard for an hour, just walking behind her, watching how Tumaini does things. So maybe she will be a Tumaini kind of dog. We will see.

People who visit ask me about Tumaini's leg. They want to know what happened. The truth is I do not know exactly. She came to us in 2022 with the leg already gone, healed badly, the skin pulled tight. The man who brought her said a car. I think maybe a car. It does not matter now.

What I want to say is this. Tumaini does not know she has three legs. I mean she knows, of course, she is a dog and she is not stupid. But she does not think about it. She runs. She jumps onto the low wall behind the kitchen and she sleeps there in the afternoon. She is the first one to the gate when a car comes down the road. She gets there before Kibo, who has four legs and is younger.

The only thing she cannot do is the stairs to the office roof. We used to have a ramp but it broke in the rains last year. I have been meaning to fix it. She watches me from the bottom when I go up to fix the satellite dish. She does not whine. She just watches. Like she is saying, when you come back down we will go for a walk, and you will not be slow about it.

Seven years old. The oldest dog at the shelter. She acts like she has decades left. Maybe she does.

I get to the shelter at 5:40. The sky is already changing color but the sun is not up. The dogs hear my motorbike from the road. By the time I open the gate they are all at the fence except Asante, who waits by the kitchen because he knows the kitchen is where his pills are.

Kibo comes first. He always comes first. He pushes his head against my leg and then he goes and sits by his bowl and he does not move until the food is in it. Tumaini comes second, slow on her three legs, but she gets there. Nia is still young so she runs in circles until I tell her to sit, and then she sits for about two seconds, and then she runs in circles again.

I cook the food on the small stove behind the office. Rice, some meat when we have it, vegetables from the garden Mama Grace keeps next door. The smell wakes up Bahati, who sleeps the latest of any dog I have ever known. She comes out yawning like a person.

By 6:30 they have all eaten. By 7:00 the bowls are washed and the water is fresh. By 7:15 I am drinking my own tea on the porch and Simba is leaning on my leg, which is his way of saying good morning even though we have already been together for almost two hours.

His name was Henrik. He sent an email two months ago and he said he had bought a Doge Pound and he wanted to see where the money went. I told John, and John said okay, let him come. So he came.

He arrived on Tuesday with a small backpack and no big camera. I liked that. People sometimes come with cameras the size of their head and the dogs do not like them. Henrik just had his phone, and he kept it in his pocket most of the time.

On the first day he sat on the porch and Simba came and put his head on Henrik's knee, which Simba does not do with strangers usually. Henrik did not move for almost an hour. He said later that his legs went numb and he did not want to disturb Simba. I told him Simba would have moved if he was uncomfortable. Henrik laughed.

On the second day he helped me clean the kennels. He did not have to. He asked for a brush and he did it. We did not talk much. He asked the dogs' names and he remembered them, which not everyone does. He kept calling Bahati "Bahati" and not "the white one," which is what most visitors call her.

On the third day he left. He said he would come back. People say that a lot. But he sent me a message yesterday with a photo of Simba that he took, and he asked how the new dog was doing. So maybe he means it.

Simba had his hip surgery on the third of January. For five weeks after, he was on the small mattress by the office door, and he was angry about it. Not the kind of angry that bites. The kind where a dog sighs every time you walk past him because you are walking and he is not.

This morning the vet from Uchira came to check the stitches one last time. She said okay. She said go slow. Simba understood "go" because he was up before she finished saying it.

We went out the back gate, which is the short walk. Past the water tank, around the acacia, back inside. Maybe two hundred steps. He did it without limping. Then he turned and looked at me and he walked back out the gate again. He wanted the long way. The long way goes down to the road and past the maize field and it takes maybe twenty minutes. I said no. He sat down in the dust and waited. So we did the long way.

He did not run. He walked like a dog who remembers what walking is for. When we got back he drank a lot of water and then he slept on the porch in the sun, and he did not sigh once when I walked past him.