I dream of my old dog, Mickey, a tiny mutt smarter than any dog I’ve ever seen, untrained but more disciplined than we deserved. She would run after my cousins and I, while we played with toy guns, with a broken toy gun in her mouth.

She was one of us she must have thought, even though she was so pregnant that her tiny frame could no longer handle stairs. Her only daughter that stayed with us was Honey, who looked suspiciously like a diminutive sheep dog. She was not as smart as her mother but had no malice in her, though we would later learn, she was a fearsome hunter.

When my parents separated we took them to my ancestral home. They were as much adrift as me, city dogs in a wild and winding farm. They seemed to take to it far better than me. Honey in particular took to hunting mouse deer and her daughters would continue that tradition long after she died. I thought of the two white dogs, we left behind, the two white dogs that had died before them. One of them, Sunny, was about as smart as Mickey and knew his reflection, he even tried to use the washroom much to the horror of my aunt. They told me my father killed him, accidentally, but they didn’t seem confident about that part. He’s probably among my oldest memories.

My grandparents had their own exotic white, curly haired dogs, until their declining fortunes left them with a cowardly brown Indie, with a black scar running down from his forehead to his eyes, like someone tried to split his head open. My mother and grandmother would mock him relentlessly but my grandfather would describe a fierce and intelligent dog who was traumatised by a monkey attack. Later he changed the story to wicked farm labourers playing the culprits. Duma, as we called him, never left the small courtyard, he was terrified of something beyond it. We were so alike, except he spent more time outside than I did.

I moved back to the city and the dogs grew more distant, far away in the farm. We got a series of cats, the dogs stayed on the borders of my memories. When Mickey died after a cobra got her I didn’t feel much. Honey died and I can’t remember why. Her daughters lived on, in the farm, hunting small game as my grandparents grew less involved in the farm and stayed more in the city. They grew wilder and at least two of them had the same name. The last one might have had another owner and disappeared into the distance of the village. Maybe that bloodline ended there, somewhere in the dark of night where feral dogs go hunting.

My grandfather once told me about a Pomeranian he had, until a leopard took it away into the jungles that used to be there. I heard that as the most profound thing he could ever say about a world he lived in, that went away. There are no leopards or jungles now much less leopards haunting farms. I think of the dogs I see in my dreams and wonder what I’ve lost, my childhood or with the last of Honey’s granddaughters, my family.