Chapter 3 - Basco
But Basco did not attack and Basco did not overthrow me either!
Instead, something completely different happened, which neither I, my dad, nor anyone else in the house had expected. so nicely and quietly on leash that most of the time I could have held it with my little finger.
Basco gave no explanation either side of his changed behavior, which lasted and returned every time I got the leash in my hands. For uncertain reasons, Basco had chosen that he would take me by the hand and open the dogs' otherwise closed world to me.
Below you can see the only two existing pictures of me and Basco. It took me a couple of days to find them in the stores so you could see him, but I found them!
The fear of dogs did not go away that day, but from that moment, the fear was always accompanied by fascination whenever I encountered a dog. I was still terribly afraid of them, but now they also had a dragging effect on me that was far greater than the fear.
With my heart throbbing, I always rejoiced for weeks when I knew we were going to the countryside to visit my father's boyfriend's sister and had you asked me then, I would have said that I was going to the countryside and visiting Basco. He filled everything in my consciousness when I was there, or knew I was going there and though I still feared him, and even though I still crawled up from my dad when Basco greeted with his brutal and deep barking when we arrived, so knew I would soon overcome my fear and list myself and sit with him.
Also included in the story of my time with Basco is that he had not just been bought at the closest Rhodesian ridgeback kennel. Basco was literally from Africa, where he had lived for the first years of his life with his owners before moving back to Denmark, after living in Kenya for a number of years.
With home they brought, in addition to Basco, a mass of African art objects, masks, spears, bow and arrow, whips, wall-hung animal skulls, stuffed animals, skins and furniture with which they had decorated the gigantic and adventurous house, which many places had 5 feet to the ceiling, so there was plenty of wall space for the many gazelle skulls and countless other African artifacts.
In this exotic African backdrop, I spent the next 4 years spending countless hours with Basco. With their hollow eyes and from their permanent seats in the African fairy tale house, the many animals of the savannah and the eerie African masks watched, while a unique and surprising bond between the wild African nature and a little boy from Nørrebro grew stronger.
Almost 2 hours drive from Copenhagen I experienced in my 80s Denmark my African adventure, which no trip to Africa today will be able to cope with and when I lived on the "farm", Basco was all I thought about from the moment I got up the morning until I went to bed in the evening.
Today I think that my relationship with Basco at that time was very much in love and even though he has been dead today for 28 years, I can still feel how his fascinating and strident ridge felt against my precarious child hand when I stroked him from his hindquarters and all the way up between his shoulder blades.
More than anything else, I was always looking forward to my and Basco's walks in the wild and I was completely dependent on the feeling of how his primitive, animalistic and physical powers each time voluntarily surrendered to me, at the end of the powerful leather cord.
Basco was not any dog - he was an African lion dog - and when I visited him at his African farm in Central Zealand, he was for a while MY AFRICAN LION DOG!