By Ramsay Banna
A shuffle next to me brings me back to the here and now. I turn and face a muzzle. I freeze, mind going blank. In preparation for the hike, I spent some time reading what manner of wildlife I could expect to meet on the mountain and every article warning about the big brown bear (while making a point to mention it is docile in comparison to the world-famous Bulgarian sheepdog). I find myself wishing it is the bear, but that’s distinctly a dog’s muzzle I am staring at.
Focus on the Karakachan in that picture – that’s not me tackling it ?
I go through my options and come up with a list of one. Stay still and hope the dog thinks I am an inanimate object. Luckily it takes only a minute for the shepherd to appear because I can’t trust my shaky muscles to keep the mannequin illusion. He calls to his dog (it is a she, if gender is still observed in dog world and she has a sweet, albeit almost extinct name ‘Todorka’ – the Slavic equivalent of Dorothea, a reversed-syllable Theodora). Dorothea bounds in his direction happily but my relief is short-lived because she decides to inflict more terror on me and is back breathing in my neck.
What makes Karakachans such good sheep-guarding dogs is how smart they are and the training they go through. Used in the past as border army watchdogs, they get trained to mistrust humans and keep them frozen in place until the arrival of the men in charge, usually carrying big guns. Dorothea’s owner, it seems, is either from the anti-gun, we-are-all-brothers lobby, or the world’s worst dog trainer because Dorothea might look like a Karakachan but identifies as a Pomeranian. After an inhibited display of joy át getting to know me and appreciation for half of my sandwich, we part ways with Dorothea and I continue on my way down.
As correctly expected, the worst part of the entire trek is the last descent, the one that I hated on the way up and loath even more on the way down. I think I am seeing a lot more skulls but by then I might be hallucinating. It’s a relentless downhill and no attempt to ease the burn in my muscles by running fast, flapping my arms or walking backwards, skater style, makes the slightest difference.
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