No day could more accurately reflect Toby’s extensive self-esteem and sense of canine entitlement then roof cleaning day. Toby is a pure black dog. A short haired wolfish breed who The Captain wished to name N!@@#$. However, The Captain’s wife said, “No!”
Hence Toby was named not once, but many times: Toby, Tobias, Tobes, The Dark One, Black Animal, The Reprobated Animal, Dog of Bad Character and THE HNC!
Toby certainly makes like he is in charge, sitting by the chair of He Who Eats Meat, and, once every 90 seconds, placing one plaintive paw on his thigh: “Just a friendly reminder that I’m here!”
Yesterday, before roof cleaning I was bringing up firewood in the snow in wheel barrow and Toby barred my path, snout a snarl, eyes narrow. For he needed his butt scratched, between the two hind haunches above the tail, where God has not designed him to scratch. God therefore made me as Toby’s personal back scratcher.
Toby challenged me with a snarl and I smacked his head, hard, over and over again as he leapt at my throat. Then, he ducked a slap, fell to his side, “put the enammal” on my ankle, and spun around in the snow, letting me know that he could hamstring me. He then popped up and turned his back, so I could scratch his butt and we made friends, him letting me go on with my chores, parading around with his arrogantly curled tail high in the air.
Toby loves to go for rides and will dart into any vehicle [The Captain has a fleet of 5 trucks and 4 cars, which his sons wreck regularly] that has been started up, as he knows this is the way to Burger King and a bacon cheeseburger. In fact, the drive-thru people at the Burger King know of Toby’s exalted status, that he is Anubis, Last Dawg Kang of Egypt, and save extra bacon for his orders!
Today, as The Captain started his truck to head up to The Colonel’s compound with ladders and shovels, Toby occupied the truck while we ate breakfast, making certain that no cracker would leave him behind ever again! There he sat, in the back seat of an idling truck for 20 minutes.
No dog has internalized the fact that his humans are his servitors more thoroughly than Tobias, who I wrote a novel about, titled Uprising! As I stood on the lower roof above the porch shoveling, The Captain lost his footing and flew down past me, rocketing out over the snowy yard, and landing flat on his back in a foot of snow. Rather than check on his owner’s vitals, Toby used the opportunity to “mug” the downed ape and demand a scratching.
Toby always stands back when The Captain’s sons wrestle in the living room, waiting until one is in a cradle or in side control or about to be pinned. Only then does Toby ally himself with the winner, and in true Urban American fashion, began attacking the downed wrestler with wolfish snarls!
Toby’s bark is much worse than his bite, which is something of an artistic expression. When the giant “white supremacist animals” of The Colonel, two big meat munchers, twice his size, show up to visit me, Toby lays down the law! Snarling like a fiend out of the abyss, and they put up with it for reasons described below, having to do with Toby’s status as a human-controlling sorcerer.
Toby is a well-grounded nexus of entitlement, and despite being a mamma’s boy, and not wanting to hike over the mountain unless The Captain’s wife is present, he puts on quite a show, strutting about, commanding the coyote-eating werewolves and curling that tail like the very George S. Patton of canines—until the winds change and those Confederate Coyotes can be heard unfurling the Stars and Bars on the mountain top and saying, “Here, Tobby-tobby-tobby!”
Then the ears slick back and Toby abandons the woman who saved him from in ignoble name and trots off the mountain, leaving the fair lady far behind, sure that some member of the human clan must be headed to the drive-thru for a bacon cheeseburger dedicated to The Kang of Dawgs.
Oh yes, in case you might wonder, Toby can open doors—yes he does. He thus controls the portals of access and egress for the two murderous felines that hunt the sparrows and humming birds beloved by The Captain’s wife. The black cat, Ani, even cuddles with Toby, them seeming by night by the hearth-side, to comprise a chimera of conjoined canine-feline shadow.
Toby is also renown for breaking The Colonel’s hounds out of their six foot pen one day so that they could come and visit me in the camper on The Captain’s Compound—and, more importantly—so that Toby could let them in the side door of The Big House to eat his food, as it was getting stale and he wanted The Captain to cook him fresh bacon and eggs—“with swiss cheese melted in the toaster oven, if you please, cracker.”
Now, we lowly apes might regard Toby as a reprobated animal. But he’s putting on weight, his coat is glossy and he hasn’t worked a lick for The Man three years gone now.
Whose really in charge up in here?
Yes, as Toby’s biographer, let it be known, that any movie depicting Toby must have his voice over done by Samuel L. Jackson—or The Allstate Guy, if y’all are cheap like that.
