Dog Chess

            All who have ever walked with their dogs in public have played the noble sport of Dog Chess.  Much like traditional Chess, the objective of Dog Chess is fairly straightforward: have a pleasant stroll with your canine companions while avoiding conflicts with other dogs, joggers, children, other dogs, wild beasts, the elderly, and other dogs.  Also like traditional Chess, this simple premise masks a game of beguiling complexities, variations, metagaming, and overextended similes. 

            While perhaps not a Grand Master of this time-honoured contest, I have accrued significant proficiency in Dog Chess.  My immediate family owns a pair of rambunctious hounds: Frankie, an elegant Labrador-retriever mix with vanilla-dipped-in-caramel fur and eyes drawn by Walt Disney, and Wilbur, a young Finnish Lapphund mix with snow white fur and a dedicated determination to place every atom of the physical universe into his mouth at some point or another.  They are not aggressive dogs by any means, but they can be quite territorial and standoffish around unfamiliar animals.  Since a sizeable canine population exists alongside the good burghers of Culpeper, Virginia, our regular expeditions to the park are inevitably punctuated by close encounters of the barking kind.

            Which brings us, at long last, to the day’s gratuitous anecdote.  Whilst I guided my own personal Scylla and Charybdis through the park yesterday morning, I happened upon another Dog Chess player.  I’m no slouch at the sport, but the woman in question—whose name I do not know, but since she looked like a Melissa, I am calling her that from now on—was clearly playing on a Kasparovian level.  Melissa was jogging with two dogs that might have been greyhounds (or some strange greyhound mix), while simultaneously staying behind my own entourage at a respectable distance.  Since she and her hounds were moving visibly faster than me, I can only assume that Melissa was also a wizard.

            But Melissa was not an issue.  Up on a nearby ridge, a great beast gazed down at the park from an adjacent yard.  White was its fur, no leash held it at bay, and in a better world its arrival would have been heralded by Jerry Goldsmith’s score from The Omen.  I am speaking, of course, of the Chihuahua. 

            Now, you have to understand something about Chihuahuas.  Small dogs, as a rule, believe that they are large dogs and behave accordingly.  A given Chihuahua, being comedically tiny on a cartoonish level, labours under the delusion that zhe is the second coming of Andrewsarchus (tell this joke to your paeleontologist friends, and they’re going to laugh, trust me).  What I’m getting at is that Chihuahuas are utterly fearless. 

            So this little fella sees Frankie and Wilbur and comes barreling into the park, butt wiggling in ways that presumably inspired Igor Sikorsky’s contributions to aviation.  At this point I, in gross violation of common sense to all but the most seasoned of Dog Chess players, slowed my movement to a crawl, hoping in vain that my dogs’ stalwart defensive posture (ha!) would discourage the pipsqueak’s advance.  Melissa, having both speed and cojones of steel, elected instead to run around and behind me, strategically positioning my party directly between the Chihuahua and herself.  Dog Chess is a cutthroat sport, and I would have done the same in her position.

            Frankie, the perennial Mouth of Sauron in these situations, had surprisingly not barked yet during this entire escapade.  As the Chihuahua drew closer, though, the fur along her spine stuck up, giving the impression of a downy stegosaur.  Once the Chihuahua had come within a scant handful of meters of my miniature pack, Frankie let out a soft growl, as is her wont.  ‘Twas at this point when the Chihuahua had one of those moments of clarity that come but rarely in the lives of small dogs: the startling revelation of his actual physical size in comparison to another dog.

            The small furry sausage turned his wee tail and retreated.  ‘I have still won a moral victory!’ barked the Chihuahua, or so my overactive imagination provided.  ‘We will meet again, big dogs!  In another time!  In another life!’  Okay, that last part was just me quoting from the Tintin movie.  In my defense, it’s a really good movie and I deserve a paycheck from Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson for the sheer number of times I’ve plugged it in conversation.

Dog Chess stories, like most gaming stories, do not generally have a point or central thesis, and this story is no exception.  It’s all about the thrill of playing the game, and hopefully conveying some sense to the audience.  But seriously, though, the Chihuahua was hilarious.  You should have been there.