“…I have four dogs altogether”, Catherine tells me. “My oldest is a rescue dog. I found him in the garbage bin outside my apartment…”
Catherine picks us up from a servo, just west of the Spanish border, and offers to drive us to Portimao.
“There’s just one catch though guys”, she apologises, “one of you has to sit in the back with my dogs”.
Nia is happy to hang out with the hounds, so we climb aboard and head off down the road.
Catherine is an ex-pat Aussie, who has lived in Portugal for sixteen years.
“I have four dogs altogether”, Catherine tells me. “My oldest is a rescue dog. I found him in the garbage bin outside my apartment. His face was all messed up and I thought he was dead. He was twitching a bit, so I took him to my mate Andre, who’s a vet. Turned out he’d been shot in the head with a shotgun. Andre patched him up, but he didn’t think he’d make it. The next week or so he just lay in the corner and hardly moved. Each day I put a piece of steak on the floor next to him, but each day it was still there when I gave him his meds in the evening. On saturday night, when I came home, he was sitting up. I grabbed a steak out of the fridge and put it next to him on the floor, and he ate the whole thing, in about three big gulps.”
“He survived?”, I ask.
“That was fourteen years ago. He’s still alive today. He’s totally blind, but other than that he completely recovered. Now he’s old, so he’s a bit slow of course”.
“Wow. Dogs are tough”, I say.
“Yeah. I called him Josey, like the outlaw Josey Wales. He’s one tough mutt. It doesn’t happen so often now, but sometimes bits of lead shot still fall out of his face”.
>> More hitchhiking stories.
>> Follow Raw Safari on FaceBook.
