When Hannibal and his elephants made his way through southern Europe everything that lived there ran off into those mountains, men, sheep, dogs... The dogs proved to be best equipped to survive the harsh winters for centuries to come.

Somewhere on a mountain, where snow had turned to a crispy layer, the car broke down and the only good news was that I looked down into a green valley, knowing that as long as the brakes where still functioning I could return to the world of breakfast, lunch and dinner.
I rolled down for miles, than had to push the heavy car, packed with camping gear, into a small village. The garage owner told us he could look at the problem tomorrow. There was no hotel, just a campground that used to be a farm, some miles out in the hills. Rather than carrying my tent and field kitchen I decided to push the car there, although it was a very hot day.
That strange little campground is where I found Beau, but first spent the entire next day repairing the car's carburator.

The first time when I visited the nest at daybreak I saw a big dark, wolf-like dog descent from one of the black hills accross the little stream. Stannie ran towards him but didn't approach him too much. She was nervous and for a minute she paced the same ten yards up and down between the stream and the dark dog. He disappeared, but came back almost every morning at daybreak. I concluded he was the father and lived in the wild. Days later I learned that those sun-burned foothills of the Alpes near Gap, the closest town, were the habitat of troups of wild dogs, descendants of the dogs that had fled for Hannibal and his elephants.

The owner of the campground saw me visiting the nest and said to me in French: "Take 'm all. The ones you leave behind will be drowned soon." I had a busy job and needed time to think how I would combine my work with having a dog. But little Beau helped me decide. Every time when I started to make my way back accross the stream, he jumped after me, landed in the water and was carried downstream. I had to save him twice a day.

I named him Napoleon at first, because Gap, and this little village called Neffes, were both situated near the Route Napoleon, the road to the south coast of France. Looking at Stanny and his dark-haired father I could predict he was going to be a big, muscular dog, but at the time he was just short and loud. Napoleon seemed suitable.
I changed his name to Beau Beau within the first week already, because everybody that saw him cried out "O how beautiful he is !" - and I couldn't resist. In fact I thought it was funny to call him Beau, because as long as he was a puppy I thought of him as extremely ugly with his round face, short legs and a pointy antenna-like tail.
When we returned home in the Netherlands it was the oldest cat, Lotje, who immediately adopted him, cleaned up after him, and raised him to be a Defender Of Cats. She used to run into the house and demand his assistance whenever a strange cat, bird, mouse or human would enter her territory. And he would respond to her every wish without delay.

We were together for fourteen years, except for those three weeks in 1991 when I travelled through the southern states of America. It was a hot and humid summer and he was too old for such a journey. I left him with friends who took him to the theater, one of his favorite places to go. He felt he had to help the people on stage by barking, running around with them and wave his tail, which by the way had developed into a formidable flag of white and golden hair.

The first three years of his life he attacked a human once per year, but also saved a little child from falling down a fire escape by dragging it back inside. The three persons he attacked and wounded to a serious degree were thieves and burglars without exception, caught in the act by a 130 pound dog. We all understood he merely did his job.

When Indira came into our lives she and Beau bonded quickly. For a number of years we worked together in a kind of western show. Indira was the fierce horse and stepped around proudly in her best tack, and Beau was the wolf at her side, showing everybody his big white teeth due to a thin rubber band holding up his lips. Beau and Indira were always found side by side, they enjoyed each other's company greatly.
After Indira died I noticed Beau walked into things when we were on unfamiliar grounds. He had gradually gone blind but he had clinged to Indira all that time, and when not in her presence I kept him on a leash. He was nine then. His big brown eyes turned to fluorescent green. It took two years to find a surgeon who operated on him to restore his eye-sight. It was a Frenchman, visiting the Netherlands to teach this technique to students at the veterinary clinic in Utrecht. Beau began his second childhood after the operation and became so playful he knocked out all my teeth one day by shaking his head wildly, while we were playing with his football. I never blamed him one second, and my artificial dental works will always remind me of him.