HE CAME to us in an unusual way, via 15 years of imprisonment, near-starvation and physical abuse, and 45 minutes on my wife’s bicycle, her right hand holding the handlebars, her left cradling his head, with his emaciated body stretching along her forearm to her elbow.

A longhaired, short-breed dog with fur that had once been white but was now the colour of the mud in the canefields, through which he’d dragged himself, and the six-foot-long, heavy iron chain attached to the tight, rough rope around his neck for days, if not weeks, after his escape. He could barely take the two or three steps forward into the small country lane along which my wife was cycling that allowed her to notice him.

He really didn’t need the extra misfortune but he was already nearly-blind in his left eye; most of it looked like a marble.

She was able to make the difficult, one-handed ride back through the rain to home only because he settled down completely on her forearm, making no struggle at all.

His body was so thin that, at home, trimming short his matted, grimy, near-black fur, my wife almost snipped off his tail, thinking it was a thread of the rope she’d cut away from his neck. His head was so big, relative to the rest of him, he looked more like an apostrophe than the mix of Sealyham Terrier and Bolongese he might be, if he were not just a Little Bajan Pothound.

\When she showed him to me on my return next day from a work trip and asked if we could keep him, I said, “Of course!”

Because I could see he’d be dead in hours, and I’d get the brownie points without having to do anything more than dig a very small grave.

He lived.

We called him Bond. James Bond; he was obviously such a sophisticated mofo.

He’s been with us for three years now.

He grew to look as strong in three weeks as he had looked feeble that the first day. The vet, examining what was left of his teeth, estimated him to be 15, maybe even 20 years old.

His rapid sensory deterioration, after the first six months, could justify an age of 20-plus. In the first year, he lost sight in his left eye completely, his hearing on one side first, then the other. At the start of last year, his right eye began clouding over with cataracts, too. He went totally blind about this time, last year.

Since then, he’s found his way around the house and yard by smell alone.

But being completely blind and deaf has not bothered him at all. He rushes outdoors when he imagines the other dogs are barking at the postman – they’re often asleep in the basement – and stands barking furiously at the flamboyant tree.

If we leave the gate open – and God alone knows how he figures out we have – he’s out into the street like a bullet, barking deliriously and running full pelt – crashing face-first into the dustbin, the fence, the flower bed, the neighbour’s gate, the pile of bricks, before stumbling upon the park across the street. Taken for a walk on a leash – he prefers to go at night, since it’s much cooler for a longhaired dog, and he can’t see shit in the day, anyway – he will break into a run if you do: not having any idea whatsoever of what calamites lie directly in front of him doesn’t affect the joy of feeling the wind in his hair.

He’s the living personification – canine-a-nisation? – of, “They can slow me down, but they can’t stop me!”

And we can’t even slow him down (unless we pull him up on our laps for a pat, where he will lie still for hours, just appreciating the love he’d never had all his life before). He’d rather run through the kitchen and living-room, smacking his head repeatedly into cabinets, barstools, coffee table legs, TV stand, couch, closed verandah door, than walk slowly and avoid bumping into any of it.

After he’s fed, with the other dogs, in our under-the-house, he climbs up, by braille, an uneven “stairway” made of concrete blocks on to a ledge. All the other dogs can see the concrete blocks on the other side leading four steps down to the garden; he cannot, but he remembers they are there, and that they extend outwards for three or four feet. He knows, though, that he will fall off their irregular structure if he tries to go down them one-by-one.

So, everyday that I don’t put him down into the garden myself, he walks back and forth along the ledge, preparing himself.

And then, after 20 seconds or so, he leaps out, literally blind, into the air.

Sometimes he lands on the ground on all fours, like a gymnast on a perfect dismount, and trots off; sometimes his fall is cushioned by the big, puffy crotons. So far, he doesn’t appear to have landed head-first on the hard sharp concrete edge of the septic tank.

But, every day he’s called upon to do it, this little fella, who should have died years ago, probably not long after he was born, given the horrible treatment he suffered, this little dog leaps out into the genuine unknown.

My son calls it a perfect illustration of “a leap of faith”.

And, magically, it reaffirms my own faith that, in this hard life in a cruelly indifferent universe we can, if we persevere, find love and acceptance for whomever we might truly be.

And, with our small, broken selves, and our defiant hope and courage, make a big difference, if only to a handful of others.

BC Pires believes in the God of Small Things