Puppy-minding and paintballing

Paintballing Fury

Posing before the battle began at Paintballing Fury, Waterfront Karen.
 

Photo credit: John Fox | Nation Media Group

It was supposed to be a joint birthday celebration, given that mine and Jan’s birthdays are only three days apart. It started with a very pleasant lunch at the Talisman restaurant in Karen – a place both Jan and I have written about, so I will leave it at that. (Though I want to say that the fish and chips were the best I have tasted in Kenya.)

Afterwards, Jan with his wife, Gabie, and my other son, Andreas, went off to meet friends for a paintballing game at the Waterfront Karen. Lut and I were left behind at Jan and Gabie’s cottage to look after their boisterous puppy called Riley.

Riley is an Alsatian. They are beautiful dogs, aren’t they? But they can be a handful. We had Alsatians on our small farm in East Anglia when I was a youngster. One of them bit a policeman’s finger nearly off. The policeman actually apologised to my parents because he had no business nosing around our farm buildings.

Then, when I was teaching at Nairobi University’s Adult Studies Centre in Kikuyu in the late 1960s, we bought an Alsatian puppy. Max, we called him. For seven months he was a placid and friendly dog. Then, overnight it seemed, he became neurotic and kali. We guessed someone must have hit him. He became the kind of dog we couldn’t keep on a student campus.

A friend suggested that we could give him to the Kenya Police. Handing him over was an interesting experience. The officer in charge of the dog-handling section was a very friendly Scotsman. ‘At nearly eight months, it might be difficult to train your Max.’ he said, ‘But let’s try something.’ He told me to hold Max tightly on his lead. One of the staff approached and smashed a bullwhip right close to Max’s nose. Max backed away. The man cracked the whip again. Max tried to go for him.

‘That’s good,’ the policemen said. ‘We’ll have him. He’s not stupid, and he’s got guts.’ So, they took on Max for training, and his first duty posting was to Nakuru. I well remember one of the things that policemen said. ‘You know, it will be a bad day for Kenya if criminals get guns. Dogs can cope with pangas – but not with guns.’

Reading this, I wonder how Riley would have fared if she had been let loose in the paintballing field. (This is Jan taking over.) She would have probably cowered in terror behind a barrel, which is how most of us started our game at the Waterfront.

There were nine of us in two teams playing capture the flag, with the objective of touching the opponent’s flag in the opposite corner of the field. To get there, we had to scramble across muddy terrain with overgrown shrubs and scattered obstacles, while dodging a barrage of whizzing and cracking paintballs.

Both teams started out cautiously, inching forward from their corners and assessing the lie of the land. I hid behind a paint-spattered stack of tractor tyres to observe the enemy’s movements ahead, completely unaware of a far worse enemy below.

To my horror, I was ankle-deep in a nest of frenzied safari ants. I decided I preferred the sting of a paintball, and leapt into the open. This proved to be a useful distraction for my teammate, who snuck behind enemy lines and captured our first flag.

After about 10 minutes of the hour-long game, it started to rain. We were told by staff beforehand that we would have to stop if it rained, but they let us continue because we were having so much fun.

There was only one problem: the rain was fogging up our goggles and we could barely see, which made it a lot harder to dodge ants and paintballs. But this just added to the challenge, and I wouldn’t have had it any other way.

To book your own game, head to www.paintballkenya.com.