The Accidental Blood Pact with the Dog is a childhood episode in which Joachim’s longing for closeness to Aika turns into a clumsy act of violence. Inspired by a television scene, he tries to bind himself and the dog as blood brothers; instead, he wounds Aika, injures himself, and leaves a trail of blood through the house. The episode’s comic domestic mishaps cannot undo its central reversal: the dog he wanted to draw nearer remains afraid of him.

The wish to become blood brothers

Aika belonged to the narrator’s second-oldest brother, who had spent a week with the breeders near Hamburg, named the dog Biggi von den Ziegelteichen, and took him to competitions. The dog was also trained to perform a trick at the command Bleck. Yet it was Joachim who loved him most fiercely and continually sought his company. He secretly fed Aika sausage, patiently picked burrs from his bushy tail, and did not mind being covered in dog hair. Their closeness was not simply asserted: the recollection also describes the two swimming together in the Baltic Sea, crossing to the first sandbar, with Aika looking at Joachim underwater, his floppy ears spread like fins.

The idea of making that attachment into a blood bond came from television. Joachim saw Winnetou and Old Shatterhand cut their forearms on a white rock and bind their bleeding wounds together. The scene moved him so strongly that he wanted the same kind of bond, specifically one that would put dog’s blood in his own veins. In retrospect, the gap between the ceremonial image and what follows gives the episode its force: the child imagines a deliberate, mutual pledge, but has no real understanding of what the act will do to the animal.

An improvised ritual goes wrong

Joachim found a scalpel in the family medicine cabinet in his parents’ bedroom. The cabinet had been mounted high and kept locked when the children were younger; now he could reach it by standing on a chair. He was already fascinated by its contents, from bandages and medicines to folded instruction leaflets, lists of side effects, and unfamiliar medical terms. He took a scalpel from its individual wrapping and chose the familiar Kutasept-Orange tincture for disinfecting wounds.

With no one else at home, he lured Aika into the basement using a Frolik treat. He took a shoelace from one of his father’s running shoes, knelt in front of the dog, and asked for a paw. He meant to make only a slight cut. But Aika jerked as the blade touched his paw, and Joachim accidentally cut deeply into the soft pad. The dog licked the gaping wound in panic. Joachim then cut his own palm with the scalpel. He had tested a kitchen knife on his hand that morning, but it was blunt; the scalpel opened the skin, and blood poured from the cut.

He pressed his wound against Aika’s and tried to tie their hand and paw together with the shoelace. As he tightened it using his teeth and free hand, Aika whined, tore himself loose, and ran away yelping. The planned sign of closeness had become a chase. Aika fled up the basement stairs on three legs, and Joachim followed him through the living room, where the injured dog left bloody pawprints on the ochre carpet, only a few weeks old.

Blood on the carpet, wounds in the bathroom

Joachim managed to drive Aika into the bathroom and shut him in. He wrapped his own hand in a kitchen towel and turned to the carpet, trying to wash away the prints with water. That only spread them. He then poured a little Domestos all-purpose cleaner onto the blood, which removed the stains but also bleached the carpet. Working from print to print, he made the visible blood disappear at the cost of the carpet’s color. When he turned around, Aika was still shut in the bathroom, whining, and the dog’s bloodied injury remained to be dealt with. Joachim was considering disguising the bleached patches with brown shoe polish when he heard a key in the front door.

His father had come home. Joachim ran to him, intending to ask him to leave again on some pretext, but broke down as soon as he saw him. His father carried him to the kitchen, examined his hand, and said that it needed stitches. Joachim explained that he had cut himself and that Aika had been cut too, then disclosed that they had been playing at being blood brothers in the basement. Hearing the dog whine, his father went to the bathroom and returned visibly stunned. He told Joachim that both of them would stay there until he came back. They waited together, both bleeding; the recollection lingers on their blood spreading along the bathroom grout and flowing around its corners.

The father treated both injuries. Each received a tetanus injection and a local anesthetic. He stitched Aika’s deeper, still heavily bleeding wound first, using four stitches, then stitched Joachim’s with three. Even amid the pain, Joachim felt a flash of envy that Aika had received more stitches. His father advised him to think carefully before telling his brothers and suggested keeping the incident between them. That attempt at secrecy did not last.

The bond’s aftermath

Joachim’s brothers wanted to know what had happened, and he eventually told them in exchange for a ride on his eldest brother’s prized red ten-speed bicycle. He was proud of the sheer absurdity of his idea. His brothers reacted with a mixture of fascination and revulsion, and the episode became material for teasing: on Sunday walks they threw sticks for him to fetch, barked at him, or threatened to have him put down. The eldest brother also joked that Aika had become even stupider since they had become blood brothers. Their teasing turns the child’s solemn wish into a family joke, while the dog’s fear shows what the ritual actually cost.

The carpet’s damage was repaired by cutting out the bleached patches and replacing them, but the replacement pieces did not quite match the original color. The repaired floor looked like a romantic garden path made from stone slabs of different sizes. That visible alteration remains a domestic trace of the failed pact, but the more consequential mark was on Aika. For weeks he tucked his tail between his legs whenever he saw Joachim, and he never again entered the basement with him. The attempt to make their closeness permanent instead introduced fear into their relationship. The episode’s remembered humor—its ruined carpet, the stitches, and the brothers’ jokes—does not erase that outcome; it sharpens the contrast between Joachim’s longing for intimacy and the dog’s lasting withdrawal.