...of a stand-off

I remembered how once, when I was out walking with my grandfather, he showed me how to keep dogs at a distance; even when no stone was available, he would bend down as if to pick one up, and the beasts would shrink back every time. Once he even threw earth into a dog’s mouth; the dog swallowed it and let us pass.
I attempted something of the kind with mastiff of Puyloubier, but he simply roared at me out of a vastly magnified mouth. As I bent down, a yellow Paris Metro Ticket, cancelled and covered with my jottings, fell out of my pocket; in a moment of exuberance I tossed it through the fence. Instantly, the dog turned himself into a marten (a marten, as everyone knows, will eat anything) and bolted my paper: greed, but also revulsion incarnate.
In my fancy, the worms inside him that lived on him flung themselves in dark turmoil on the ticket - and, lo and behold, the dog excreted an inverted little tower, as pointed as its dagger ears. It was only then that I noticed that he had staked out his official territory on the concrete with comparable dried and bleached formations (a grandiosely scribbled hieroglyphic).
Gentle suasion (or speech of any kind) would have been inconceivable in the face of such unreasoning animosity. I therefore crouched resolutely down, and the Legionary mastiff fell silent. (Actually, he was only startled for the moment.) Then our faces moved so close to each other that they vanished as in a cloud. The dog’s eyes lost their glimmer, and the dark head turned blacker than crepe. Our eyes met - or rather one eye met another; one-eyed, I looked into his one eye. Then we both knew who the other was, from then on we could only be mortal enemies forever; at the same time, it dawned on me that the beast had long been mad.

[The Lesson of Mont Sainte-Victoire, from Slow Homecoming, Handke, P.]