I hadn't brought a crate because of the dog's history of abuse, so I was standing there
wondering how we were going to get him home in the cab of the truck without somebody
losing a finger or two in the process. I got the bright idea to wrap him up in a jacket so maybe
he would calm down, and it worked. So much so, that halfway home Jillian got worried that
he’s breathing all right and lifted up the corner of the jacket to check on him, and up popped
his head.
It was like that scene from ‘Alien’ where the creature came lurching out of the man's
stomach. All you could see was teeth and this little brown head spinning around looking for
anything to latch onto and I was screaming ...
"Don't you dare let him loose! Closed up in here like we are he'll make confetti out of every
one of us!"
Today, having some time on my hands, I stopped to visit this cemetary. I’ve lost pets before,
and they were always buried somewhere on the property. In fact, yesterday, I was standing
near the very spot where Dolly, my daughter’s little mutt dog was buried last year. It was the
one place I could find that would make an adequate grave site and where the ground wasn’t
crisscrossed with roots or other obstructions. The point is, I was standing right there, and
Dolly never crossed my mind. Not the fact that she was the friendliest little thing you could
ever hope for in a dog. Or the fact that she was the best rat catcher I have ever seen, and that
includes two useless cats. There was nothing there to indicate that I was standing near
hallowed ground. No reminders. There should have been.
Dolly loved the hog pens. She was tutoring herself in the fine art of hog management, dog
style. Nothing that we tried to teach her, just something that she aspired to on her own. It just
happened to work out that she is buried near there. She was no master hog dog, or trophy or
blue ribbon winner. Dolly’s accomplishments were few and fairly unremarkable. But she was
loved nonetheless for that ...
The minute I walked in the door I smelled skunk. Jake was the most likely culprit as he was
sitting on the couch in the living room.
"Jake ... are you skunky ?
"Whut?"
"Did you get skunked?!"
"Not that I'm aware of."
"Is it possible that you wouldn't have noticed a thing like that if it happened?"
"I wouldn't think so."
"Can't you smell that?"
"I don't smell a thing. I got a cold. My nose is all plugged up." He sniffed then, a rattling
sound, to emphasize his point. Just then Fred walked in behind me.
"What the hell is that smell?! Boy! Did you get skunked?"
I was starting to get a sinking feeling in my stomach.
"Jake ... is Elvis in the house?" I asked.
He comes in at night, most nights, but the kids will always let him in if they're home alone. I
have no idea why. If they really needed protection he would be useless. He's scared of his
own shadow.
"Yeah."
"Where's he at?"
"In your room."
Fred and I just about knocked each other down trying to get back to the bedroom. There was
Elvis in all his stinky, skunky, glory, stretched out like a dead dog in the middle of our
king-sized bed. I heard a hissing sound and looked over my shoulder at Fred. He had gone all
red in the face and I could see he was trying to form a word, and I suspected I knew right up
front what that word was gonna be ...
Thanksgiving afternoon though, I felt nothing but misery from my bloated belly as I lay on the
front porch on a chaise lounge trying to rest away the massive dinner I’d just ingested. The
sky was such a color blue that I wanted to thank God or the angels, or my mother for
allowing me to be born able to see and appreciate, such a pure shade of blue.
It wasn’t long before Killer the mutt found me, stretched out the like a beached whale on the
lounge, barely breathing and encouraging digestion. He wiled his way up next to me
demanding attention. He has a way of finding people, Killer does, which is how he found our
family to begin with; he simply showed up one day and never left. The name that was
randomly attached to him couldn’t have been less suited to him, as I’d never known him to
kill anything in the year that I’d been associated with him. He gazed at me with his one brown
and one blue eye, begging from under his red and white coat for a scratch or a kind word. I
could offer neither, but merely groaned and pushed him away.
“I’m too full for such nonsense, dog. Go on, now.”
He whined, as he was known to do, and lay his head on my shoulder.
“Your breath smells like butt!” I hissed, and pushed him again. He rewarded me for that
remark with two or three more putrid pants, and a half dozen whacks on my leg with his
bushy tail. When I refused to pet him, he placed both front legs on my already sensitive
midsection and leaned in until his nose was nearly touching mine. He knew that I couldn’t
resist his charm for long, and he was right. Almost automatically I found the sweet spot at the
back of his neck and had him looking at me with eyes that seemed sure that I had hung the
moon ...
I was awakened at four fifty five a.m. Saturday morning to the sound of Girl barking. Sugar
and Girl are our pasture dogs, and are bred to alert on wild hogs. Their sole purpose in life is
to protect our domestic breeding stock by keeping wild boars away. Up until Saturday, they
had not been tested on anything more threatening than an occasional armadillo or possum.
Despite several false alarms, they have never been chastised for barking and every ruckus
created by them is checked out thoroughly.
The two dogs came to us together. Girl was hand picked for our purposes, and her sister
Sugar was taken out of sympathy. She had tried to escape the puppy pen at a young age and
hung herself by one back leg for several hours, leaving her with a limp. She was slated to be
put down, so after one look at her sweet face we decided that even if she never amounted to
much as a hog dog, she would be good company for Girl.
Of the two, Girl is naturally the most tenacious, so when she kept barking without seeming to
take a breath in between, my husband Fred went out to check. When he came running back
into the house telling me to open the gun safe, I felt my blood pressure go up a notch. There
was a wild boar in with our ladies ...
MOOCH, RED DOG, RAISIN,
SUGAR AND COCOA, UNO, PETE
and more ...
