Dog and Cat Are Friends

                                                           Dog And Cat Are Friends

Growing up I had scant friends.  By choice it now seems –before puberty never any girl friends and no more than one boy friend at a time.  It didn’t occur to me to be lonely.  I had books, music, drawing and maps to accompany me.

I also had little surrogate friends, our pets.  Most didn’t last long partially because we lived at a time and in places where dogs and cats ran free.   Ran out their short lives. Due too to the fact that we were distracted folk blind to lurking small evils and ill omens.

Because I was a loner I easily developed intense relationships with these creatures.  I loved them with the sincerity of a little boy.  In turn this devotion was reciprocated.  Cat or dog they were mine.  Mine mine all mine.  While otherwise to varying degrees they were only tolerant, or intolerant, of my family.

My passion for my little friends was ultimately unkind because it forced their animal natures to submit to my love, to me alone.  I made them mutate into creatures of my imagination.

                                                                        Unlucky

My first writing in print was about one of them, Lucky.  I saw him run over by a truck in front of our house in Concordia when I was eight.  A searing memory that has never left me.  

The poem I wrote afterwards so moved my father that he submitted it without my knowledge to the national children’s magazine of the Methodist church, which then was a big deal, the church that is.  

It was accepted.   Terrible juvenilia, here included only because it shows how a mere dog could get such a grip on me, or on any child.  

I wish to think my language art has improved since then, but secretly wonder.

My parents who were assured they had a child genius to rival Chatterton ordered about a million copies, none survive.  A girl of 14 wrote me a fan letter.  I recall she was from Chillicothe, a place intriguing me until I passed through it.

After reading the letter mother remarked how sad it was that the poor girl was retarded.  Sarcasm was unknown to mother.  Certainly without doubt she never uttered a disparaging word of anyone.   She was simply taking the letter into evidence at face value.

I was so proud to be a published poet.  It went long toward the loss of my Lucky.

Who Cares

All that came and all that went

was good.

All the gladness is gone—and in its 

place is grief.

The world has lost a sturdy pup, but

Who cares?   I do.

Who cares?  There’s a question.  You

Care, don’t you?

Who cares?  The moon keeps on.

The world does not know.

I know down in my heart.  I care.

Nothing is lost except a pup?

Who cares?  His name was Lucky.

He was my puppy.  I care.

                           Handy & His Sidekick Nimrod

It happened whenever we’d return home in the night.   Perhaps coming back from dinner out, Concordia had one restaurant, the Skyliner, or from a movie—Concordia had three theaters, the Brown Grand, the Strand, plus the Big Chief Drive-in in the summer.   

But most often it would happen when we were coming home late from another one of the incessant church meetings I had no alternative but to endure.  God damn those church meetings.  

From the back seat I’d watch for it to happen, for the amazing show to start.  With great anticipation I waited for my father to open the garage door, another of his priestly functions.  I was ten and that event  made me believe in the inexplicable nature of things.

The beam of our car lights would light up the interior of the garage like a small stage, sleds hanging on the walls, clutter of rakes and shovels.  Oil-spill Rorschachs on the cement.  

At the back in a box two heads would appear side by side, Cerberus! Four eyes glinted their own lights back at us.  No alarm knowing well who was arriving.  Those eyes were of Nimrod and Handy, our cat and dog, they who always slept together entwined for life.  

The two were bits and pieces of this and that.  

About them my older brother Steve remarked, “I think they’re queers.” I’d been informed of what that meant.

I didn’t think he could possibly be right.  But sometimes I wondered with the thrill of illicit knowledge. 

Nimrod the cat descended from the margins of a barbarian mix. Nimrod had a typical tabby head stuck on the body of a scraggly alley cat.  Not a becoming mix.  

Dog Handy was somewhat more than half coyote. A rancher from the empty wild outside of town gave us Handy when he was still a puppy.  He grew to be of  medium size, short grey and tan fur, with a long bushy tail.  His coyote part showed most clearly in that tail, in his sharply pointed erect ears and his piercing devil eyes.   

Nimrod was older.  He’d just showed up, an adult, to call to us at the back door.  Mother started dropping scraps for the beggar.  He stayed.  Never came in the house.

                                         Love Affairs

I loved Nimrod.  I loved Handy to distraction.  Only a child can invest so much–all their heart, mind and imagination– into a love affair with an animal.  And animals, at least cats and dogs, will return the obsession with even more focus. 

During the day they played together.  They’d play tag.  They played ‘toss and catch’ meaning that Handy would toss Nimrod up in the air and catch him by the scruff, harmlessly, before he hit earth.  They also played ‘bury the bone’.  Holding Nimrod in his mouth Handy would dig a hole furiously. Then try to cover him before he could escape.

Handy seemed to enjoy the play greatly.  Nimrod I would describe as being philosophical about it all.  A cat can be stoic.  Only very occasionally did he extend a claw to chastise Handy with a tweak.  They quickly made up.  

Nimrod clearly played ‘mother.’  He groomed Handy with rough affection.  Handy was the mischievous ‘little’ brother.  Just like me.

Then it came that by accident or intent Nimrod was poisoned.  Gone for a couple of days he crawled home to die in my lap.  My teardrops plopped on his head.

Handy mourned long and hard for him.  For months, not mere days or weeks.  Pining in the box in the garage or moping about the yard sniffing at evocative holes. 

                                   A Crazy Kid

Then my fixation on Handy became even more profound.  I had no other companion so I invested my all in him. I began to have him in my bed, something my mother had sternly forbidden before the death of Nimrod. 

First he came to pass the night with me.  Then he began to spend time with me there after school.  Every afternoon I had an ongoing habit of settling myself propped up with pillows and a book for hours, often too with a drawing board in hand.  I had a ream of white paper all to myself, a box of pens and crayons. 

Mostly I drew maps of imaginary lands, their rivers, mountains and coastlines. I’d dream up the cities.  I created nations in depth with history, the lineage of their rulers, and of course many wars by land and sea.  These sessions passed for me like blissful trances.  

My ultimate homage to my companion in this bed-boat ride into another world was to crown him Prince Handy.  This evolved into him becoming Emperor Handinius The First, The Terrible, Scourge of Heaven and Earth.  

Throughout I’d stroke Handy, tell him what I was doing, show him my drawings.  He never ceased to be thoroughly interested.  He’d wag his tail in praise.  Lick my hand to show me his admiration.  Now and then he poke a pink tip of penis at  me.

                                                  Decline and Fall

The spell broke when I developed a badly infected ingrown toe nail. Dr. Emory of the town’s hospital operated on it.  Actually St. Joseph was the one hospital in all of North Central Kansas, an area larger than Maryland. It was exotic to young-Protestant me with nuns in the flesh in full habit floating along the corridors by office of deus ex machina.   

They were the Sisters of St. Joseph and their Nazareth mother house was also in Concordia, an immense pile of Victorian whimsy with a round window on top called the ‘eye of St. Nazareth’ because it was said that through it the nuns spied on everyone in town.

Perhaps their magical blessings wouldn’t take on me because even as a child I was a nascent apostate.  Necessarily the wound swelled and oozed.  When placed in hospital, doctor warned my parents that gangrene had set in. I had a second, then a third operation.  The toe cut back to the bone.  

In all I passed two months in St. Joseph with that damn infection that would not heal.  My father’s revenge was to tell everyone he came across that Dr. Emory was ‘indubitably on the staff’ at St. Joseph.

This cost me my friend. During the travail, my first, I’d ask daily about Handy.  Missing him was a greater pain than my big toe.  Good Christians, my parents would change the subject since lying was a dreadful sin.

When I came home it was to a house without Handy.  My parents said that during my absence he started straying off, something part-coyote dogs would do.  They said there were a couple of complaints of biting.

Then had come the evening when a scout troop from Nebraska came to perform Indian dances in the Concordia band shell.  It so exhilarate Handy that he crashed the stage and to the uproar of the audience bit all the dancers into savage whooping.

Chief Krazny, a Czech like so many in Cloud County, one of the two-man Concordia police force, did not find it clever.   There were deadly consequences.

Afterwards father always kept faithful to his story that he’d been forced to give Handy to a kind rural family living  far away on the margin of the known world.   Even in my naiveté I could hear a rifle shot in the dark interior of myself, where similar horrible things hid in stinking doorways.

For a child a robust imagination is a two edged sword.

Without doubt this was the great tragedy of my early life.  I didn’t get over it for many years.  Losing Handy was like being torn apart.   

Even 30 years later when I first needed an on-line password, one came to mind directly without bidding.  Handinius1.  Handy The Terrible.  The Great.

                            Douglas, Alive, Alive, Oh

I buried Douglas by the old vine in Les Izard’s lower garden.  A vine still producing, feebly, a handful of grapes. One so old it had a short trunk gnarled like an old farmer’s hands.

Memory livid as I shoveled that dirt onto him of when he arrived a puppy charming and lovely.  Douglas was rare, a pure bred Labrit, after gentrification called a ‘Pyrenees Berger’ (sheepdog from the Pyrenees mountains which are quite nearby).  

As an adult he stood to just above my knee and had a medium-length off-white coat, thick and tending toward curls.  Douglas himself resembled a sheep.  

Ears were quite distinctive crowning above his head and then crooking down. Eyes quick and lively.  A black button nose. His tongue was short, wide and candy cane punk.  The tip of it was usually exposed between the white curls that draped his muzzle.  Curls were thick too on his upper snout so to be partially hiding his eyes in dirty tangles. 

He was something of a Benji look-alike.  Even his teeth were cute.
People admired him until they got too close.

It was the same vine that a couple of years before I’d pointed out to Isabel Hart de Bouvoir when I showed her around, the last vine left from a century gone when Les Izards had been terraced for a large vineyard.

Isabel.  Lovely and charming, and a lady always, she had stooped to pluck a grape.  She’d just popped it into her mouth when he, Douglas, who followed us commanding the terrain in his male dog way, lifted his leg to reclaim it with a golden shower.  

“Yummy” had pronounced Isabel, enunciating the word with a steak knife to let me know in her kind and impeccably upper class British way that it was acceptable as a good joke on her. 

Douglas was probably afraid to bite Isabel.  If so it paid her a real tribute. 

   A Jezebel Called Ava         

Life began turning to Greek tragedy when Douglas was about one year old. The Gods frowned on Douglas in the winsome form, blithe spirit of Ava, a collie bitch only slightly older who arrived one day to lead him into temptation.  

Ava lived in a farmhouse across two large fields from us.  Even to me she was delightful, tender to the touch and flirtatious.

Douglas and Ava roamed free.  There were only three houses in the valley, ours included sitting above the other two on the steep hillside of Les Izards.  Our view meant we could see the white hurtling body of Douglas whenever he crossed over to find her.  

They’d harry the fields, disappear into the woods, then hangout at our place together flopped down like teens on ganja.

One phone call ended this.  From farmer Martin (“Mar-tan” French pronunciation) the valley’s resident hat-in-hand French peasant hiding his riches and his cleverness.  He said he’d been suspicious that Ava was harassing his ducks.  Not just any ducks.  The prized fattened ducks of southwest France.  

This morning he’d seen the couple scampering away leaving three ducks dead behind them.  Ava’s owners were not  forthcoming with damages so it fell to us to make restitution.  A fattened duck is a luxury, about $50 per head, something of a quacking Lamborghini.

Not knowing what else to do we chained Douglas.  Ava stopped coming around, her fate unclear.   When we were at home he’d keep close, so no chain, but at night and when we were absent, then the links he’d forged one by one would clink dolefully along with him.

Farmer Martin came to visit, for gossip and a few glasses of wine.  I think he felt sorry for Douglas.  Strange because he mistreated his own cow herder with such abandon I wanted to call the gendarmes.

M. Martin poked the chain with a worn out espadrille ankle bare above it. Both blackened by earth and duck shit. Remarking, “But Monsieur Bell, this is surely big enough for a bull!”

Humbled, I went to town to get the lightest one available.  No good.  Damage done.  From then on Douglas terrorized our property as a confirmed neo-fascist nipper.  He’d turned mean on the world, on a chain fit for a cow.  

Only me and my family seemed safe from his ill temper.  He also now barked with crazed ardor especially when a visitor arrived.  I saw that Douglas performed such evil mainly for me, to protect me perhaps although I think more to show me his value as a shepherd of people who hid in sheep’s clothing –and as my own dedicated bio doorbell.

Douglas The Hun

Instead of Isabel Hart de Bouvoir Douglas bit the equally genteel ankles of Richard and Rita Sanders, high brow old time New Yorkers who owned the last tea packing company in Manhattan, Grace Tea.   Pickled in martinis they’d arrive to wobble across our lawn a sure invitation to Douglas.

He bit Ivan Rombouts a famed coffee trader from Antwerp who had driven his Porsche to see us, stayed to give the boys their first ride in such a car. He’d take ahold of Farmer Martin when he’d come by drunk after his French lunch, too smoothed out to feel anything.  He latched his teeth onto the nursery man who came to plant trees.   He was the one local to vent his anger about that on me.  

Others I only learned of afterwards:  my brother Alan, my sister in law Phyllis, Joy Singer who had gotten my first novel published.  Douglas was not particular.   

I’m sure most of those bitten never told on him.  I don’t know why.  

Perhaps he was too pretty.  Suspicion however as to the scope of his nibbling became part of his life with us. That plus catching a visitor discretely rubbing their achilles heel.

                                                Ribald Race

Douglas as a star in a horror movie?   His most dramatic role came at the time I sat enjoying our small inflatable pool on the front lawn.  Twas the very sweet afternoon of a hot day. I sat buck naked, all cares forgotten, wife and kids away, cold beer in hand.  

It was when that 20 year old fellow came to pick up my packet of photos going to my editor in New York. I used the service for my articles almost every week.  Same fellow had been coming for a while, in a white Renault van.

By then I’d a ‘Attention Chien Mechant’ (mean dog)  sign at the driveway entrance.  Most people were dubious of this when they first saw Douglass radiant in his fleece.  But that disbelief rarely lasted long.  I had a fantasy that Douglas was quite proud of the sign.

Either the pleasant young man, an Arab, trophy of the empire, didn’t see it or ignored it.  Maybe he’d come so often without incident that he was lulled.  When he appeared grinning, waving a friendly hello, I started straight up in alarm to warn him back.  I knew Douglas was loose.

The sight of me naked was apparently more surprising than that of Douglas rushing for him, hackled and growling, doing his wolf imitation, the I’m gonna chomp your fuckin’ head off thing.  

Short canines gleamed whiter than white. Eyes slivered blacker than black.

First nip and the young fellow forgot me.  Me, him and Douglas went chasing and bellowing, all of us barking, through the tall weeds of my rarely mowed lawn.   The can of Kronenborg phizzed-off.

At one point we three were a splashing parade hopping through the pool on tender feet. 

The lawn, shaded then as now by tall lindens, is hidden from the valley countryside by an old and high expanse of boxwood.  Their were no neighbors for an audience for which I was glad. 

Each nip sent the noise level higher.  

Close enough at last I could lunge and tackle Douglas.  He went down with the grunt of an emotionally disturbed line backer.  I hauled him off, shut him up in the car, the nearest place at hand.  

He gave what I’d call a wistful look, head cocked, steaming up the windows of my Citroen BX with a whole lot of panting.  In a sudden he’d turned from a sociopath back into the unassuming Dr. Jekyll, or in Douglas’s case a winning dog of modest size. 

I ran to get the first aid kit.  The delivery man had sunk panting into the weeds.   After I sterilized and bandaged his heels I tried to make amends with promise of a 10 Euro note. 

He countered with an anguished and dolorous “Monsieur!”  

A word he drew out into about five syllables while he studied my penis. Perhaps he’d not seen one before? For that looking he’d probably drink a lake of boiling piss come judgment day.  

Briefly I wondered if he’d have a Fatwa declared upon me.  Or would he bargain for a larger reparation?

I continued regularly to use the same pick up service.  But my anguished muslim youth never returned.

                          Outcast of St Felix of Nola

Les Izards the house faces due south placed carefully, exactly, like an ancient holy site for receiving the maximum available sunlight.   Or a very big solar panel for collecting  warmth for its arthritic walls.  

Across a narrow valley to the west runs an almost identical ridge crested as well with a thicket of live oak trees.  Atop the ridge at the point closest to this house is the convent of the Daughters of Jesus.

From north to south along the ridge is what the locals call the Voie Romaine, or Roman Road.   There is ongoing debate as to whether this trail is actually ‘Roman’ or rather Romanesque. Either way it’s a trek that’s been there beyond memory, its stone roadbed made bare by use.

Where the Convent meets the road there is a small clearing hemmed in on all sides by live oaks and the skeletons of towering dead elms.  Inside it are a couple of stone benches and a statue of Mary the Queen of Heaven her blue robe splotched in crow shit.

This is where the cats are.  For my children’s delight I named it the Sanctuary of St Felix of Nola, for the patron saint of lost animals.  

Whenever we went over to walk the Voie Romain we’d visit the sanctuary just to marvel at what were about 50 or more stray cats who lived there at any given time.  This explained the name I’d given to such an eerie mystical place.

The nuns fed the cats daily with their scraps.   As a result these strays were a hearty band of outlaw cats, cats never touched by human hand, wild as sin and each with a straw up its ass.

They were of all sorts from kittens to those stiff with age.  They were a fantasy of mixes and colors, all cat types and configurations considered.

Given the proximity to Les Izards of St. Felix we necessarily saw here now and then one or more of these cats.  Wanderers who crossed the valley to lurk hidden well away from the house, hugging shadows in the day. 

Their eyes glinted in the dark from out of the shrubbery.  Sometimes so many shone they seemed a minor constellation.

Our kitchen is the nearest room to the sanctuary and with French doors, high and wide, it was our best post for observing any wild cat who came our way. 

Also in the kitchen above the table is a massive window, in two halves, cut through the stone.  It was there on the ledge of this window in the last purple shade of evening that I first had a glimpse of Princess Terrified.  

As we had our meal together, a young family rapt up in its own circle, I sensed a flicker in my peripheral vision.  Sidereal pinpoints. 

She had come to hunker small as she could get on the outside window ledge.  Observing us intently.  Cat’s eyes on high alert and in perpetual motion.  I’ve wondered why she did so and through how many other evening meals she’d watched us.

As I explained to the children I gave her the name of Princess Terrified because I’d never seen a cat so frightened of man.  I said she was one of the ‘Fied’ family sisters, including Horri, Petri and Stupi.  

After that I’d feel her gaze on us often as we ate supper.  Pressed down against the glass.  Tensed to run away but also clearly hugging close to us. Out of curiosity, a need for companionship, protection, hunger? 

At a glance, taking in her deranged eyes, I knew she came from St. Felix.

When I saw her clearly she was good size, a full grown queen, near to four or five years.   She was quite near to a full bred Siamese.  A seal point, glacial blue eyes and all.  

I’d come to know this kind of cat and had a special fondness for them. I was intrigued by what story she must have.  A true princess in the wild.  Had she been sleeping on a pea?

This is why I began to court Princess Terrified, who then became simply Terri.

It took time.  First, when I saw her at the window I’d go outside and stand still.  True to her name she’d dash madly off in a terrific fear.

Next phase was to talk to her.  Baby talk her.  This at least seemed to calm her some.   I knew Siamese liked to be addressed and with deference. Then I moved to offering her milk. Then tuna.  Of all ploys the tuna worked best. 

Did the Daughters of Jesus share their feast of canned tuna with the cats of St. Felix? 

Eventually she’d hear me coming out and wait, about 10 yards off, until I put down whatever I had for her.

Sometimes she’d be absent for days.  Sometimes I was off on business.  It was a fraught romance.

                              Taming of The Terrified

One remarkable day I put out my hand towards her and she let me touch her briefly with a finger tip.  Before  starting off hysterically as if awakened from a zombie nightmare. 

I admit I grew weary of all this and was ready to give up when one evening she came up to rub her side against my leg.  Perhaps in heat?

Ultimately it happened that I could pick her up, momentarily holding a wild animal in my arms. I held her in awe.  Psychosis aside Terri lived as a beautiful cat and kept herself groomed with a prima donna’s vanity.

So it was that Princess Terrified became a member of our household. Member?  Hardly.  I was the only one permitted to stroke her, hold her.  My wife was somewhat acceptable, my children not at all. Inside she stayed in the kitchen, sometimes even for as long as a couple of hours.  Terri spent the night out hunting.

Terri rarely ate our food.  She took care of that herself. Once I saw Terri jump up straight in the air high as 8 feet to catch a bird in mid flight.    

She fed herself on birds, mice and such, an amazing huntress.   Whatever she caught she quickly devoured.  No cruel play.

In time when I was home from a trip she’d find her way to my study and would jump up into my lap.   She was a pleasant unobtrusive companion.

Every afternoon when I was around to observe she did her Siamese thing, going mad for a few minutes, racing about the yard and up, down, around trees, rolling, leaping, charging at nothing  Then her ears were laid back tight to her skull.  Then her eyes went bulging and strange.  

                                   Rikki Tikki Terri

If you’ve never read Kipling’s story about a valorous mongoose, please do. It’s a masterpiece.

Terri’s story reminds me of his tale.  That’s because one summer afternoon I walked to the kitchen doorway to the porch and watched stunned into inaction as she battled on the porch with an Aspic Viper.

Asps are to my knowledge the only snake to beware of in this region.  Its poison is sometimes fatal to dogs, dangerous to cats, sickening to man.  I knew they lived here, when warmed in  the summer the old stones of the house attracted them. 

To see one on the porch where the children played was alarming.  For a child their venom could be threatening.  I’d never seen one so close to us.  

The fight between cat and snake was dramatic.  Terri repeatedly pounced then sprang high in the air with the snake between her paws.  From up high she’d drop the snake.  She shook it, lashed it hard like a whip.  She danced around it in a blur.  As quick as the asp was Terri was quicker.

I had at hand nothing to help her.  If I intervened I feared distracting her.   It was watching killer antagonists in a mute Kansas tornado.

In the end the snake lost and lay still.  I checked and found it almost bitten through. Terri was quickly gone, limping off into the bushes.

Then she was gone for a few days.  I feared she’d died.  In my human way I felt she’d protected my family, given her life for them.  Of course it was a work of nature, not Disney. 

When again I heard her unpleasant Siamese screech sobbing for me at the door I brought her the finest delicacies.  I scratched her ears,  chucked her under the chin.  Made her purr.

I so admired her, feeling stricken by her. In the flesh my ‘Mafdet’, the Egyptian cat goddess who slew serpents.

Good cat that she was she then ignored me in self satisfaction to instead lick her paws in a sensuous, closed-eyed ablution.  

                Offerings

Behind the house the hillside abruptly rises almost vertically.  It’s a wilderness, although now and then through the years I’ve cut back the area of acervate tangles, of gorse and thorny brambles up to the line where the live oak thicket begins.  The task is needed to shelter the house from threat of a grass fire.  

So one spring afternoon when I labored over that virile weed-eater labor, Douglas came trotting by to show me the eviscerated entrails of a dead hare.  I was unimpressed.  I already knew all about hares, inside and out.  I’d once worked on a greyhound racing farm where jack rabbits were used to train greyhounds for the Florida race tracks.  

Douglas paraded it about to make sure I admired him, just beyond my reach and flashing me the half-moons of his eyes telling me this was his prize not mine.  I gave him a “good boy’ to send him on his way.  The carcass dripped.  

That afternoon I found four baby hares at the door between kitchen and porch.  They were unharmed.  Douglas had brought them to me, surely toting them one at a time from their nest, clamped gently in his teeth.  Same fangs that had ripped their mother apart a couple of hours before.

My wife brought them in, feed them day and night from one of those plastic toy baby bottles that come filled with candy for children.   The only room of the house where Douglas knew he was welcome was also the kitchen.  Sometimes he slept there.  Ate there.  Watched TV with us. 

For the two weeks the babies where in the room Douglas oddly ignored them as if they invisible.  It seemed he wanted his gift to me to be a matter of honor.

The babies became young hares, all four of them.  Then time dictated that I move them up the hill into that impassable fastness. 

What happened next I’ve no idea.  Nor it seemed did Douglas.

                                 Terri’s Last Terror

Terri began to sicken one spring.  I saw here moving more slowly, no longer catching a bird in mid flight.  

I had a meeting of the Spanish Coffee Congress to attend in Barcelona.  My wife came too.  I was the keynote speaker.  I had no choice but to go with my guilt trip riding my back as I left.  

To attend we needed a sitter for the children, selecting a young woman, a Buddhist, who had been a house cleaner for us at one time.

Just before driving off for Barcelona I went again to check on Terri.  She was clearly dying. I gave her water, tried unsuccessfully to get her to eat.  I left her where she’d chosen to die, on the front lawn near the house. 

At my touch she meowed wanly at me.  She licked my hand once.  It was a one of a kind sensation, that abrasive true grit of her cat affection.

On our return three days later I knew she’d died, just felt it in the emptiness left behind.  The kid-sitter confirmed.  Good Buddhist that she was she’d taken it upon herself to get Terri to the vet.  Opening her up he found her riddled with cancer.  He closed and had her die.

He told the young woman he couldn’t believe in all his experience how an animal could have lived on for some time with such a mass of end stage cancer.  He’d disposed of her body so I had nothing to bury. 

Instead I  mourned for her remarkable spirit at the tomb I built for her in my mind.  If any cat had soul,  it would be the Princess Terrified.

Douglas The Obscure

My head is full of the sounds of dancing boys.  Such a weird score bears witness to the funny-tragic bent of my life with dogs, from Kansas to the Tarn, Handy and the scouts to Douglas.

Merry and silly, the boys romp on the porch.  I’m listening to a birthday party of many years ago, for my just-turned eight year old.  There are five little boys.  Same age as my son, his classmates at the one-room country school he attends.  

Cake and presents are on the table.  Such things ratchet up the joyful expectations.

I stand in the kitchen door open to the porch so that I can hear everything.   Including coming now the sudden erupting crash of frightened screams.

Douglas has attacked the birthday party.  He nips and pinches, barking malevolently when there is nothing better to do with his mouth.  There are tears of fright and pain on the checks of the boys.  

I rush on stage to grab up the boys and hustle them to the safety of the kitchen.  My wife runs for alcohol and gauze.  I haul Douglas by his collar to the chain kept nearby, on the base of a brick column.  Chain strong enough for a bull they say.

Party over.  In more than one meaning.  It had never occurred to me that Douglas would go after children.  How can a smart man be so stupid.  The kids soon quieted.  No blood drawn although scrapes and teeth dents showed how serious it had all been.

                                   Oh Have You Seen My Dear Companion

Next day we had the vet come to Les Izards with his needle.  You can’t have a dog that attacks little children.  

So it was that I crouched beside Douglas consoling him in the last goodbye, stroking him despite everything as he died. I cried a little, for a moment or so.  Out of loss, and shame.

The last from Douglas was a lone long regretful whimper.  Then came the terrible quiet.