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Bad Dogs
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Bad Dogs
This is a work of fiction, very loosely based upon my life.
Bad Dogs
Chapter One: Dusty
I grew up in the country, and in the course of my life I’ve known many dogs. Most were great fun, a few were sneaky, conniving scoundrels, and a very few were outright thugs. Much like people, in that regard.
The first “bad” dog I ever knew was a cow dog on the ranch we lived on in Southern California at the time of my birth. Dusty paid no attention to anyone except my Dad and my Uncle John, and even with them he was surly. The only reason Dad didn’t shoot him out of hand was his usefulness – you could point out a particular animal in a herd and tell him to “cut ‘er out”, and in moments that animal would be standing before you, shaking and bawling in fear.
Everyone else on the ranch, from the lowest hand to the owner, was afraid of that snarling yellow mutt. With good cause, too – he’d sooner take your hand off than let you pet him, and god help the animal that crossed him. Even the 2,000 lb prize bull was meek around him.
I was born with serious club-footedness in both feet, and I spent many months in the Shriner’s hospital in LA, and many, many more unable to motivate around very well. My older brothers and sister were all wild, whooping Indians charging around that 22,000 acre ranch on foot, a-horseback, and on bicycles or scooters long before I was able to do much more than make it to the chain link fence around the yard.
Dusty hated them. Most especially he hated my brother Mark, who at age four could drop the loop of a lasso around one hoof of a running steer. Nothing and nobody was safe from Mark with his rope. The first time Mark roped old Dusty, that dog like to wore himself plumb out fighting that lasso. The next time, he didn’t fight the lasso, he just came up that rope in a low yellow streak and slammed into Mark full tilt, knocking him down and standing in the middle of him.
First my Dad knew of it was when Rosie burst into the machine shed screaming that Dusty was killing Mark. Dad came out, saw that old dog standing in the middle of Mark, snarling and damned near foaming at the mouth, and charged him. Well, Dusty saw that coming and backed off, dragging Mark’s lasso. Once Dad figured out what had happened, he got the rope off Dusty, tanned Mark’s hide with it, and made him put it up for a week.
Dusty, ever after that, had a great hatred for Mark. He’d lay in wait for him around the corner of barns and outbuilding, and just generally terrorized him fiercely. He was a damned smart dog, and I guess he figured out that anybody who was a target of Mark’s mischief was just naturally his ally. I was such a target, constantly. By the time I was 2 and a half, I could get around pretty good in my braces, although I was never what you would call fast. Dusty saw Mark terrorizing me by zooming at me on his bicycle, or tripping me up, or what have you, and that mean old dog became my shadow. Never once let me pet him, wouldn’t take food from my hands, or get within closer than about 3 feet of me, but he was always there unless he was off with Dad working the cattle.
Anytime he wasn’t working, if I was outside that yellow cur was slinking along behind or beside me. Come up to the corner of a building, he’d scout ahead, and many a time he flushed Mark out, yelling. He was my protector, but never my friend. I used to watch him studying the other animals on the ranch, and watching my brothers and sisters, and I could see that old dog thinking.
I used to sit at the end of the old bunkhouse, where the slope of the ground caused there to be about a 4 foot high crawl space that was until very late afternoon cool and shady. All the ranch dogs would be under there, and usually a half dozen cats, avoiding that brutal San Joaquin valley heat. When I’d walk under there, the dogs would companionably move aside and make me a space on the cool dirt, at least till Dusty showed up. Then I’d be at one end of an oval space about 10 feet by 8, with Dusty smack in the middle. None of the other animals would encroach on his space.
Well, I was back under there one day when Mark came looking for me, calling my name. Dusty bristled up at the sound of his voice, and rose to his feet. The other dogs sidled even farther from him, the cats disappeared up under the floorboards of the other end of the bunkhouse. As Mark came around the end of the bunkhouse into sight, Dusty started snarling; you know what I mean, that low rumbling snarl with real menace dripping from it, that snarl that says, “this time I’m gonna kill you.”
Well, Mark wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed. He’d bout had it with that old dog, and quicker than you’d believe he dropped a loop around Dusty’s neck. He had learned something from the last time, though, cause he snubbed that rope around a post and backed off, keeping a good tension on it. Dusty charged him, and like to broke his neck when he hit the end of that rope. It flipped him over backwards and he hit the ground damned hard. He staggered to his feet, and for about 30 seconds he fought that rope like a wild cat. I’d backed up under the bunkhouse with the other dogs, and was watching wide-eyed.
Dusty suddenly quit fighting, and just stood there, panting in the heat of the afternoon sun. Mark was out at the end of the rope, taunting him. I watched Dusty turn and look around, then look down the rope to the post he was snubbed on, and I could see that crafty dog thinking. Suddenly he shot toward that post, and I screamed at Mark to drop the rope and run for the house. For once, he did the smart thing. He dropped the rope and ran. Dusty went around that post, but the loose rope snagged on it as he did and tumbled him again.
It is probably the only thing that saved Mark’s life. Dusty, snarling and wild, struggled loose from the loop and took off after Mark in a streak. Mark hit the gate on the chain link fenced yard and just barely got it slammed on the catch when Dusty hit it like a freight train. For about ten minutes old Dusty snarled up and down that fence, trying to get at Mark, who was hunkered, trembling and pale, on the front stoop.
Finally, Dusty calmed down a bit, and came walking back toward the bunkhouse. The other dogs boiled out from under there like their lives depended on being somewhere, anywhere else. Likely they did.
Dusty grabbed that lasso and drug it under the bunkhouse, laid down, and commenced to chewing. Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever handled a real roping lasso, but that is about the toughest, hardest rope you’ll ever see. In the next 2 hours, Dusty chewed that rope up into 2 – 3 foot long chunks. By the time Dad came in from the foothills where he’d been up blowing a reservoir, that rope was so thoroughly destroyed you couldn’t have used a single piece to tie a gate shut – none were long enough.
Mark told his story bout the mad dog, I told my story about the whole thing. Dad cogitated a while, then he went out to the bunkhouse and saw Dusty lying there in the middle of a rat’s nest of chewed lasso, rope burn on his neck.
Well, he came back in laughing at Mark, telling him he was damned lucky that old dog hadn’t caught and savaged him something fierce. Mark was so mad about his lasso that he was crying; Dad just told him to count it a good damned lesson.
The next day Dad took Dusty with him up to the old line cabin in the hills where the Basque hermit lived, and introduced them. He told Dusty to stay, and the only times I ever saw that old mutt again were when we’d drive up there bout once a month with simple supplies for that old man.
Copyright Patrick Early
Oct 27, 2003
Chapter Two: Big Buster
Dogs come in lots of sizes, as we all know. Everything from 10 oz teacup poodles to 240 lb mastiffs. I’ve known many little dogs, which, like many little men, had huge attitude problems. Most big dogs I’ve known were pretty easy going.
Buster was an exception. Appearance wise, he was a classic American Boxer – light tan coat, dark brown ears and muzzle, darker line down his back, white blaze on his chest and white stockings on all four feet. Truly, he was a handsome animal.
We called him Big Buster because it fit – he was easily twice the size of any other boxer dog I’ve ever known. As a 4 year old boy, he looked like an elephant to me – he towered over me and weighed at least 8 times as much as I did. He was terrifying; not just too me, I’ve seen big men blanch grey when he rose up, hackles standing, and rumbled that deep growl of his.
He did that often. Big Buster belonged to Old Robert; an old, old man who made his living panning gold in the little streams coming down out of the Strawberry Mountains of eastern Oregon, where my family had moved when we left the ranch. When we met him we were living in a huge old 2 story house on the bank of Canyon Creek, a few miles from John Day.
Old Robert had a truly rattle-trap early 30’s vintage Chevy pickup, held together mostly with baling wire, and hope. He’d pick a likely spot, park that wreck, tell Big Buster to guard, and clamber down into the stream bed to work a likely looking gravel bar. If he found any “color”, he’d climb back up to the truck, drag out his gear, and set up camp.
He had a homemade camp kitchen that slid out of the bed and set up on two legs, with the back side resting on the bed. His bedroll fit on the bed behind the cab, under a canvas canopy that was supported on 3 hoops made from oak saplings that went in the stake holes of the truck. The awning extended about 8 ft behind the camp kitchen, which is where he’d set up an old wooden folding chaise lounge he’d acquired somewhere. He’d sit there by his little fire, under the canopy, wrapped in a blanket if it was cold enough, sipping booze laced coffee all evening, telling stories.
The house we were living in had started life in the 1890’s as a saloon in Canyon City. By the time we moved there in the late 50’s it was in pretty poor shape, but it was huge, it had 14 bedrooms upstairs, and each one had a cast iron stove. In the main room downstairs there was the biggest single wood stove I’ve ever seen – it would take 8 sixty inch long, 2 foot in diameter aspen logs to fill the firebox. That huge old monster would hold that fire all night, and could heat that old uninsulated house hot enough to run you out of the main room on a sub-zero night.
In the kitchen there was a modern 5 burner propane stove, and a propane frig, along with a restaurant sized wood burning cookstove., and stairs down into the old cold room under the back porch. Part of Canyon creek was diverted by an old split log flume to run through a rock channel in the cold room – since the creek was a purely snow melt stream, it stayed damned cold year around. There were electric lights (bulbs on cords from the ceiling) in the main room, the kitchen, and the bathroom. The rest of the house we lighted with Aladdin kerosene lamps.
In late September of that year, Old Robert set up camp about a quarter mile upstream of the house. He wasn’t working the creek at that place – he was sifting the ground where the old assay office, the whorehouse, and another saloon had stood in Canyon City’s heyday. Most of the town had burned one disastrous winter in the early days of the century, and the soil where those buildings had stood had a pretty good lacing of powder gold that had sifted down into cracks in the floor, or through it.
Old Robert had gotten an old town plat map from the county courthouse, and gone and surveyed off the sites of several businesses he figgered had handled a lot of placer gold back in the day. He planned to spend the winter working the top 18 inches or so of soil from those building sites – said he’d done it before in other old mining towns and made pretty good money doing it.
After he’d been camped there a few days my Dad walked up to introduce himself on a Saturday morning. He’d forbidden us kids from going up to the old man’s camp till he got a chance to meet him, and it is just as well. As he approached Old Robert’s camp, Big Buster stood up from under the camp kitchen, stepped out and growled.
Dad said later it startled him something fierce; he couldn’t see the dog clearly in the shade of the awning, and he said he’d never seen a big Shetland pony that aggressive, or one that growled. He always carried his stock whip with him in those days, a 16 foot rawhide 8 ply black snake he could pop a quarter across the ground with, and he said he shook it out behind him when Big Buster stepped out into the light.
Dad stopped dead about 50 feet from the back of the truck, and faced off with Big Buster. He said that dog was one of only two dogs he’d ever met that scared him, and the other was a rabid pit bull he encountered as a boy in Oklahoma. As he backed away from the truck Big Buster kept advancing, keeping the gap about constant. Dad got fed up with that real quick, so he stopped and popped a rock with the whip just to let Buster know what it was.
That whip made a hell of a crack when he’d pop it, and right quick Old Robert came hot-footing into camp. He saw the confrontation, asked Dad if he’d hit his dog with that whip. Dad told him no, just let the dog know it was there.
Old Robert told him he was right tickled too hear that, ‘cause he’d sure hate to have to shoot a neighbor before being introduced. He told Buster to get under the truck, and the two of them sat down to campfire coffee, and got acquainted.
Throughout that fall, the old man could be seen humping wheelbarrows of soil down to his flume at the creek, washing the placer gold out of all those old foundation areas. Most afternoons, after my big brothers and sister got home from school we’d all troop up to wherever he was working, and “help”. He was remarkable patient for an old semi-hermit who couldn’t set foot indoors without getting all flustered, who might go weeks between human encounters, and whose only regular companion was a dog the size of a small horse that hunted for his own meat.
Big Buster stayed in camp most days, on guard, and Old Robert made it real clear that dog would eat us for a snack soon as look at us. Big Buster reinforced that judgment with his growls, and flashing fangs behind a curled lip if we got within about 50 feet of the truck.
We’d stay there pestering that old man, generally underfoot, till dinner time. Dad really liked him, and he’d go up there most evenings after dark for an hour or so. He told us lots of Old Robert’s stories, and they were always fascinating. That old man had been prospecting since he was a teenager, more than 60 years before, and he’d been just about everywhere in the Great Basin country it was possible to get to.
After he’d been there about a month we got a rare stretch of Indian summer weather, and Dad got a bull elk on his way down the mountain from the Seneca lumber company mill where he was working one evening. He came in about 45 minutes late, with that elk field dressed in the bed of the pickup, and we had an exciting few minutes getting it hung in the big cottonwood behind the house.
Dad went up to Old Roberts camp to tell him about the elk, and invite him to a big barbeque at our house that coming Saturday. Old Robert said he’d come, and that he’d warn Big Buster too stay clear of that elk.
We had a grand time that Saturday, with friends coming from all over the area with their kids. There are few finer foods than well-aged elk steak bbq’d over an open fire, with corn roasted in its jacket, and all the fixings of an old fashioned country get-together.
When the party was winding down in early evening, a bunch of us were down on the creek bank chunkin’ stones at the boulders and admiring the few big rainbow trout we could see in the pool just below the house, when Old Robert wandered over. He was just standing there, companionable like, looking out across the creek, when his face lit up like a Christmas tree.
He jumped down the bank like a fool kid, bouncing from stone to stone, then waded out into the creek. He got out about ten feet into the water, waist deep, and pulled his pocket knife out and worried a chunk off a great big flat rock just sticking above the water. He came wading back into the bank, didn’t say a word to nobody, and went trotting off up to his camp.
Everybody just figgered the old man had drunk a bit too much corn refreshment through the day, and let him be.
Next morning he came to the house bright and early – the first time he’d ever done that, carting a quart mason jar in his hand. Sloshing around in the bottom of that jar was about an inch of mercury. It had lots of dirt and rock flour coating the top, but all over the surface you could see a thin layer of powder gold.
He told Dad, sitting on the back porch with us kids crowded round, that that big flat “rock” out in the creek wasn’t a rock at all – it was a congealed lump of mercury amalgam mixed with rock flour he figured must have escaped from the old ball rolling mill in the fire, and settled in that pool behind the house. He was pretty excited.
He asked Dad if he minded if he moved his camp to the downstream side of the pool, below the house, so he could work on getting that lump up out of the creek bed. He wanted permission, ‘cause that field was part of the place we were renting. Of course, Dad said yes.
Well, Old Robert moved camp that day. This poised somewhat of a problem, because his truck was now only about 100 yards from the back door of the house, and Big Buster was considerable wrought up over us kids busting out that door and dashing down to the creek to watch Old Robert. That whole first day after the move, Big Buster laid under that rattle-trap old wreck of a truck, growling and snarling every time one of us kids came in sight.
Finally, even Old Robert grew concerned. That evening, he talked things over with Dad, and they settled on a plan. With Dad present, Old Robert introduced us kids to Big Buster one at a time, formal as you please. That big old dog understood we weren’t to be molested, but at the same time he was some put out by the whole affair.
At that time, in that country, there was a considerable problem with packs of feral dogs running the country. City folk would go camping in the mountains, and when Spot or Rover didn’t show up to get in the car for the trip home, they’d just leave the poor city bred mutts behind. I imagine the majority of those dogs perished within a few days of abandonment, prey to some bobcat or mountain lion, bear or wolf, or just dieing of stupidity.
Some few of them would go wild, and those would pack up and run the country. They were hell on sheep, even yearling calves, and the sheepherders and ranchers paid a bounty on them through the county extension agent. As the winter approached, like any other sensible wild predator they’d move down out of the high grazing country into the valleys to try to survive the bitterly cold weather.
The area around Canyon City had seen its share of problems with these sorry creatures, especially given that it laid square astride the best path down out of the high country. The year before we moved in, there’d been some pretty serious depredations to the winter penned sheep of one the big ranchers at the mouth of the canyon where it opened out into the John Day valley, and everybody in the country warned us to watch out for “them damned wild dogs!”
The presence of all of us kids moving through what he considered his space perturbed Big Buster mightily, and he moved his guard spot out from under the old truck to a spot on the edge of the aspen grove on the far side of the meadow, about 200 yards off. He’d sit there, the picture of duty, staring at that truck and Old Robert’s camp all day long. He’d only come back into camp when the old man himself came in for the day.
Old Robert was out in that bitterly cold stream most mornings, wearing some old rubber hip waders he’d acquired, cutting chunks off that huge lump of amalgam. He’d get about 100 lbs cut off, and then he’d wade in to shore, lift the chunks into his wheelbarrow, and trundle them into his camp. He had an old 20 gallon cast iron cauldron he’d found that he set up on a tripod over his fire, and he’d melt that mercury down and pour it into quart jars he scavenged from all over.
In mid November we got our first real snowfall, and Mom forbade us kids from going down to the creek in the afternoons, afraid we’d fall in and catch our deaths of pneumonia. Likely she was correct in her assessment – I couldn’t get near water without ending up soaked and muddy, and my brothers and sisters weren’t much better.
About that same time Dad told us he’d seen one pack of wild dogs about 15 miles up canyon, and we were to stay close to the house. He also told Mom that from that point on, if we got serious snow during the day while he was at work on the mountain, that he would be bunking in the bunkhouse at the mill instead of trying to get down the mountain on that steep, crooked road.
My sister Rosie was in first grade that year, and one morning one of her classmates brought in some candles her grandmother had made, for show and tell. They were made from candleberry wax – a type of low shrub that grew all over that country had white, waxy berries that could be cooked down and a fine, hard wax extracted from them. Candles made from that wax burned clean, lasted well, and smelled delicious. In pioneer days they had been a real blessing to folks.
Rosie took it into her mind that nothing would do but that she should go pick a mess of those berries and make some candles. She knew that Mom wouldn’t let her go downstream to the nearest sizable patch of the bushes, about ¾ of a mile, so she didn’t ask. She just grabbed a flour sack, and went.
She’d been gone about an hour when Dad got home, and then about an hour later Mom started calling for her too come help put dinner together. When she didn’t answer up, Mom went out on the porch and called for her. Still no answer.
Dad came out, found out she was missing, and called all of us kids in to ask if we knew where she’d gone. Nobody knew a thing. Rosie was an independent spirit, and this wasn’t the first time she’d disappeared, so the folks weren’t terribly worried. They figured she would come in soon.
Meanwhile, Rosie was downstream, picking away. She had that flour sack about 1/3 full of candleberries when she realized it was getting late, and started for home. She was about halfway home when a pack of about a dozen dogs appeared on the other side of the creek. She heard them growling and yipping, looked over and saw them, and panicked.
She did about the worst thing she could have done – she started running for home. Anybody who has ever seen wild dogs or wolves work prey knows that running from them is the surest way to draw an attack, but she was a little girl alone, and scared.
Those dogs came splashing across Canyon creek, and hit the bank behind her running, determined to catch her. Rosie was screaming by then, and she had lungs on her that would rival a train whistle. She burst out of the aspen grove below Old Robert’s camp just barely ahead of those dogs, and Big Buster was already up and alerted by the noise.
To hear Old Robert tell it, that Big Buster never hesitated – he was off like a brown streak toward that pack of dogs, and he hurtled into the midst of them just as they caught up to Rosie. The lead dog slashed her left thigh just as Big Buster arrived, and Rosie was down on the ground in the middle of a boiling, screaming, snarling pack of dogs all fighting to get at her and/or Big Buster. Old Robert said he grabbed his rifle, but couldn’t fire for fear of hitting Rosie, who he’d catch a glimpse of every few moments.
By the time my Dad came dashing up, it was pretty much all over but the whimpering. Rosie was still down, clutching her leg and crying, while Big Buster was standing over her a-bristle, with five dead or dieing dogs around him. Dad couldn’t get to Rosie to pick her up till Old Robert spent a couple of minutes talking that huge brute of his down from his battle-high, and getting him to step away from her.
Mom and Dad took Rosie into John Day to the doctor’s house. He cleaned the wound on her leg, a deep slash into the muscle on the back of her thigh, and stitched her up. They brought her home in about two hours.
While Mom was busy trying to restore some order amongst us kids, and get Rosie set up on a pallet in her and Dad’s bedroom, Dad went to talk to Old Robert. When he got to his camp, the old man was working on Big Buster, cleaning up several minor slashes he’d suffered, and trying to decide what to do – one of the wild dogs had managed to slash the major tendon just above the ankle on his right hind leg, and he couldn’t put that foot down without the leg folding under him.
Old Robert said he figured about all he could do was put Big Buster down – no way would that tendon ever heal properly, and he didn’t want him to die by inches. Dad told him that wasn’t gonna happen, that no dog he owed that much too was going to be either crippled or put down. Old Robert said there wasn’t any choice; he didn’t have the money to get Big Buster fixed by the vet.
Dad refused to hear that – he walked back to the house, got his pickup, and drove to Old Robert’s camp. They loaded Big Buster in the bed of the truck, and headed back into John Day to the vet’s place.
When they got there the vet pretty much said the same thing – no way to adequately repair the damage; Big Buster was likely to go through life a three legged dog if he survived. Dad told him to do his level best, and explained why. The vet agreed to try, but told Old Robert that for that tendon to have any chance of healing he would have to cast and immobilize the leg for several weeks.
The story of what Big Buster had done got around the valley pretty damned quick. The next day there were several men out talking to Dad about organizing a big hunt to clean the dogs out of the canyon completely, and everyone made a point of visiting Old Robert and Big Buster.
They held that drive and hunt that following weekend – over 100 men on horseback from all over the country started up canyon about 15 miles and worked all the way down to the mouth, flushing the dogs out ahead of them. All told they cleared out three packs of dogs totaling nearly thirty in all.
Every few days somebody would drop by to leave off a haunch of mutton, or a huge hunk of beef, or half a deer for Big Buster to gnaw on. That old dog just lay under Old Robert’s truck, and ate and ate. By the time the vet figured it was safe to take off the cast and let him start using his leg, he must have gained 30 lbs.
That’s the story of Big Buster, the biggest, meanest dog with a heart of gold I ever knew. He never did get tolerant of anybody but Old Robert. When the old man died in camp three winters later, they had to shoot Big Buster to get his body for burial. It’s probably just as well – that dog was a one man critter.
Oh yeah – Rosie never did drop that flour sack of candleberries – that weekend she and Mom cooked them down, extracted the wax, and made a few candles.
Copyright Patrick Early
Nov 3, 2003
Re: Bad Dogs
Chapter Three: Rex the Malevolent
The summer of the year I turned five, we moved from the John Day area of eastern Oregon to a farm in the Willamette Valley, about 5 miles south of the tiny agricultural/lumber town of Molalla.
The farm was about 90 acres of mostly bottomland along one bank of a small creek, with the barns, houses and out-buildings on a bench of the hillside above the creek about halfway to the crest of the hill. Two houses faced one another across a blacktop driveway.
One was a smallish, modern (early 50’s) story and a half with two attic bedrooms under the gables in which the owner of the farm lived with his wife and two teenage kids. The other house was a huge old classic farmhouse, deep covered porch on the south and west sides, two full stories with 3 bedrooms, a bath, and a screened summer sleeping porch upstairs, with the living room, dining room, and kitchen as well as the master suite downstairs. On the north side half the depth of that huge old box was covered by a shed addition which contained the utility/laundry room, as well as a single car garage which we used as a woodshed. Behind the laundry room was the 3 sided summer kitchen, with a huge old 6 burner, two oven, water jacketed cast iron wood stove, a scalding cauldron on a swing arm brace that could be lifted and swung out over the brick firebox for it just off the edge of the porch, and a box smoker for small meat like chickens or fish
The owner of the farm worked in town for the largest local lumber mill, as their payroll manager, and just leased the land out to a local farmer each year for cropping. We had the use of the barns, the orchard pasture, the woodlots, and the “home” garden plot – about 6 acres in total. It was a great place to live – we had chickens, pigs, rabbits, cows, a goat, guinea hens, and dogs.
Which brings me to the “star” of this story – Rex the Malevolent.
Where the house lay was off a small county side road connecting two larger roads – one a county farm road leading south to Marquam and north to Yoder from the junction; the other the major state highway running north/south up the east side of the valley. From the end of the driveway it was about a mile and a half either way to one of the larger roads. There was very little traffic on that road at any time, there being only four farms between the junctions, and we treated the hill between the end of the driveway and the bridges over the creeks in the bottom as our personal play ground for riding scooters, or skates, or bicycles, or what have you. The creeks, the woods around them, the pond alongside below their confluence, the agate bed below that – all of it was our territory.
We’d lived there a year when I started school, and soon made two good friends – Gary, who lived about a mile and a quarter from our house across the fields and through the woods, and Grant, who lived about two and a half miles away in the other direction, on the Marquam road. In those days I was confined to walking or my stand up scooter, as my leg braces wouldn’t let me ride a bike. I couldn’t cut across the fields to Grant’s house, as it would require crossing two fast running creeks and cutting across old man Johnson’s place – he’d made it clear he’d deal harshly with any kids he found on his land. South of his place was the Hobart farm, which was for 9-10 months of the year an uncrossable bog which produced a huge yearly crop of marsh hay, and little else. Mostly, Grant rode his bike to our house.
When I was seven I finally got free of those cursed leg braces, and hit the ground running. It wasn’t three days after I got out of them that I learned to ride a bike, and very quickly I was riding it to Grant’s house every chance I got. The Marquam road was pretty much level from it’s junction with our road south to the junction with the state highway at the Marquam four corners. Grants house was just north of the section jog, (for those who don’t know, when you map rectangular property sections onto a spherical surface, occasionally you have to offset the north/south property lines from the sections adjacent, to make them fit. County roads frequently follow these section lines, so have a square S jog occasionally) about a half mile north of the Marquam store.
Shortly after I started riding to Grant’s, we took up the habit of riding on down to the store for a bottle of pop (my poison was Grape Nehi in those days). Before we would leave his house his mom always called old Ora Oz, the widow woman who lived just south of the section jog, to pen up her dog for an hour of so. She had a giant Alsation with a truly vile temperament and the bad habit of attacking anyone on a bike who rode past.
At seven years old I was tiny – just over three feet tall and weighing 39 pounds at the start of the school year. Rex was about three foot at the shoulder and probably weighed 140 lbs – to me he was a monster. My bike was a homemade one – my Dad couldn’t find one small enough for me to ride – single speed, and heavy for its size. I only got moving fast on it on a good hill. Rex could catch me easily if he were free.
One Saturday I rode to Grant’s house, only to discover he’d gone to town with his Mom to get some new shoes. His Dad raised free range turkeys for the specialty poultry trade – essentially wild birds that had their wings clipped, and ran loose on the 160 acres of fenced ground behind the house, and he told me they wouldn’t be home for several hours. His attitude made it pretty clear I should clear off, so I did.
Unfortunately, I made a serious mistake coming out of their driveway – instead of turning left toward home I turned right toward Marquam. I never thought about Rex, I just wanted a bottle of pop from the store. As I made the second square corner of the section jog and started down the straight stretch toward the store Rex erupted from the eight foot cedar hedge in front of Mrs. Oz’s house like a guided missile – a child-devouring missile with jaws big enough and strong enough to crush my skull.
I saw him from the corner of my eye when he was about ten feet from me – nowhere near soon enough to do anything at all to avoid him. He slammed full-tilt into me, knocking me, bike and all, into the ditch. That impact probably saved my life. I ended up under my bike in the bottom of the ditch, with the front wheel between my head and neck and the air above us.
Rex jumped on top of me and the bike, and tried several times to bite my face and throat, but all he got was a mouth full of spokes for his troubles. Finally, he grabbed me by the right leg and dragged me onto the road, kicking and screaming. It seemed like forever I fought that monster, getting bitten on the legs and feet several times as I kicked at him to fend him off, before Mrs. Oz ran out and grabbed him and dragged him off of me. She took him in her yard and chained him up, then came back to me.
She ended up having to carry me into her house, as I was too torn up and shaken to navigate. Once inside she called my Mom, then started trying to clean me up. It wasn’t long before my Mom came in with my oldest brother, took one good look at the bites, and hauled me out to the car for a high speed run into town to the clinic. I was lucky – there were thirteen punctures, but only one slash that required stitches.
While the Dr worked on me, my brother ran across town (all 8 blocks) to the lumber mill to fetch my Dad. By the time they returned to the clinic the Dr was finishing up stitching my slash and bandaging the various punctures after cleaning them out. Mom and the Dr managed to talk Dad out of going straight to Mrs. Oz’s house to kill Rex, and likely her too if she got in the way. They persuaded him to make a complaint to the county sheriff’s animal control officer, and get Rex put down by the law. He did go recover my bike.
Well, that was my first lesson in the value of trusting the law – turned out Mrs. Oz’s son was the patrol sergeant for the county sheriff for the south end of the county, and he’d given Rex to his mother for her “protection”. Nothing was done about the incident except to advise my folks to tell us kids to stay away from her house.
My Dad was enraged, totally. He was intent on killing that “damned dog”, and it took a lot of fast talk by my Mom and our landlord to prevent him from doing so. In the end I got forbidden to ride past Grant’s house unless we knew positively that Rex was chained up. I was also forbidden to go to the Marquam store by taking the state highway – it was twice as far that way and the highway carried a high traffic volume, much of which was huge log trucks that would quite literally blow me off the road.
Mrs. Oz had been very upset by some of the things my Dad and Mom had said to her in the aftermath of my mauling, so she usually refused to chain up Rex if Grant’s Mom called to ask her to. Consequently, my trips to the store were few and far between for a goodly while.
Finally, after about the fifth or sixth time she refused, I got fed up. My Dad had always said if I was scared of something I should face up to it, and he’d often said that “If you want something done right, do it yourself.”
So I made up my mind to do both.
Saturday morning, I told Mom I was going to ride to Grant’s house. She reminded me not to go south of there, and I went upstairs for my coat. My folks bedroom door was right at the bottom of the stairs, and I knew she wouldn’t hear me as she was washing dishes and listening to the radio. I went into their bedroom, opened up the drawer of my Dad’s bedside table, took his .38 revolver, and put it in my coat pocket.
On the ride toward Grant’s house the weight of that pistol in my pocket seemed to keep pulling me sideways. Just past his house, before the first 90 degree turn of the section corner, I stopped, pulled the pistol out of my coat, then rode on with it in my left hand.
As I came around the second corner, I rolled to a stop. I was just bringing the pistol up in a two-handed grip when Rex erupted from the hedge across the road. I shot that evil monster four times in the chest and side as he slid almost to my feet, then put the fifth shot through the top of his head.
It was quite strange. I unhurriedly put the pistol back in my pocket, pushed off and started pedaling toward the store. I felt as though it were someone else navigating that bicycle – there was a sensation as of looking at the world through a thick window – everything was at a distance from me.
At the store I parked my bike, and climbed the stairs to the porch in front of the entry. Old Mr. Marquam looked up from his stool behind the register where he was reading his paper, saw who I was, and rang up 8 cents as I pulled my dime from my pocket for the bottle of Nehi. He knew I would drink it in the back by the cooler, so didn’t charge for the bottle deposit.
I was nearly done with my grape soda when I heard a car grind to a halt in the gravel in front of the store. Right quick a county deputy came in the door and asked, “Somebody shot Miz Oz’s dog, you seen anybody come through the intersection in the last little while?”
Mr. Marquam told him nobody but the little boy, and pointed toward me. The deputy came back toward me and from about five feet away he asked, “You know anything bout this, boy?”
I was raised to answer when spoken too, and answer honestly if I said anything at all, so answer him I did. I put down my bottle of pop, reached in my coat pocket, and nearly killed that deputy by a heart attack I pulled out the .38, and said, “I shot that dog.”
The deputy froze, white as a sheet, then said in a choked voice, “Put down that gun boy, do it now!”, as he reached for his pistol. So I set the pistol on top of the cooler, grabbed my bottle of pop, and stepped away from it.
He stepped between me and the cooler, and demanded my name, which I gave. Then he asked me why I killed the dog.
I told him I killed Rex because no one else would take care of him, and the problems he caused. The deputy wanted to know what problems, so I pulled up my pants leg and showed him the scars, and told him how Rex had chewed me up, and nobody did anything.
He looked at me for a moment, then picked up the .38 and said to come with him. We went to the front of the store, where he used the phone to talk to someone, I guess the dispatcher. Then we went out to his cruiser, he put me in the back, and we drove in to Oregon City to the juvenile holding facility. Once there, he turned me over to this huge woman with the physique of a troll, a face that would frighten an orc, and the manners of the grandmother in Flowers in the Attic.
She called my Mom, who had gotten very worried by that time – it had been a couple of hours, and the shit storm started. About 4:30 that afternoon I finally got to see my Mom and Dad – in the courtroom where preliminary hearings were heard. I didn’t get to talk with them much, just hello, then the judge called me up to talk to him. He asked me a bunch of questions (to establish competency, I assume), then began asking me about shooting Rex.
I answered his questions, I showed him the scars on my legs, I told him why I killed that hateful beast. He gave me quite a lecture about not taking the law into my own hands, about letting adults deal with such issues, about not misusing weapons, etcetera ad nauseum, and finished by asking if I’d learned anything from all of this.
I thought for a minute, and told him I sure had.
He asked what lesson I had learned, so I told him.
“Yes sir,” I said, “Next time, if there is a next time, I’ll use a rifle. That damn dog got too close before he went down.”
Wrong answer, as far as the judge was concerned. I got escorted out of the room, and sat in the hall with the troll for about 45 minutes while my folks, the lawyers, and the judge discussed what to do with me.
I went home that evening with my folks. Tuesday of the next week was spent in juvenile court, then the whole damned family had to go to interviews with juvenile investigators and I had to go to the court psychologist for “evaluation of risk”. The whole process took about a month, then we went back to court.
I’d learned my lesson all right – I told the judge I was sorry for being so foolish, acted contrite, and said I’d never do any such thing again. Basically, I told him what he wanted too hear. Apparently it sufficed; nothing official ever came up from it again,
I never even got the beating from my father I had expected. About 3 months after the last court date, he stayed home one Saturday and took my brothers down to the woods for some target practice. For the first time ever, I got invited along, Once we were at the target range in the woodlot, Dad produced a single shot .22, and taught me to use it well.
At the end of that day, as we walked home, he told me, “That is your rifle, boy, if you need a weapon in future use your own.”
Copyright Patrick Early
March, 2004
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