Dogs

[Fred Henderson]

What can you say? Most of us have one or two. I've got a few tales to tell. I'll be getting myself a dog soon. I've heard tell that dogs tend to be like their owner, so maybe you guys (especially you, Francis), tell me what kind of a dog I should get.

Here's a true story. It was back in the 1980s, while attending university, in my last years with my parents in Fraser Valley, BC. Probably I was walking home,early morning maybe just closed the bar. There is a low hanging mist that shrouds the streetlights and quiets my footsteps. I am walking through a subdivision, and decide to take a shortcut along a narrow walkway between two houses, 5' fences on either side. I am about halfway through when something makes me look right. There, with paws on top of the fence, about a foot away, is the head of a monster Doberman Pincer. I just looked straight ahead and kept walking. Not a sound from either of us. It was only when I cleared the pathway and back on the street that I got scared. Something about those eyes. Stern and stupid. Sometimes that dobie looks right at ya. Right into your eyes. And the thing about a dobie is is he’s got lifeless eyes. Black eyes. Like a doll’s eyes. When he comes at ya, he doesn’t even seem to be livin’… ’til he bites ya, and those black eyes roll over white and then… ah then you hear that terrible high-pitched screamin’. The sidewalk turns red, and despite all your poundin’ and your hollerin’ that dobie come in and… it rips you to pieces.

Thank-You

[Fred Henderson]

A true story I blitzed out this morning, and scanned at the library...

[Fred Henderson]

A rewrite of the previous story, which was handwritten and scanned to pdf.

Back in the late 1970s, after I graduated from high school, my parents sold the family home in the suburbs of Vancouver, BC, and moved us out into the Fraser Valley, where we lived on a small acreage that bordered on a large wilderness area formed by two provincial parks. To keep the property safe, my father, always the dog man of the family, purchased a purebred English Pointer female, white and brown. We decided to just let nature take its course, and sure enough that does indeed happen. The tell-tale bulge appeared and grew, till one morning in the kitchen, in a large wooden pen built for the occasion, she gives birth to eleven jet-black puppies, not a white mark on them. But calamity soon unfolds. The mother quickly develops a nasty looking case of mastitis, an infection of the mammary glands with ugly open sores. Someone, probably my father, calls a veterinarian, who tells us too keep the mother in another room, so she won't try to nurse the pups, and feed the pups baby formula. On the first point I am truly surprised. Once out of sight of her newborns, she appears to forget all about them. In no apparent distress, she just circles around the way dogs do, and lays down and rests. On the second point we are fortunate indeed. My mother just happens to be an avid collector of dolls and accessories, and unearths from her closet a bag of doll-size plastic baby bottles, complete with removable caps. A poke through the tip with a pin makes them fully functional. The couple on the next property has an infant, and is able to give us a can of Enfilac. My mother sets about boiling some water to sterilise the bottles and mix the formula.I remember only the first feeding, the rest has disappeared into the smoke-rings of my mind. (thanks, Bob). Here I am with a little black bag of skin and bones nestled in my palm, tightly shut eyes turned up, tiny pawns kneading my fingers to stimulate the flow of formula from the downturned bottle I hwld in my left hand. My one and only stint as a bitch. Once the pups could see and move around easily, the hand-feeding ended, and a nightly ritual saw two of my mother's large pyrex pie plates on the newspaper (always the Toronto Globe and Mail) lined kitchen floor, with a ravenous black horde of pointy tails and floppy ears crowded around, nose deep in some kind of gruel. Afterwards, they would roam around the kitchen doing their business until they tired, at which point they would be lifted back into the pen and the newspapers were scooped up and tossed in the trash. Once back in their pen, they would quickly gravitate to the same corner, where they all piled in for companionship and warmth. My mother would find them there sleeping still when she switched on the light in the morning, all except for one puppy that would be sleeping alone in the middle of the kitchen floor, his belly resting on the cold linoleum, chin resting on forelegs, legs stretched out behind. He must have first climbed to the top of the pile of his sleeping mates, then up and over the wall of the pen, where it would have fallen over a foot to the floor, all in darkness. Anyways, the customary eight week mark arrives, and it is time to give away the pups. A sign goes up at the end of the driveway, and within an hour we get our first visitor. A man stepped out of a car, and the pups were set loose on the lawn for the man to view. I was not on the scene at the time, probably busy in my basement room with my university studies, but the big wide grin on my mother's face, as she told me that the pick of the litter was the puppy that preferred to sleep alone, will stay with me. And now, 40+ years later, I finds myself thinking so much about that puppy. He would be like a kindred spirit to me now, the way my life has turned out since the lockdown lifted. I think I'll get me a dog, my first.