(Note: I wrote this in 1972 in Georgetown, Texas. It is also on this website under “Butch The One Of A Kind Dog.” It was published on another blog site, which I no longer have, in 1914.)
I can’t sleep for trying to think of answers to the questions that came today and that will come again tomorrow. The farmer shot their dog. She is gone. Nothing will bring her back. They have accepted that fact. But the whys will come again tomorrow as they try to reconcile the facts with the man’s actions and words.
They went looking for her this morning when their other dog (Butch) came home alone with a bullet wound. They were soon back, hurt, sad and angry. Without a word the younger boy got on his bike and rode around and around the block to have time to control the tears. The older boy immediately released his anger verbally.
Did the man really use those words and talk to them so ugly? I thought perhaps I was hearing an adolescent outburst of emotion. When the younger boy got off his bike, I asked to be told what the man said.
Yes, he was ugly to them. He was angry and let them know it. He said she (Princess) deserved to die because she was running on his land. Then he ordered them to get of his land.
“Mom, he said damn and all those other bad words to us. He probably never had a dog when he was a little boy and hates dogs now.” Then he asked, “Can a dog kill a cow.”
“No, but a dog can chase a cow and cause it to get hurt.
“Did daddy ever shoot a dog for chasing cows when we had cows?”
“No, we never had any trouble with dogs.”
I think back to my childhood and remember that packs of stray dogs some times bothered the baby calves. But our dog and the mother cows usually took care of the situation. When my father took out the gun it was to shoot a skunk in the chicken house or a rattlesnake. This was a necessity to him and he never hunted wild animals for sport.
The children reminded me of a time last spring before we moved when we lived in the country. A dog kept being a nuisance at night. Princess and Butch would chase him off and he would promptly return. After several nights of turned over trash, holes around the chicken pen fence and barking dogs, their Dad tried to catch the dog. The dog was the faster runner. The next night he sprayed buck shot in the dog’s direction. That didn’t work either. Finally one night the dog came early. Their Dad quietly followed him home and talked to his owners.
“Why didn’t that man tell us if he saw her chasing his cows?”
“I don’t know?”
Do I tell I tell them that maybe the man thought most people would not do anything about it? Do I think that most people would do anything about it? I only know what we would have done.
They remember that we kept our dogs on a stake in the yard for over a week when we moved into the new house, and we planned for a fence to go up before we released them. They know their Dad would have staked her again and put up a temporary fence immediately had the man talked to us.
After a few days in the new neighborhood we met our neighbors. Almost without exception they had a dog. Our small subdivision is separated from the main part of the small town by open spaces and an interstate highway. The neighbors all planned for fences too, but as long as the dogs were not bothering anyone, we agreed to try to keep them on our street. So our dogs were let free with the others. There are no alleys and no trash cans to be turned over, no flower beds to dig in, so we made a mutual agreement about our animals.
I would sometimes see dogs on the next street over, but our dogs were not interested in things that direction. Our back yard adjoined pasture land and that was like home to them. They were country dogs. They had a morning ritual of a run in the open spaces before we moved. The timing was almost always the same: some time between 8:30 and 10:00 AM. They would run through the citrus groves and along a canal in the Rio Grande Valley where we lived. They would return hot, tired, and wet from the dew on the tall grass. They did not leave again during the day or night. They were good watch dogs and patrolled the perimeter of our yard at night.
I had watched them closely here and they seemed to be following the same pattern. I had talked to my husband about this and we felt they were safer exploring the pasture than going onto the other streets. We erroneously assumed there was nothing they could bother back there.
The man told my husband that someone had seen some dogs chasing his calves. He had come to check them this morning and something had chased some baby calves through a fence. He was angry and he shot the first dogs that he saw. It was 9:30 AM when Butch ran home alone. No, the man had never seen Princess before. But we can never prove that she had never chased his calves.
There will be more discussion of this with the dawn of the new day.
ADDENDUM
Butch was more traumatized than hurt. The bullet entered his shoulder and exited just under the skin on the other side. The bleeding was quickly stopped. If the bullet had entered higher or lower it would probably have been fatal.
When things quieted down, Ken took the boys in the pickup and went around the pasture until he found the gate. He went in. The man was still there and they talked. Ken just described the conversation as “direct.” They got Princess’ body and buried her in the back yard.
There was quite a reaction among the neighbors. It was very negative and one of the men jokingly made a suggestion for retaliation which I won’t write here, but it had to do with barbecued beef. They were upset also.
We were in the process of buying some property west of town. We had met some of the adjacent landowners. Most of them had been on the same property and in Williamson County for many years. Ken told one of them about the dog incident. He knew the man who shot Princess and told Ken that the man did not own the land but only had it leased. Then he told Ken that he was surprised that he had confronted him. He said, “Ken he doesn’t just shoot dogs. He just got out of prison for shooting a man.”
We never saw the man again and Butch’s morning runs stopped.
Soon the next street had lots staked. The subdivision began the northward march toward the Georgetown airport. Before long we had neighbors behind us, and we had fenced yards.