How I Killed the Dog

Back around 1978, Dearly Beloved, SSS and I packed up our toddler and moved to the country. We rented an old farmhouse sitting in the middle of 27 acres of Johnson grass. It was about 3 miles outside the city limits. Pay attention now, because that fact becomes important.

We planted a garden, bought some chickens and a couple of milch goats. And a .22 rifle in case of snakes. This is Texas after all, and 27 acres of Johnson grass can hide a lot of critters.

One night, we were awakened by a huge racket. Going outside to look, we found chickens running everywhere, a dead milch goat and a pack of semi-wild dogs playing tug-o-war with her body. We were understandably miffed. SSS fired a few bullets over the heads of the pack, and it dispersed. We rounded up the chickens, buried the goat and went back to bed.

The dogs came back. They had found fast food! No matter how much we reinforced the chicken coop, they always managed to get into it. We fired over their heads night after night, as they steadily decimated our chickens.

We called the City. We called the County. We called the State. Nobody was willing to round up the dogs and take them to the pound. All anybody told us was that we were within our rights to shoot the varmints, as they were attacking our livestock. By the time we had been shooting over their heads for a couple of weeks, the pack, which had originally consisted of eight or ten dogs, was reduced to one stubborn so-and-so. And he still managed to bag a chicken every once in a while. When the chickens started fussing in the night, the noise would wake me, and I'd grab the gun and go out with a flashlight. I remember one night when the moon was full and the ground frosty. I could see the dog in the moonlight, loping insolently through the Johnson grass stubble. Just out of range. I was sobbing and screaming at him, "Come Here, you b*st*rd! You chicken-killing useless son of a b*tch," as I raced through the stubble in my nightgown and slippers. That was enough to make me laugh, and the hunt was off for that night!

By then, he had moved in. He dug his way under the house and tried to make friends with our dog, which was a little city mutt.

Well.

One morning, SSS and I were both up early. He was in the bathroom, which backed up on the back porch, or breezeway. I headed for the kitchen to make coffee and breakfast, and there was the dog! Right outside the back porch screen. I grabbed the gun, loaded it as quietly as possible, tiptoed to the kitchen door, and shot him right through the screen door!

There was a two-fold satisfaction--the depredations on our livestock were over, and I had literally scared the you-know out of SSS, who was sitting on a toilet about three feet and a thin wall away from where I fired the rifle!

Now, before you go saying that wasn't nice, I have to tell you that I know exactly how he felt. How, you may ask? Because he had set off two cherry bombs in the bathroom when I was in the shower, not so very long before! So scaring the you-know out of him had a certain sense of poetic justice to it.

We hauled the dog's corpse to the farthest corner of that 27 acres and let the buzzards and ants have him. Two years later, when we were moving back into town, I went and got his skull. I kept it for years, and I think both girls took it to school for show-and-tell, complete with the story of how Mom had killed it because it was eating our goats and chickens.

The teachers looked at me funny, but at least they had something memorable come in for show-and-tell.

Of course, Vanessa got the Show-and-Tell prize years later when she insisted on taking her new baby brother to school, but that's another story!