Late this morning, right after laundry and as I was trying to get notes together for a new Backwoods Home article nobody asked me for, I got a call from Neighbor L.
“Just so you know, D’s got his 30-30 and he’s out your way looking for a stray dog that spooked [her horse.]”
“Does he want backup?” I asked, because these things are far less unpleasant and more likely to be successful when you’re not alone.
“No, just giving you a heads-up. The whole thing might head in your direction.”
Well, I wasn’t doing anything that wouldn’t wait, and if people were going to be thrashing around the wash where my dogs live, I’d as soon be on top of it. So I took the AK off the wall, loaded the boys into the Jeep and drove through and into the wider wash network where she said the incident had happened. Sure enough I saw tracks where a horse walked in and tracks where a horse sure looked like it was running out, so this must the place.
It’s about two winding miles between the confluence of the two dry riverbeds and the road, and we drove it slowly while I watched to see if the boys – especially Little Bear, who’s good at this – perked up and got excited. They really don’t appreciate other dogs in their stomping grounds, but they didn’t seem to think there was another dog on the planet today. Fun ride, though. Thanks, Dad.
We went over to D&L’s. D was back but planning to go right back out. L insisted there had been two dogs: One might have been a coyote, but the other was a white pit bull with a brown face and gold eyebrows. Its ribs and spine were clearly visible and it had sores, and it acted aggressively against her and her horse and sent the horse running.
Oooo-kay then. Let’s go kill a mean pit bull.
The notion that it was a pit bull is not so far-fetched. In fact strays around here are almost always pit bulls, because there’s a lowlife who runs a puppy mill on the other side of the eastern plateau, and he specializes in pit bulls. I keep hearing he’s been driven out of business, but year after year we don’t seem to run out of stray – and often quite uncivilized – pit bulls.
I parked the Jeep in the shade. D and I climbed into his Jeep with our rifles and drove to the scene of the crime. We spent nearly an hour combing the brush on either side of the big wash and saw nothing. We drove up and down the wash: Nothing. We went up the mesa and looked around: Nothing. For lack of anything more constructive to do we drove to a place I know where the cliff overlooks the wash and its surrounding meadows, got out and glassed the whole thing. I’d about decided by now that this was a fool’s errand.
And then we both heard a dog barking, where no dog had any business being. There’s a parcel owned by a weekender we rarely see. He’s got a shed there and some equipment and an RV, and sometimes I kind of look in to see if everything’s okay there. The barking sure sounded like was coming from there.
We piled into the Jeep, drove down off the ridge and over to that parcel on the other side of the wash. And there we saw two dogs. One stayed in the shadows between the shed and a trailer, and literally headed for the hills at its first opportunity. The other trotted over when we called. It was a white pit bull with a brown face and gold eyebrows. Its ribs and spine were clearly visible and it had sores, and it was as friendly as can be though it wasn’t sure it didn’t want to follow its friend into the wilderness rather than hang with us. It came when we called, though, and I scrounged some line from the weekender’s trailer and improvised a collar and lead. It hopped right into the back of the Jeep, and we brought it back to D&L’s place.
We put him – he was protrudingly male – into one of their kennels, and when I left they were trying to get hold of a local rescue outfit.
Update: Just got a call from D, they’re going to drive him to a vet in a town about 40 miles away who’s tied into a rescue outfit there. So probably happy ending for the one dog, but not so good about the other that’s still out there somewhere. If it won’t let itself be taken it’ll pretty certainly die.
I expected to read about a dead dog. That was a very humane thing to do.
One suspects the dog’s good manners contributed to its survival.
Good manners usually are a great aid to survival. Good on all y’all for taking the poor thing in, Joel.
Quite a story, Joel. I admit that, like everybody else, I braced myself for a dog kill at the end. Well done to you and D and glad the poor pooch is making it into rescue.
Thanks for the rescue Uncle Joel. Shame you can’t be out hunting puppy mill owners instead of stray dogs.
There is occasional talk of that, CH. The people on the other side of the plateau, who have to deal with him much more than we do, just hate that guy.
We’re dog lovers here, every batch of us. It’s with no pleasure we hunt the dogs but we can’t have mean ones around. As Kentucky said, the dog’s manners decided whether it was ‘stray’ or ‘feral.’ The feral ones, we kill with a curse on our lips for the people responsible. The stray ones, we try to take in if they’ll come, because otherwise they’ll die terribly in the desert. A bullet would be kinder, really, but I’ve never heard of anyone (except a cattle rancher) shooting a nonaggressive stray. There’s an older couple near the county road, where the dumped ones end up, that have a houseful of them.