John Graves - My Dogs & Guns

O ne cool still night last March, when the bitterest winter in decades was starting to slack its grip and the first few chuck-wills-widows were whistling tentative claims to nest territories, the best dog I ever owned simply disappeared. Dogs do disappear, of course. But not usually dogs like Blue or under conditions like ours here in the North Texas cedar hills.

A crossbred Basque-Australian sheepdog, he had spent his whole ten years of life on two North Texas country places and had seldom left the vicinity of the house at either of them without human company since the age of two or less, when his Basque mother was still alive and we also had a lame and anarchic old dachshund that liked to tempt the two of them out roaming after armadillos and feral cats and raccoons and other varmints. This happened usually at night when we had neglected to bring the dachshund into the house, or he had tricked his way outside by faking a call of nature or pushing open an unlatched screen door. The dachshund, named Watty (it started out as Cacahuate, or Peanut), had a very good nose and the sheep dogs didnt, and having located quarry for them he would scream loud sycophantic applause as they pursued it and attacked, sometimes mustering the courage to run in and bite an exposed hind leg while the aggressive mother and son kept the front part angrily busy.

It was fairly gory at times, nor was I that much at war with varmints except periodically with specimens that had developed a taste for chickens or garden crops. But the main problem was the wandering itself, which sometimes took them far from home and onto other property. In the country roaming dogs were and are an abomination, usually in time becoming destructive varmints themselves, large ones that often die from rifle bullets or buckshot or poison bait, well enough deserved. Few people have lived functionally on the land without having to worry sooner or later about such raiders, and the experience makes them jumpy about their own dogs habits.

To cope, you can chain or pen your dogs when they arent with you, or you can teach them to stay at home. While I favor the latter approach, with three canines on hand and one of them a perverse and uncontrollable old house pet too entwined with my own past and with the family to get rid of, it was often hard to make training stick with Pan and Blue. At least it was until the dachshund perished under the wheels of a pickup truck, his presence beneath it unsuspected by the driver and his cranky senile arrogance too great to let him scuttle out of the way when the engine started.

Blues dam was a brindle-and-white Basque sheep dog from Idahoof a breed said to be called Pannish, though you cant prove that by me since I have never seen another specimen. Taut and compact and aggressive, she was quick to learn but also quick to spot ways to nudge rules aside or to get out of work she didnt savor. She came to us mature and a bit overdisciplined, and if you tried to teach her a task too roughly she would refuse permanently to have anything to do with it. I ruined her for cow work by whipping her for running a heifer through a new fence for the hell of it, and ever afterward if I started dealing with cattle when she was with me, she would go to heel or disappear. Once while chousing a neighbors Herefords out of an oat patch toward the spate-ripped fence watergap through which they had invaded it, I looked around for Pan and finally glimpsed her peeking at me slyly from a shin-oak thicket just beyond the fields fringe, hiding there till the risk of being called on for help was past.

Not that she feared cows or anything else that walkedor crawled or flew or swam or for that matter rolled on wheels. She attacked strange dogs like a male and had a contemptuous hatred of snakes that made her bore straight in to grab them and shake them dead, even after she had been bitten twice by rattlers, once badly. After such a bout I had seen her with drops of amber venom rolling down her shoulder, where fangs had struck the thick fine hair but had failed to reach her skin. Occasionally she bit people tooalways men, though she was nervous enough around unfamiliar children that we never trusted her alone with them. Women, for her own secret reasons, she liked more or less indiscriminately.