Dogs I've Loved and the Creatures They've Killed
A rerun, an ode to Darby
A rerun this week because the flu (or something similarly awful) has hit our household. I told Tanner it feels like a rite of passage of parenthood with a young kid to be sick on Christmas, and hopefully by going through this early we won’t have to undergo it again for years. (RIGHT?!)
Anyway. Enjoy this story about Darby, my first dog.
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Darby was not going to drop the squirrel.
“Please, Darb,” I begged her, my glasses slipping off my nose as I held her leash taut with one hand and tried to pry her jaws open with the other. “Darb, it has WORMS coming out of it.”
But she didn’t let go. In fact, she seemed to clamp down even harder. I swear she cut her eyes at me in that moment and muttered, “So?” out of the side of her mouth.
This dog was kind of a bitch.
I grew up in the rural-ish South, which means my family and I have always had dogs. It also means that those dogs have captured, maimed, or murdered many critters.
Sophie, a golden retriever who was pretty sassy but wouldn’t hurt a fly, killed dozens of voles.
Zeb, my beloved black Lab/German shorthair pointer, shook a squirrel to death; came close (like, its-neck-was-between-his-teeth close) to mauling a raccoon before my husband intervened; and stopped a possum’s heart. He may have actually killed it, but we don’t know for sure, because it was gone from its resting place behind the fence when we checked the next morning.
Drake, our childhood yellow Lab, didn’t kill anything, but he was a lovable dingbat, so that makes sense.
And then there was Darby.
The coonhound didn’t actually kill the squirrel she was clutching in her jaws at the start of the story. (It was dead — bugs coming out of its eyes dead — when she found it.) (I can barely type that without gagging at the memory.) Come to think of it, in the three years I had her, she didn’t kill anything, other than the sense of smell of everyone who came in contact with her. I don’t know if that’s a coonhound thing or if it was just Darby, but even if she’d had a bath mere minutes before, she smelled truly knock-you-over awful all the time.
Darby was a mature lady of 8 years old when she came to me, with only four teeth in her head and a distaste for anything other than curling up on any soft surface she could find. She was a mashup of Elvis in his Vegas era and old Elizabeth Taylor: beautiful in her prime, but now a little rode hard and put up wet. You know those older women who are always holding either a Cruella de Vil-length cigarette or a martini (or both), with lipstick that’s creeping past their lip line and the kind of raspy voice that lets you know they’ve *seen* some things? That was Darby. I used to cry with laughter every time I’d watch her go down a set of stairs or a particularly steep hill because she looked like she had on high heels three sizes too big, swishing her little hips extravagantly as she slowly tap-tap-tapped her way down.
To the best of my knowledge, the girl had lived a hard life. She was a rescue dog, so I don’t know anything about her existence before 2013. But I think she lived in the woods for most of her days before her rescue group found her. My dad had a theory that she had a human family as a young puppy, but her coonhound nose got her in trouble one day, and she wandered off. By the time she realized what had happened, she told herself, “Well, shit,” and just decided to make it work on her own.
Based on how Darby acted whenever we got into the woods — turning into a speed demon who used all 40 pounds of her body weight to pull me over rocks and hurdle giant fallen trees in a single bound — my dad was probably right. So I couldn’t totally fault her when she sniffed out the dead squirrel one night as we went out for her final bathroom break. After all, pre-me, this would have probably been dinner for her! She was just following her natural instincts!
I tried to remind myself of this as I tightened my grip on her leash, while my pajama pants threatened to fall completely off my waist and I became increasingly aware of the fact that I did not have on shoes or a bra. Why do dogs always decide to pull something when you aren’t outfitted for a fight?
I dropped Darby’s leash and trapped it under my foot so I could wrap both hands around her snout. I managed to wedge my fingers into the roof of her mouth and started trying to pull it upward.
“Darby, DROP,” I implored her. She glared back at me. This dog wasn’t a model of obedience on her best days, so I have no idea why I thought she’d suddenly listen when my defenses were down and she had what she deemed a Grade A Prize in her clutches.
I got my left thumb into her lower lip and tried to force it down. She clamped harder. If she had more teeth, I would have been in so much trouble right now.
“Leave it?” I suggested. Maybe that would work better than “drop”? Darby laughed. OK, she didn’t, but the way this night was going, I wouldn’t have put it past her to abruptly gain human capabilities of expression.
I sighed. This whole force her mouth open thing wasn’t going to work. And listen, I’m not proud of what I did next, but you need to understand how desperate I was to get this half-eaten piece of roadkill out of her mouth. I had just managed to get her back up to her fighting weight after a bad bout with whipworms had left her at a gaunt, prisoner of war-looking 25 pounds. Whipworms live in a dog’s intestinal tract and eat all of their nutrients. They cause more disease than any other parasite found in a dog. They can lay dormant for years (what likely happened with Darby) and then come back to attack.
We were not going down that route again because she wanted to snack on a bloody, oozing creature that, the longer I looked at it, I wasn’t even sure was a squirrel because of how much it had decayed. (Gagging, so much gagging.)
So I pushed my glasses up my nose one more time. Thought to myself that my terrible eyesight would have totally killed me by now had I lived in the Middle Ages. Shook my head to bring myself back to the problem in front of me. Slowly slid my hands out of her mouth and down to her neck.
And then I squeezed.
I want to emphasize that this was a GENTLE squeeze. I was mad as hell at this dog, but that was a common occurrence at this point in our relationship, and I regularly whiplashed from all-consuming anger to sobbing into her smelly fur about how much I loved her. I was not trying to kill her. I just wanted to cut off her wind for long enough that she’d start gasping and open her mouth a little and drop the squirrel.
Lo and behold, it worked.
With Darby, my ideas seldom worked on the first try. I was 24, and she was the first dog I raised all on my own, and my cousin once told me I was the dumbest smart girl he’d ever met, which meant I was bright but had no common sense. He’s not wrong. I have no idea how I conceptualized this plan, let alone how I did so at 11:30 p.m. in the dark with impaired vision, barefoot, braless, probably showing the whole neighborhood my backside with how far my pajama pants had slid down my hips at this point.
But the scheme was successful. And after I got her back inside, washed my hands and arms in scalding hot water with half a bottle of Dawn (and rubbed a little in Darby’s mouth for good measure), and threw my pajamas in a “to burn later” pile, I thought to myself what I always think after a standoff between my pets and a critter:
“I love that stupid dog.”