Stop. Look. Listen. Remember those old RR track crossing signs, now extinct? Misinformation, impatience and the power to act decisively can be lethal. In the following personal account, I was attuned to the power of the family 20 Gauge. An intervention beyond my control saved a life.
A mutt adopted us. It was a red spaniel bird dog mix that appeared one evening without a collar near my wife’s parents’ home just out of Gulfport, Miss. We didn’t feed her that evening. She was there again the next morning, obviously looking for a family. Our family agreed to be adopted.
So we discovered she loved hunting. She was good, pointing and waiting until our signal to flush a quail covey. We didn’t wonder; we just accepted the good luck. She helped us hunting nutria, ‘possums and armadillos, looking for bull snakes and moccasins in Cyprus swamps, fishing in the Gulf, beach combing, and building and paddling pirogues on the bayou. There was plenty for a red longhair bird dog mutt to do.
But then tragedy happened: she attacked the wrong prey. The first clue was when we were walking to get the mail. We noticed her down the road by the swamp loping in circles and howling. I couldn’t figure out if she caught someone’s stocking cap in her teeth or had an overgrown beard under her chin. That perception changed in a hurry as we approached her. She was sporting a massive cluster of porcupine quills under her chin, in her nose and even her mouth.
The boys inquired with a neighbor what to do. Let them fester and come out on their own, said the old man. It’s impossible to pull out that many porcupine quills without doing lethal damage.
So I helped my wife’s younger brothers clip them off, a task that still turns my stomach thinking about it. It was tough holding her to clip them off. We hoped she could eat, but I’m not sure she ever did, since we couldn’t clip the ones in her mouth.
She took the pain as a send-off, and went howling into the piney woods behind the ball diamond. We didn’t see her again for two weeks. She came back barely able to walk, mangy hair falling out, with her jaw rotted off to the bone on one side. A few quills were still hanging on. She refused food, and only drank a little water.
That’s when my emotional thinking set in, prompting me to act out of ignorance. This dog would not survive, so I thought. We had no choice but to end her suffering. The next morning we enacted our plan. She seemed weaker, and was willing to let one of the boys lead her to a pit we dug. I hid the shotgun behind my back, knowing she would be ultra alert to any muzzle pointing at her. We knew from previous experience pointing the empty gun at her with the hammer cocked and pulling the trigger, eliciting a yelp and quick jump away from the muzzle. So I knew we had a challenge.
Robert held the dog over the pit. We didn’t think to blindfold her. I cocked the loaded shotgun behind my back so she wouldn’t hear the set of the firing pin. In one smooth sweep I moved the gun muzzle to between her eyes and pulled the trigger. The blast penetrated deep into the ground. In that split second she had already jerked free, and then dragged herself amazingly fast for a deathly sick dog, yelping and crying into the piney woods. I assumed she would die a miserable death.
A month passed. I’ll never forget that morning. There was that mutt on the front doorstep. Some of her fur had grown back, hairless flesh had rebuilt on the side of her jawbone, and she was looking much more alive. I could not believe this was the same dog, but the healing scars on her nose and lower jaw were too obvious. It was also obvious that her jerk away from the muzzle of that gun was timed perfectly.
She stayed with us then, forgiving as dogs do. But from that time on, every time she saw any of us with a gun she took off and hid. She would not hunt. Instead, she became a loving companion to our two-year-old son. For a month I had accused myself of failure. Why didn’t I think to blindfold the dog? I remain amazed with the power of that dog to heal itself.
In America today, the power to destroy has far more investment in money and brains than the power to facilitate healing. People are not trusted to care for themselves and their destiny. Nations not trusted to root out the festering wounds that easily metastasize into the cancer of terrorism are subjected to military occupation, so we have more soldiers deployed abroad than other nations of the world have deployed altogether. We have sponsored and proliferated drones, the ultimate expensive technology to assassinate possible terrorists around the world with lethal decisiveness and no due process. We have the world’s highest per capita peacetime incarceration rate, at great cost to taxpayers, because we quickly distrust human relations and trust instead our criminal justice system, coercive police action and imprisonment. We have families in crisis beyond their capacity to care for themselves because of our shotgun mentality to blow up health care and other government services. We don’t work to save our national economy through rational restructuring of the worldwide debt problem and stopping bailouts for the big billionaire businesses. So we join with the powerful, playing God with our technology of destruction.
Yet we have, in our constitution and in our religious writings, the clear admonition to let God be God, and direct our care to the lives of the “least of these.”
--David Graber
graberdb@gmail.com
