Mutts are just the best, aren’t they? That has been my experience, anyway. One of the better ones I’ve known used to follow my group of childhood friends on the fishing expeditions we took all around our homes on what was then the outskirts of Tulsa, Oklahoma.
He was a small dog, mostly white with three or four black spots covering maybe a third of his body. He hardly ever barked, but he was always alert, always calmly watchful–well, except for that one day when his trusting obedience led to his death crossing a wide-open rural road.
We usually avoided the roads and took the overland route everywhere we went. When we did walk along the roads, the noise and heat made it a big chore. We had a much better time walking along creeks and fence lines that always seemed to lead somewhere interesting.
This particular day we did the unusual and made our way along a rural road, single file, wandering along. We crossed the road at one point, the dog remaining on the far side, sniffing at something in the ditch. My friend Randy called him just before he realized a car was heading toward us at high speed, something people did all the time on the straight, flat roads of Oklahoma.
Randy saw right away what would happen, what he had caused. His body stiffened, his hands clasped above his head like a diver about to hit the water off the ten-meter platform. The car couldn’t swerve or stop and rolled right over the dog, killing it instantly with an unforgiving, late-50s bumper to the spine. There was no blood, nothing but a stiff dog rolling down the road after the car had passed.
The driver came back to check on us, but there was nothing to be done. Randy went to a nearby house and found a shovel in the garage and brought it back. We buried the dog right there by the highway and returned the shovel to its hook on the garage wall. Oddly, when Randy’s father found out what had happened, he drove us all back to retrieve the dog’s body from the grave we had dug.
That was as strange and memorable as anything else that had happened that day, especially when we all realized that his father hadn’t a clue what he was going to do with the little dog’s body once we had it. We ended up digging another little grave in the corner of Randy’s back yard. It was right beside the tree where he and his brother got the switches his mother used to punish them.