Essays

Moseying: Living La Vida Llanero

County dogs have nighttripping adventures – and the damage left behind is preventable
March 29, 2006

I woke up early one morning recently and decided take a little morning “nightdrive” to see if I could find any wildlife down south of town. As I turned out of the driveway a pack of dogs belligerently eased away. In an hour’s driving I found one skunk, so I returned home before daybreak. The pack of dogs was still together, about a quarter mile away, which led me to write the following fictionalized story.

The dogs are running. It is 4 a.m. and nary a person is moving within the exurban neighborhood. But the neighborhood dogs have joined together for fun and games. There are seven of them, two pit bulls, a big old hound, a blue heeler, a German shepherd, and two little mutts. They always meet at the corner where a hundred-acre- mesquite pasture provides plenty of rabbits for chasing.

The seven dogs start off, going together with one of the mutts leading and within a hundred feet they jump a cottontail rabbit, and the chase is on. All of the dogs start yipping excitedly. The big hound veers off as if it knows what the rabbit will do, and sure enough it comes right at him, but it ducks down an old badger den. All the dogs express their frustration, but within a minute the little mutt leads off again. In another fifty yards they jump a jackrabbit, and despite an all out chase, the rabbit stays ahead, and it does not start to circle like the cottontail.

Coyotes have long known the circling behavior, and in pairs they make short work of their prey, but the dogs are just learning. Jackrabbits swerve and leap over obstacles the dogs have to go around, so the jackrabbit leaves them in his dust. By the time they give up, they are a quarter mile away. Their barking has set the penned up dogs in the neighborhood to barking. A couple of people wake up and yell at their dogs, but most folks keep on sleeping, unaware of the excitement.

The running dogs are thirsty, so they head for a house with an ornamental fishpond. They wade in, and their sharp toenails dig through the plastic liner. After some good shaking, the dogs are ready to go again. They come out to the county road, and hear some horses moving around, nosing at some hay stacked up just the other side of a fence. The dogs trot up, and a dark gray cotton rat (with a short tail) darts away from the hay, right into the blue heeler’s jaws. He munches down, growling at the mutts biting at his nose.

The dogs move on and in a few minutes come to a paddock with goats. A good fence protects them – seven feet tall and lined with sheepwire. The teenaged son of the homeowner had made a mistake, though – when he came home late he had guiltily coasted into the driveway and pulled close to the fence. The pit bulls figure out what to do first, and they leap up into the back of the pickup, and then leap over the fence. The other big dogs follow, but the mutts cannot make it, so they start yelping excitedly.

The big dogs chase the goats, and get them cornered. Each time a dog feints toward the herd, the goats lower their head and a stinky old billy comes to the fore. The dance continues, and finally the homeowner wakes up. He comes to the door and yells, but the dogs do not go. The homeowner goes back inside and grabs a shotgun, but as soon as the door swings open, the big dogs quickly assess the situation and manage to scale the fence by bouncing off the shed in the pen. The homeowner runs barefoot, hoping to get a shot, but the dogs have had a run-in with another angry defender of livestock, and skedaddled through a neighbor’s yard surrounded by an ornamental rail fence.

The dogs had learned the hard way about homeowners. There used to be eight dogs in the group. They had cornered a calf in a shed about a half mile away, and had killed it and started having some fresh meat when the homeowner “snuck” up and obliterated the eighth dog. If a homeowner finds a dog injuring his livestock or any other property he has full legal permission (in the county) to take whatever actions deemed appropriate. After the dog flopped and quivered and died, the homeowner dug a hole in the night and covered him up.

The dogs in this fictionalized pack are not wild dogs. Each has a home and is always curled up on the front door step when his owner wakes up in the morning. Sometimes a dogowner wonders when he notices his dog with stickers in his fur or mud between his toes, but rarely does the dogowner have a clue what his pet does in the wee hours of the morning. When a pet does not come home the family is quite sad.

Many rural homeowners wake up to find a dumped dog or cat in their yard. Kochie the cat and Lila the dog came to Deborah and I as unwanted and dumped weanlings. We have taken at least another dozen animals to the pound in town. When a huge Rottweiler showed up in our lumber shed I desperately wanted for Midland’s Animal Control to come out and catch it, but they do not come to the county. I called a friend who has an unofficial pet shelter and is fearless.

In my neighborhood, both livestock and dogs have died in the ways described above. Lila sleeps inside and when the pack came near the house while running a rabbit, she sounded off and we got a good look at some of them. We recognized several neighbor dogs. I have shotgunned two sick foxes over the years, but have never killed a dog.

If the local pack ever becomes aggressive, I may have to change my policy.