I remember when I was a young teenager, we had moved out to the country after my dad retired from the Air Force. We had a poodle named Alexander. He had always been an indoor dog, but all of a sudden in the new house he became an outdoor dog. Dad built Alexander a doghouse and chained him to a tree, and there he was.
Dad felt like my brother and I needed another dog, a bigger dog, and he had heard about puppies close by. So we got a dog. We named her Muffin.
Muffin was a German Shepherd/Pitbull Siberian/Husky mix, and she had dark black fur with brown highlights on her chest and face. And as she grew, she was beautiful, and she was strong. Because of all the dirt and the house being new Muffin was an outside dog.
I was more of an indoor kid, and so I didn't go out to play with Muffin a whole lot. And as happens with so many pets, mom and dad had to feed and water Muffin more than me, and eventually mom had to do it all the time, and that was that.
But she was strong, that dog. As she grew, she broke every chain that dad put on her, and eventually he had to put a really heavy chain wrapped around the tree and then hooked to her collar that was really thick and big just to keep her in the yard.
I never did like that, and I wished that she could run free, but dad told me it was too dangerous and she might get hurt, she might get run over. One day she did get loose, and she was running around in the palm scrub behind our house.
Mom and dad had always warned us about rattlesnakes being underneath every palm frond laying on the ground and scorpions and banana spiders and all the other dangers that they could think of, so I was scared to go back there, but I didn't want Muffin to die.
And so I went and started trying to catch her. She would zoom by me, I would run after her, she would zoom by me again, and the thing that I noticed the most was how her eyes were so bright, and it was almost like she was smiling and laughing.
It was fun to see, but I was so scared that she would get hurt. So I finally caught her when she got tired and slowed down a little bit. And I took her back and put her on the chain, and she looked sad again.
Muffin got away several other times after that, and she was impregnated by another dog. And we think it was a German shepherd nearby. She had several puppies. Mom and dad gave most of the puppies away, but kept two of them because Muffin had gotten worms and was dying.
And she died shortly after giving birth. She was a strong dog, and I was always glad to hear her barks, but I'll never forget her eyes when she was loose.
#dog #history