Our Dogs on Paiute

We always had a dog. In the early days we had Mamie. And we had Frowsy, a German Shepherd bitch we got from Louie. Really a nice dog. Bit in the eye by a rattlesnake one time. She crawled under the cabin and stayed for three days. Her eye was all grey, but she seemed to be in pretty good shape. The eye eventually cleared up. Amazing what eyes will do. We had several dogs get bit, but we never had one die.

One summer we had a Dalmatian we took up there, Cloudy. He used to wander around with us kids, but apparently one time he went up to the sawmill and got into some battery acid because when he came back he was heaving. We kind of figured out what was going on and we had to put him down.

But that’s the only dog I can remember – oh, there was Willie. When we lived in East LA, dogs came and went. Traffic, and things like that, and stray dogs. Mother picked up this little puppy, Willie. He was just covered with fleas and sick and we had to keep our distance from him. Mother took him to heart and bathed him and cleaned him up. It was unheard of to go to a veterinarian, especially poor folks. Willie got very healthy.

We had a cat named Twidget. Willie played with the cat. He’d pick the cat up by the scruff of the neck and drag it around the house. I swear, what the cat put up with.

One summer school still had a couple of weeks to run. I couldn’t have been much more than twelve years old, I was in our back yard in East LA when I heard kids running and screaming. I knew they were chasing a dog. A dog came staggering through the fence. I thought, “Oh, oh, this isn’t right.” So I got up behind the dog and I picked him up by the scruff of the neck and the skin on his back, and took him by a box. I turned the box over him and put a weight on it and got Mama. She called the Humane Society and said we had a dog there and she thought it might have rabies. In the meantime, our dog had been out wandering, as people let their dogs do back then. As soon as Willie came home, Mother put him in the house. We didn’t think he had been near the dog.

The Humane Society picked up the dog. They didn’t really check the dog out because they believed there hadn’t been a case of rabies in LA County for years. Daddy took Mother and Willie up to the cabin and left them there. Two weeks later the rest of us came up and we had the usual celebration. There was fresh food and something to drink for the adults and Coke for the kids. Mother mentioned that Willie had acted strangely a few times, so she was watching him and locking him downstairs at night. She said what he had gone down to the creek to drink and suddenly came to a skidding halt and backed up from the water shaking his head. She was reminded of hydrophobia.

That night – I guess Fritz and Audrey weren’t there, it was just me and Mom and Dad –we all went upstairs to bed. We heard the dog running around knocking into things. Mother said, “Joanne, don’t get out of bed. Just stay in bed.” She had forgotten to close the door between upstairs and downstairs. In the morning, when we could see, the dog was downstairs and staggering. He wasn’t getting near anybody. I sat down in a chair and finally he came over a little bit closer to me and lay down by my feet. We discussed it and we said this dog had got to be shot. Suddenly Willie ran outside and ran in circles. My folks said, Oh God, let’s shoot him quick. If he takes off into the forest, other animals will attack him. So we shot him and buried him. We buried him deep because we didn’t want somebody digging him up.

When we went back to East LA we called the Humane Society and said the dog had rabies. We suspected our dog had gotten it from that dog they’d collected. They still said there hadn’t been a case of rabies in four years. They weren’t interested in having us cut off the head and bring it down for testing. That was the last time that area was ever rabies free, because the dog had been spreading rabies.

I think of how casually we handled things like that. Those were the days, you know, when the world was a different place.

Copyright Joanne Harris 2009