Oklahoma Dreaming: Animal Farm

by Donna Schoenkopf

last time: two cities

It's been quite a week here at Chigger Lake.

First the dogs.

I noticed the first dog when I walked the half mile to my mailbox. It's my morning constitutional and is extremely pleasant. I get to survey my land, either by walking my long, beautiful drive to the county road, or by walking down, then UP, the hills that reveal some new little bit of nature for the day. I think and listen and look at everything. It's not yet spring, so a lot is laid bare. The dirt is red, the trees are brown and gray with twisted branches, the sky is pale blue, the air is sweet and cold. I saw a bluebird last week. Not a blue jay. A bluebird. A bluebird of happiness. I wear my parka with the hood up and tied tight and my fists jammed in my pockets. It's COLD!

So I started down the county road to the mailboxes and saw a couple of dogs hangin' out there. They looked like they were Steve's dogs. As I've said before, he's got a pack of TEN dogs, mostly pit bull mixes. They are scary. I kinda froze up a little but, thanks to daughter-in-law Casey and good son Eric, I knew not to look at them directly. That is considered, by dogs, to be a challenge. Not for a foot race. To fight. So I didn't look at them and kept walkin' and got to the mailboxes and one dog was skittish and stayed away, and I saw that, indeed, it was Steve's, but the other, a reddish brown color, pit bull mix, was very friendly. He wagged his tail and licked my hand. He was not Steve's.

Well, I pulled out my mail (daily newspaper ... they mail it because I'm out in the boonies ... couple of bills, fun envelope full of cool stuff from Carole) and started back down the county road. Brown Dog started following me. My first thought was that I could NOT let him follow me. I only had one remaining cat and was getting guineas in May and couldn't have a dog eating all my animals.

So I turned around and told him sternly to go home. Not mean. But stern.

He didn't follow me.

The next day, same thing.

This time, I saw him chewing at his foot and I KNEW he had stepped on some cactus that grew next to the mailboxes. He followed me again, this time all the way down my driveway. And I noticed that he was skinny as hell. Someone had dumped him out on our county road. I touched him on the head and he swooned with love for me. The chemical bond traveled from my fingertips to the top of his head.

But NO I would NOT let him be my dog! I have a cat and future guineas to protect. And I could just TELL he was a chicken killer.

I picked up a rock the size of an orange and threw it at him to scare him away. He went over to it and picked it up and wagged his tail. With a big smile on his face.

So I told him, AGAIN, to go home. Yeah, right.

He padded away, turning every now and then to look at me over his shoulder.

I went home and writhed with guilt. I called Carole and she said why not just feed him out by the mailboxes? What a genius she is. So I put the dry cat food I had left in the car along with a water dish (plastic salad bowl) and left a nice supply under the mailboxes.

It was gone the next day. Who ate it, I'll never know. Brown Dog was nowhere in sight. I didn't see him for a couple of days. But I left food out, this time nearer my house, so Steve's dogs wouldn't get it. It was gone, too. Then I stopped.

I saw him once, coming out of my woods across the pond. I called him but he turned and loped back into the trees. Something had happened. He was now scared of me.

I left food out next to the pond. I thought, well, I'll just deal with the guineas and the cat later.

This went on for a couple of days.

Then ... ANOTHER dog showed up. She just appeared. She wasn't Steve's either. A pretty black dog, female, with a white cross on her chest. Yes, like Jesus's. And she LOVED me. Wagging tail, joyous appreciation of me by jumping on my chest with her great big muddy paws. Well, she had to be fed, too. I had had a dinner party the night before and had a ton of scraps and put them out for her. Chicken and buns and beans and fat and grease. YUM. She loved it.

Then Brown Dog came up. They were a pair.

I have named them Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera.

Diego is a good dog. He makes himself scarce during the day but comes out when I call him. (He never came when I called him "Boy," as in, "Here, Boy!" but does come when I say, "Here, Diego!")

Frida is a bad dog. Sweet. But bad. She eats ALL plastic, including a paint container, toilet plunger, plastic bags, bottoms of plant pots, garden tools, plastic dishes I used to feed them from, the trumpet vine that was wrapped in plastic, TWO clothes line ropes, a box of nails, a jug of motor oil, a plastic stake-type sprinkler head, a plastic container of 3M rubbing compound for cars, a TV antenna connecting cord, an electric weed whacker, an old jacket that had been in the cat carrier, and then she dragged two plants out of their pots and sat in the sun chewing on them—a rosemary bush and a heather plant, complete with bees. All this in three days. She gets most of it from the concrete slab that I've stored stuff on because I don't have any closets in my house. (I REALLY need to get that shed built!)

This has all happened this week.

They WILL eat my guineas. I just KNOW it ...

I NEED guineas to eat the massive waves of ticks that appear in August. And I need to let the guineas out of their coop to EAT the ticks in the grass. I had all my ducks in a row and now THIS.

My cat cowers in the house under the bed.

I know I will have to take those dogs to the pound.

But, after calling two animal shelters I have come to understand that no shelter will take them. You have to live in the city limits to be accepted. They even ask for ID. It seems there is a plague of dumped dogs in this state. A nice lady who lives in the country told me she shoots 'em because they eat all her animals. They form packs.

Great.

So I emailed Casey, my daughter-in-law and ex-dogwalker. She lives in the San Francisco area where dogs are honored for the good animals they are. They even have special nature parks where dogs can explore unleashed, parks with trails and various kinds of bodies of water. (Did you know dogs are less apt to fight if they're off the leash? Interesting, huh? Casey and Eric, my wonderful son, told me this. They know EVERYTHING about dogs.) She told me that no, you really can't break a dog of chasing (and killing) cats. I suppose guineas should be included in that.

A side note: Casey, upon finding a stray dog, starving and pathetic, at the bottom of the cliffs in San Pedro, went to the store, bought dog food and jugs of water and dishes to put it in, climbed all the way down the cliffs again, and left it for her.

That girl LOVES dogs. (And I love her.)

This morning I tied Frida to the cottonwood tree. I have never tied a dog up before. I never lock dogs up. I never fence dogs. (I personally have found that the more you tie up a dog, the more he wanders.) The reason I did it was because she chewed a hole in that plastic paint can. A mess. And I had finally had enough.

Then I untied her after fifteen minutes. She had completely wound herself around the tree and tangled her legs in the rope. Boy, was she happy when I released her! She immediately got another skein of clothes line and is presently running happily around and around the house with it in her mouth.

I met my neighbor, Orville, on the county road yesterday and told him about my dilemma. He's a wonderful guy who only owns one house pet—a cat—and said he's had a stray at his house. A starving female loaded with ticks. He didn't feed her. After a couple of days she just disappeared. He figures she went into the woods and died.

I can tell Orville feels bad about it, but he knows the score.

WHAT am I going to do?

But, gentle reader, the aforesaid is not the whole story.

Last week, through my open doors, on the sweet breeze that wafted gently through my house, I heard the most horrible, agonizing sound coming from way down my other hill—the hill covered with red mud and briars and poison ivy. The one I couldn't get down unless I rode down it on Peewee's backhoe, and then I would be taking my life in my hands.

It was the sound of a cow in distress. Not mooing. Screaming. I couldn't get down there. It stopped. Then started. Then stopped.

After half a day, the sound of coyotes, right THERE. I just thought, thank god.

Out here, you get the real deal.

Well, that's it from Chigger Lake, where you better watch out, and you can never get all your ducks in a row for very long.

next: first spring