A Dog's Life

There’s blood on my bike gloves, I’ll tell you how it got there but first allow me a short rant.

Me I consider life a precious gift – a gift that gift comes with responsibility. I used to adhere to the Hippocratic thinking of do no harm, in other words, so long as you don’t do any damage you've lived an adequate life, but that lame attitude is changing. Now I’m going with more a tribal way of thinking –small bands of hunter gatherers can’t tolerate dead wood: either you contribute or you hit the road. Unfortunately our modern society not only allows deadwood it actually coddles hordes of worthless deadbeats. All too often it seems I run into absolutely worthless motherfuckers. All human life is precious, nice words but they hold no water; some people just ain’t worth the air they breathe.

So back to the story. We were riding down to the Black Diamond Bakery when I noticed beautiful blue-eyed husky crouching in the ditch, his front paws covered in blood. Kris, Joe and I wheeled around and while I went to check on the dog, Kris spoke to some guy who had pulled up in pickup and Joe knocked on the door of a trashy house across the road. The pickup pulled away – thanks for the help dickhead – and Kris said that the driver had come to investigate a gunshot and a woman’s scream. Joe said that the fat ass redneck who answered the door at the shack said something to the affect of “rules are rules he deserves what he gets,” and slammed the door.

The dog had a collar but no tags. This was a valuable dog, it was a healthy pure breed, it wasn’t some stray. Now I’ll confess I don’t like dogs. Well I shouldn’t say that, it’s not that I don’t like dogs it’s more like I’m indifferent about dogs, but there I was trying to comfort a dying animal while Kris and Joe went out trying to find the owner. Cars simply drove by. I guess the drivers had run out of smokes and were hustling down to the 76 station to pick up a six dollar pack of Marlboros. Finally a lady pulled up in a big Dodge pickup pulling a horse trailer. She thought she knew the owner, and so made a difficult U-turn and headed back down the little side road. Across the road the rednecks were crawling out of their holes, stumbling around the brown yard scratching their asses.

The dog seemed uncomfortable and I helped him to roll over to his other side. I noticed a small hole just behind his front leg, out flowed a steady stream of blood. Could this be a bullet wound? Finally the lady with the horse trailer came back; as it turns out she didn’t know the owner. Thank goodness she agreed to take the dog to the vet, so I picked up the dog, wrapped him in a blanket and put him in the truck. That dog really shook me up, he was a good boy and to see him suffer cut deeply.

As I got back on my bike I noticed a trail of blood across the road. The red trail went directly from the redneck’s driveway to ditch where we found the dog.
We continued down to the bakery where Kris reported the incident to a couple of Sheriff Deputies. They feigned interest and took down a little info, but I noticed that they didn’t take her name. Let’s hope that I’m wrong but I felt like those two guys were more interested in their doughnuts than that dog's life. Kris called the vet and found out that the owner had showed, but was unable to get any info on the status of the dog, so I guess that’s the end of the story.

Even now I can’t explain why I care. There just seems something inherently evil in shooting a dog. As I rode past that Hoosier shack on the return home I spat on the pavement.