DAY OF REGRET #3

Obe, a dog among dogs. The dog everyone asked about years after meeting her. She was a quiet, gentle dog, a dog who could smile, who greeted you with a slow wag of her massive tail. Obe had silvery-blue eyes, hence her name: Old Blue Eyes. She was as trustworthy as she was huge. You could do anything to her, and she would not snap or threaten.

But Obe was never fully ours. She had a far away look, a longing for the wild. When the coyotes howled, she howled back at them with the most mournful sound, full of pain and grief jammed into her DNA for centuries. She was a quarter wolf, and that part of her longed to rejoin the pack. 

When we first moved to the country, I saw Obe walking slowly but purposefully across our back field. Walking toward her from the south fence was a coyote. I was running behind Obe, screaming at her, terrified she’s be eaten, though she was bigger than the coyote. I’m not sure what I was going to do to separate a 95# German Shepherd-Husky-Wolf mix from a coyote. Luckily, I didn’t have to figure that out; they walked toward one another until they were about 100 feet apart, then stopped. They took stock, then turned around and strolled back to their respective homes . The coyote returned to Old Man’s Creek, and Obe returned to our front yard. 

One day a truck came down the lane, not one I recognized.

“Got a big dog that looks like a wolf?” the man said. “It’s under the bridge, caught in a trap. Maybe you can get those farmers up the next hill to help you.” And he drove off. At the time I figured he was afraid of dogs.

 I flew out the drive and down to the bottom of the hill. The bank was slick down to the creek. It was fast moving and deep after the spring floods. Obe was in the middle of the creek, howling and fighting the trap that gripped her right front paw. I waded out close enough to her to grab the heavy chain hanging from the steel jaws. It was clear why she was still in the creek––the chain was attached to a long rod that was sunk into the creek bed. That way if an animal gets exhausted, it will drown. I jerked it free and Obe dashed for shore.

I tried everything to get that trap open, but it was powerful. Obe’s paw was squashed to a third its normal thickness. As long as the trap was on her foot, I couldn’t get her back up the bank because she couldn’t put her foot on the ground. She was writhing and screaming in pain, but I could not carry a 95# dog up a slippery bank.

Our two neighboring farmers did drive up. I never did find out how they knew what was happening under the bridge. We were well out of sight. These big guys were truly afraid of Obe, a blue-eyed wolf that was out of her mind with pain and fear. I couldn’t blame them. I promised to hold her head and jaws if they would just pry the trap loose. And they did.

Once freed, Obe ran up the bank, I opened the trunk of my husband’s Prius, and she jumped in. One of the farmers said she was the best trained dog he’d ever seen. Truth is, she’d was a good dog, but she’d never have done that under normal circumstances. Obe's foot was bleeding profusely, so I wrapped it in an old tee shirt, closed the trunk, and drove the 12-miles to our country vet’s office at a speed not recommended on gravel. The vet and his assistant backed into a corner as a mud-covered madwoman, crying hysterically, and a giant mud-covered, bleeding dog burst into their office.

The vet said there were three possible outcomes. Obe might lose her whole foot. She might lose some toes. She might be okay. We opted for the latter. She was in so much pain that they couldn't clean the foot, even though it was covered in creek mud. They gave her antibiotics, pain meds, and clean bandages.

I showed everyone in the vet's office the heavy trap and chain. There was a small tag on it with a license number. You see, perpetrating this kind of pain and terror on wild animals is perfectly legal. In fact the state collects fees at the expense of these suffering beavers, muskrats, raccoons, and my dog, Obe. So it was legal to have the trap in the creek, and this trap legally belonged to someone.  But, as someone who was visiting the office said as she threw the trap onto a pile of rubbish, “Things get lost.”

We went home to care for Obe and await her fate. I spent the better part of the evening tracing down that trap license. I have a fair amount of determination in such matters. The owner wasn’t home so I left a message on his machine. It took the entire tape for me to describe to him what his trap had done to Obe, the pain, the terror, the cost to us. I told him he was a big man, able to outsmart little animals, a man tough enough to let animals hang from a trap until they die of fear, or starve or he comes and kills them. While I was grateful he had driven to my home and informed me of Obe’s plight, a man of his stature might also have stayed to deal with the situation instead of running away home.

But this wasn’t any old dog he had trapped. Obe kept all of her toes and never even limped. She was indeed a dog among dogs.  

And that was the last day I ever regretted living in the country. (see entries for March 2 and 3)