Dog story...
Bob Another beer, please Christ
It's a very very good article. The eggs Pierre is talking about
are for our 2d annual a.t. charity. Go over to a.t. if you want to
read about it. This article isn't nasty tasteless, but it IS very
good. You'll have to trust me on this one. - Bob ]
kette...@leeds.syntegra.bt.co.uk writes:
I was up on the top field at the weekend, poking around in the midden. It
was early evening, and looking up, I was surprised to see the light fading
in the east. Christ! The nights are closing in already. The rain was sleeting
across, cold and unpleasant, and at the sort of angle that seems to
penetrate any number of layers of clothing. The midden steamed, gently. I
put down the tray of eggs and started digging away with my hands. I
know that might sound a little gross, but it's honestly the best way to do it
- you never know what's under there, and with a shovel you could rupture
something really fucking putrid - fingers are more sensitive.
The top layers were OK, fibrous and wet from the rain - straw, horse
manure, cowshit, chickenshite, bits of fleece and miscellaneous
vegetation. The rain had got rid of much of the flies, and I didn't notice
many chicken bugs (most had defected to the relative warmth of our
houses, I guess). The deeper I went, the more mulchy, hot, and populated
the manure pile became. Millions of little translucent maggots, and those
long thin red worms. Perfect! Just what I needed. I marked out a rough
metre square in the midden with some canes for future reference, and
reached for the first egg.
"Ayup, now, lad! An' what'll ye be up to out 'ere on a Sondy night, then?"
It was Donald, the farmer, doing his evening rounds. Sally spotted me and
bounded over, tail wagging excitedly. Donald's bulging porcine frame
looked ridiculous in the stripey wellies and bright green rubber smock
buttoned to the neck. The rain made his bald pink head gleam. I
suppressed a snigger.
"Oh, nothing really," I muttered vaguely, "Just burying something,
Donald". He just looked at me, the way he always does when he suspects
there's something not quite "right" going on. In fact, even when there's
nothing going on, he assumes it, so I guess this was his normal mien.
"Ye're a bloody doylem, you are, ye daft southe'n twat! C'mon, Sally,
walk on". Sally looked up at him, then at me, and sat down again, craning
her head forward between my arms, and sniffing. Pierre's game was
*much* more interesting than walking with Donald. It had muck, and dirt,
and some *very* interesting smells.
"Well, please yesel', ye ungrateful mangey hound" shouted Donald, and
strode off, throwing me a baleful glance.
I laughed, and scratched behind the dog's ears. "Hello, Sally girl! Come to
give me a hand, then?" She rewarded me with a big sloppy manure-
encrusted lick on the face. "Ugh. Now don't touch these eggs - and
*don't* dig them up!". I went back to planting my embryonic stinkbombs.
Crouching there on my hands and knees in the manure pile, with Sally
leaping around chasing her tail and the occasional fly, I realised that it was
almost a year to the day that we'd first come up here and found the
midden...
*****************
Jane hadn't been up at the farm for very long, so one Sunday afternoon I
suggested that Gippy John might give her a tractor lesson. She's always
loved tractors, and so was bursting with excitement. I was curious as to
why John had the old, battered '50s David Brown out in the fields when
there was a lovely, modern Case International parked up in the yard. It
turned out that he'd had to undertake a particularly unpleasant task - to
remove the carcass of a ewe that had lain in the water meadow unnoticed
for about a week. He hadn't got the scoop fitted to the CI, and didn't want
the carcass in the cab with him, hence the David Brown. This had turned
out to be sound thinking, as when he'd lifted the ewe to throw it over the
engine cowling, it's bloated belly had burst and deposited it's contents
over him and the tractor (ruminants are not the best-designed of God's
creatures). Anyway, Jane got her lesson (we didn't mention the ewe) and
everything was hunky dory.
Afterwards, I proposed a stroll around the property and fields. I took her
round the typical "farmy" things city folk like to see (I should know, it
wasn't that long since I'd been a confirmed "townie"), like the cattle sheds,
the sheep pens, the chicken sheds, and of course, the stables. Two non-
humans came along for the ride. The dogs, Sally and Sophie, had an
innate knack of never getting so close to livestock as to panic them, but
close enough to keep them in a perpetual state of unease.
Now these two dogs were the official farm dogs, and technically Donald's.
However, following a little-understood process of reverse adoption, they
spent most of their time round at our cottage, and returned to the
farmhouse (occasionally) for the night. Sally, a black lab/collie cross with
a greying snout, was all boundless energy, jumping around and sticking
her nose into everything. Sally always led the way by about fifty yards,
glancing around from time to time to check the route with me. Sophie was
the grand old dame, a pedigree yellow lab, a couple of years older than
Sally (about thirteen), and beginning to show her age. Her golden coat
was going a dusty white, she had weird and disturbing growths and
tumours growing all over, and her hindquarters were beginning to pack
up. But what a lovely dog - she lived for affection, and would go up to
anyone and nuzzle or gum them playfully. Her party-piece, when ignored,
was to work up a good muzzle-full of canine sputum-froth and then go up
and nuzzle a crotch. We had a lot of embarrassed visitors in those days.
Anyway, I digress. Having taken Jane on the farmyard tour, we set off up
the hill towards the top field. Sally would hare off in front, stopping and
looking round to see that we were following now and then. Sophie kept
pace with the humans. She kept trying to help me open the gates, nuzzling
and slobbering over the gatelatch and generally getting in the way. Bless
'er. Every so often I'd break into a five-yard sprint, and Sophie, the game
old girl, tongue lolling and tail spinning madly, would try and follow.
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She never got more than half a dozen paces before her back legs gave out
and she collapsed. But the more it happened, the more she tried. Again
and again and again. She was loving every minute.
We were about three quarters of the way up the hill, and Sally had
reached the top. She was yipping excitedly, and running down a short
way, then back up again. Over and over. She'd obviously found
something. I stepped up the pace.
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Well, we got up there, and I really couldn't see what all the fuss was
about. Where we went through the last gate, and the ground levelled out
and became the "old cricket field", was a large mound of broken
Yorkshire stone, remains of an old outhouse long ago demolished. I'd
availed myself of it in the past for some rocks to landscape my pond, but it
wasn't exactly exciting. Then Sally bounded over the wall and
disappeared. Glancing over behind the rocks, I discovered a small stone
corral, and against two walls, an evil-smelling dung heap. The midden. I
couldn't work out what a dung heap was doing all the way up here, since
in my childhood on my grandparents' farm the manure pile was always in
the farmyard, but I guess on a large farm it makes more sense to keep it
equidistant from the fields, especially in the grazing seasons.
Sally came running up with something in her mouth. A stick. A very wet,
gnarled, black stick.
"Drop it, Sally". She wouldn't.
"Drop it! DROP IT!" Nope.
"DEAD! DEAD! DEAD!" She wagged her tail.
I grabbed the stick and tried to wrest it from her jaws. It was all gooey
and slimy, and stank. "Drop it! Dead!" I shouted, then peered at it more
closely. There were little greeny-white semi-transparent maggots writhing
on it, and tufts of what looked like hair, and a hoof on one end. *Not* a
stick, then. I gave a harder tug and it came away in my hand. A bit of
blackened bone, with yellowed tendons and strips of purple-green rotting
meat hanging off it, and the maggots. A sheep leg. Gagging a bit, I threw
it away as far as I could, and tried to wipe some of the glop off my hands
in the grass. When I looked up again, Sally was standing there, tail
wagging, with that damned leg in her mouth again. What a funny game!
We played "fetch" for about ten minutes until Jane had the idea of fetching
me a *real* stick and dummying the dog by throwing that instead, and
lobbing the leg while she was busy pursuing the stick.
This little game over, we strolled off across the "cricket field".
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This time Sophie didn't get up. She must have been dead beat. She just
looked at us, wagged her tail, then put her head between her paws, as if to
say "No, it's OK, you go on, I'll just rest awhiles here". So we carried on,
Sally darting on ahead. She found some cows to bark at (in all the time I
knew her, I *never* heard Sophie bark, not even once), and we found a
field so full of crows that you couldn't make out the colour of the ground.
The overhead telegraph and power lines were bowed under their weight.
We came back past the midden about twenty minutes later. At first I
couldn't see Sophie, but then I spotted her, about fifty yards from where
we'd left her. She was sitting up, but had her head bowed, and her
shoulders were heaving.
<Ark><Akk><Urk><Huerk>
Something was obviously wrong. She wouldn't look at me at first, and
kept twisting round to keep her back to me. I finally got hold of her
muzzle and forced her gummy jaws apart. A hoof. It was that damned
sheep leg again, only this time it was right the way down her oesophagus,
with only the hoof visible at the back of her throat. The stupid gluttonous
dog was frantically trying to swallow it, ignoring her body's attempts to
try and disgorge it. Rolling my sleeve up I tried to get my fingers round
the back of the hoof to get some purchase. I ended up with my arm half-
way up to the elbow down poor Sophie's gullet before I could get a good
enough grip. Against the muscular action of her gullet, I managed to pull
it out with a slithering <Schloop>. The fucking thing was half digested,
and covered in a milky gloop like the stuff Jeff Goldblum was spewing on
people in that film "The Fly". The maggots were all gone, though.
Sophie seemed none the worse for the experience, just resentful that her
meal had been taken away.
I had to do something about this leg, though. I took it back to the midden
to bury it. It was soon apparent where Sally had got it from. She'd dug up
the bloated ewe that John had buried there earlier. It's eyeless cranium
(crows' first choice of starter) was lolling out of the pile on it's neck, still
attached to part of the spine and breastbone. Sally must've pulled one of
the forelegs right off. There weren't any shovels around or anything so I
had to use my hands. Kneeling there, trying to cover everything up, no
sooner had I buried one bit than another would be uncovered. At one
point my knee slipped through the crust and into the remains of the ewe's
abdomen. Put me right off tripe for life. Lots of other dead things in there
as well - rats, shotgun-blasted crows, foxes and less identifiable "things".
It was pretty disgusting, but we all had a good laugh about it later.
*****************
I roused myself from my reverie and realised I'd bedded the last egg. I
packed the mulch back round and over my hoard, tamped it down and
covered it with straw. It had really got dark now. I looked at my watch -
8:15. Time for a leisurely stroll down to the village for a couple or so
pints at the Woodcock.
"C'mon, old girl," I said, scratching Sally's salt 'n' pepper-speckled head,
"Lets get you back to Donald".
A year later, and Sally's going strong as ever, if perhaps a little whiter
around the muzzle. Fit as a fiddle, and with an ever-ravenous appetite (we
took 90% of a cow pie back from Mad Ma Jones's for her in a doggy bag,
and she wolfed it at one sitting). Her demands for attention are as
guileless as ever, too, as any male she's taken a liking to will testify.
Dear old Sophie, however, has passed on. Cancer of the bowel. It was
pretty unpleasant, watching her embarrassment and shame as she
progressively lost her control. She's with her favourite "toys" in her own
personal playground in the top field now. Sometimes, when I see Sally
trotting up the path towards the midden, I wonder if she's popping up to
see if her old pal will "come out to play".
Pierre
MY NORMAL ADDRESS IS BACK IN SERVICE<kette...@leeds.syntegra.bt.co.uk>
________________________________________________________________
Standard BT disclaimer: Don't you DARE attribute my opinions...
Mark Shaw
>[ This is from alt.tasteless. I figure you dog folks will enjoy it.
[ssssssnnnniiiiipppppp!]
Not bloody likely.
(followups set appropriately)
---
Mark Shaw
ASIC Designer, Texas Instruments, Dallas
mn...@dalsol.rtc.sc.ti.com
finger for PGP public key