I’ve had many dogs in my life, but the one who’s lived with us the last fourteen years had a shaky beginning.
She
came to us from the animal shelter. My
son Robert and I liked her because she sat quietly in her kennel, looking at us
with big, sad eyes, while all the others were barking. The lady at the animal shelter had tied a
bandanna around her neck and called her Bandit, but Robert started calling her
Bandi.
The
shelter identified her as a “dachshund mix” but she looked more like part
Corgi, part Sheltie, and the rest an impossibly long feathered tail which she
held up like a sail at full mast. Her
hair was reddish gold and silky soft, and she had four white socks.
Bandi
was a "chewer." She gnawed off the bottom corners of the back door
frame (and, among other things, her dewclaws) but she wouldn't chew bones;
she'd bury them, usually by uprooting plants I wanted to keep. One evening our internet suddenly went
out. When we discovered the phone was dead,
too, we checked the line into the house.
Using a flashlight, we found Bandi had pulled off the wire and eaten
most of it. After that when anything was
missing, we assumed Bandi had eaten it.
We
had a mesquite tree in the back yard.
The first notch where the branches divided was about four feet from the
ground. One day Bandi forgot she was a
dog while chasing a squirrel. She ran up
the trunk and sat in the notch, barking at the squirrel who, of course, climbed
much higher.
After
that Bandi loved to show off for visitors, running up the rough trunk of the
mesquite tree to sit in "her" place.
She also preferred to sit on top of her doghouse a la Snoopy rather than
sleep inside.
One
evening when she was about eighteen months old, Bandi was in the backyard when
it began to rain lightly and we could hear thunder far away. She managed to open the gate and run around
to the front porch. Since she had a dog
house and it was barely raining, we put her back in the yard and closed the
gate.
A
little while later, about ten o’clock, I heard a car race up the street, hit
something, and then a dog crying. I
looked out the window and saw a dog pull itself up in the neighbor’s yard under
the street light. I thought, “How
terrible! Someone has hit a dog.” And then I felt sick in the pit of my
stomach. I asked my husband to look
outside and see if Bandi was in the yard.
She wasn’t.
I
grabbed a big towel and ran outside in my nightgown. Sure enough, it was Bandi. I could tell she was in pain, but I couldn’t
tell what her injuries were, so I wrapped her in the towel and carried her back
to the house. I laid her on the kitchen
floor. There was some blood, but not a
lot. She tried to bite us if we touched
her back leg, and I thought she might have internal injuries.
My
husband looked in the phone book and started calling veterinarians. He found one on call who said to bring her
in. I thought we should all go, because
I didn’t want to wake up Robert the next morning to tell him his dog was dead.
We
woke Robert and he quickly dressed. He
and I sat in the back seat with Bandi while my husband drove across town. Bandi was hurting so badly that she nipped at
us whenever her leg was moved. The vet
didn’t think she had internal injuries, but he said her back thigh bone had
snapped in two. He would have to keep
her so he could insert a rod in the leg the following morning. He said to come back at four o’clock to pick
her up.
When
Robert and I arrived, Bandi heard us coming through the door. I had read about “mournful howls” but that
was the first time I’d heard one! A cast
held her back leg out straight, so she had to hop around on three legs. Before her leg healed she managed to chew
through the cast and had to get another one.
But
I guess she’s a little smarter than dirt.
She doesn’t try to escape the backyard any more. She knows bad things can happen outside the
gate….
There's never been a better dumb dog than miss Bandi.
ReplyDelete:)
DeleteIt looks much like the one we had when we moved here. Jumper - so named because he could make a 3 foot jump straight up with stiff legs. The kids loved him. Your description and the pictures reminded me of him.
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately, he met up with a bigger dog in our back yard, and lost the match.
Oh, poor Jumper!
Delete