Remembering Life Through Dogs and Dreams

Blue

Blue was my father’s much-prized Bluetick Hound. According to Mother, he paid three hundred dollars for him while we starved at home on squirrels and squirrel gravy. Blue was a coonhound and my father was a coon hunter. I should say coon hunter first, country politician, second. My Mother remembers holding a lantern to a tree so my father could shoot the raccoon that Blue had treed.

I never petted Blue, like Spot or Tyke. Dad kept Blue penned with the other hunting dogs in an area by the old barn. Occasionally, all the dogs would be out and the pack would surround and chase any automobile that ventured down the long gravel road leading up to our house, pursuing the vehicle as if it were some strange animal requiring herding.

We lived in a “dry” county which means selling alcohol is illegal. Luckily or perhaps unluckily, my father, being the County Attorney had access to the confiscated booze. Once, my Uncle Jack marched into the house and took my father’s bottle of Early Times whiskey. Being of Native American blood, neither of them could handle alcohol. Some sort of argument ensued; angered and undoubtedly drunk, my Uncle carved a square chunk from Blue’s back.

 I remember the perfect square missing between the shoulder blades, as Blue stood chained in the front yard. It was such a clean cut, a pink fibrous epidermal square.

 My father, in return, marched into my Uncle’s house and finding him on his bunk, knocked his front teeth out as he lay, gently sleeping off the bottle of whiskey. Possibly, I have the order mixed up and my father initiated the violence with the punch, but whichever occurred first, what is certain is that my uncle lost teeth and Blue a half- inch deep square chunk of flesh.

Blue died one night soon after when he followed a raccoon into water. It drowned him, as coons do, by climbing onto his head and holding him flailing under the water.