Maria and Mother: A tough barn needs some attention.
A dog story.
A woman in my town saw her life come apart after an ugly domestic quarrel. Her husband fled, and she took her two kids and left the area to start a new life. She met another man, and is happy with him. She had a four-year-old Chocolate Lab named Wyman and she couldn’t bring him to her new home, so she left him behind in the small double-wide she used to call home.
She left some kibble on the floor and a bowl of water and left the back door open so Wyman, who had spent most of his life tethered to a tree in the back yard barking at cars and people walking by. She came by when she could to leave food and water, but that became harder as time went on. She came by the farm to talk to me, and I knew from the first she was going to leave the dog behind, I just felt it. She came to say goodbye, said she had moved, asked me if I would take the dog and care for him, and she said her brother-in-law was supposed to come by and take care of the dog, but he hadn’t been coming.
Wyman was a good dog, she said, a hunting dog.
I suggested she get on Petfinder or call animal rescue. I said I couldn’t take on another animal now. She told me she was happy, for the first time in years, with a good man who loved her and talked to her. And I saw the pain and guilt in her eyes.
She smiled and said goodbye, and I think I knew she was not coming back, and I drove to her house with some kibble and rawhide and I saw the back door was open and I heard Wyman barking and I went into the basement and he came charging down the stairs at me, growling and barking, and he was – is – a beautiful Chocolate Lab and so I threw a piece of rawhide at him, and he screeched to a halt, picked it up and ran into his crate to eat it, forgetting about me. A sweet dog. And a beautiful dog.
It was hard to leave him there. He could have run out into the road, and the house was a shambles, he had been chewing on anything he could get his teeth on, almost surely anxious at being along, and I called Animal Control and they got permission to take the dog and they went and got him and took him out and he is up for adoption. I suspect he will be gone in a flash.
You don’t see a lot of well-bred Chocolate Labs in shelters for too long. It was wrenching to see him alone in that house, a bewildered and helpless creature, his world having just moved away. I am glad for this woman, and she deserves her new life, she had a hard time in the old one. And when people tell me they hate people for the way they treat animals, I always take care to remember that most people treat animals very well in this country, and if mistreatment of animals is a reason to dislike people, then good and loving treatment is a reason to love people. And that, I think, is where I want the story to end for me.
Wyman is gone, but I might dream about him for awhile.