After reading Reavis Wortham’s post on Saturday, I figured it was okay to tell this story.
I’ve posted before about our beloved dog Kimber, a mix of Cavalier King Charles Spaniel and Boston Terrier called a Caviston. (And yes, it bothers me that it’s not spelled Cavaston, but no one consulted me.) When we first moved to the woodland house in West Virginia, she weighed less than five pounds and I was keenly aware that the entire world posed one big hazard for her. Not only was she prey to most other creatures, her girth was smaller than that of the floor vents which hadn’t yet been covered.
We fenced in about a half acre of the backyard/woods so Kimber could have a place to wander, but for the first, say, nine months of her life, she never wandered without an escort. I was her primary security detail. After a year or so, she’d filled out to about 18 pounds and had outgrown reasonable threats from owls and hawks. Only the largest dogs ever outgrow threats from eagles, but our eagles stay distracted by the Potomac River smorgasbord a few hundred yards away from our place.
Once permitted to wander her fenced domain alone during the day, she turned into quite the squirrel hunter, chasing them great distances until the critters cheated and shot up a tree. I don’t think Kimber ever figured out why she couldn’t follow. She’s an avid deer chaser, too, though I’m not sure of her plan for when she caught one.
As neighbors joined our community, her canine best friends became a German shepherd and a Rottweiler. They let her hang out with them and played without crushing her. Like many small breeds, Kimber always thought she had way more wolf in her than she ever did.
As a human in her life, I of course knew better. Although Kimber aged out of danger from smaller predators, very real danger remained from larger carnivores–coyotes in particular. Even at her top adult weight of 20 pounds, she never went out at night without an armed escort. My rifle of choice: a Rossi Circuit Judge chambered in .45 Long Colt. The coyote gun lives its life staged at the back door all the time, easily accessible when needed. Often carried, only used once. On a snake. That’s a lot of gun for a snake.
Then came last week.
Last week was reasonably cool for a June afternoon, so we left the downstairs door open to allow Kimber to come and go as she pleased to and from the back yard. My office sits on the second floor, overlooking the backyard and the woods beyond. I was doing as I always do while staring down the maw of an approaching deadline, pounding away on the keyboard, playing with my imaginary friends when a cacophony erupted from out beyond my windows.
Growling and barking. My wife screaming at Kimber to come. To stop. I heard other animal sounds.
I knew this was bad.
I bolted from my desk and raced down the stairs, down the hall, and through the family room to the back door, grabbing the rifle on my way out. I still had no idea what was happening, but the noise of it all had not decreased in intensity. If anything, it had gotten louder.
Outside now, I turned the corner and the crisis became clear. Kimber had tangled with a woodchuck (or groundhog, depending on where you live). Normally docile, woodchucks are herbivores and hover near the bottom of Mother Nature’s food chain. When confronted with a carnivore, they survive by running away. But Kimber was faster and she cornered it against a tree.
Best I could tell, Kimber thought it was a game. Her tail was wagging hard enough to dislocate itself at the root as she bounced around, taunting the woodchuck that thought it was fighting for its life. Those critters have wicked incisors and long claws that would tear a little dog apart. Given a clear shot, I was going to kill the woodchuck.
Let’s not forget that my wife was in the mix, too, trying to separate the sparring parties. One thing for sure: I had no safe shot to take.
And then I did.
Woody Woodchuck broke into an open field run and for a good three or four seconds, he was all alone. As I shouldered the rifle, though, my wife yelled, “No, please, don’t!” In that instant of hesitation–my fault, not my wife’s; mine was the only finger on the trigger–Kimber woke up to the chase and re-entered the sight picture, chasing the woodchuck down until it somehow managed to climb under the fence and make its escape.
So, Woody lives on to make another appearance. Maybe he was traumatized enough to stay away from our backyard. I look for him every day. So does Kimber, who is fine, by the way. Not a scratch on her.
But a known danger lives on because of a momentary hesitation. Though Kimber sleeps in our bed at night, she is a country dog and she’s happiest when she’s outside. It’s too late to turn her into an indoor dog, and I wouldn’t want to anyway. So, if you’re a woodchuck or a coyote or a copperhead and you’re reading this, do yourself a favor and hang out at a property down the road. At the very least, stay outside the fence.
If there’s a writing related takeaway to this story, it’s that opportunity is often fleeting, and that hesitation–indecision–keeps doors shut that could otherwise be open. Whether it’s a job opportunity or a creative decision in a story, sometimes making a decision–any decision–is better than stewing about it overnight.
Greetings, TKZers. I’m back from a wonderful, exhausting 4 days at Killer Con. The getting there and back, not so wonderful, but that’s becoming my norm for any travel requiring an airplane. “If you have time to spare, go by air.”
I had hands-on practice in fingerprinting. Coming from a dry climate and spending lots of hours tapping a keyboard, mine were very hard to collect. We got to do presumptive testing for blood (using synthetic blood). Watched a demonstration (up close) of using Blue Star (cheaper and easier to use than Luminol, preferred by the techs here).
The next morning, we arrived at NWTI and were led to a large lecture hall where they’d staged a shooting scene for us. We watched as the people who would be dealing with the scene came in —patrol officers, EMS, detectives, CSI, and the ME, and they all performed their respective duties.
After she finished, we were teamed up in groups of 4 and we walked through a crime scene taking LOTS of pictures. Our objective wasn’t to solve the crime, but rather to prioritize 5 questions we would want answered, and to compare what we saw with the survivor’s narrative of what happened.
Today please welcome author Jane Corry, bestselling thriller author from the UK. Her books have sold more than a million copies in 20 countries. She’s also a magazine feature writer and columnist. For three years, she was the writer in residence at a high security male prison.
The titles, which I feel have worked best for my books, include the ones which just fell into my head. For example, ‘I Died On A Tuesday’ came to me when I was cycling down to the promenade for my daily swim in the sea and nearly got knocked off my bike.
