Fiction
Dog Man
Leo
Lawton
Randall Calhoun was a hound man. In that part of Mississippi, near Marion,
that was a good thing to say about a man.
Most times a man was known by whether he kept dogs, what kind of dogs he
kept, and how he kept them. That was
about all you needed to know about a man to know if he was worth anything or
not.
Doc, as all his
friends knew him, was a veterinarian. To
his credit, he would treat any animal smaller than an elephant, but his first
love was those hounds he kept. He had
Treeing Walkers, Plotts, Blueticks, and crosses between them, but not just
helter-skelter, these crosses were well planned in advance. A dog man don’t just let things happen.
Especially so for
the Doc. He used his dogs to track and
tree bobcats. Once he had them up a tree
with the hounds bellering at the bottom, Doc would come along and climb the
tree with that cat in it. He had this
thing he made himself to catch them cats alive.
It was nothing but a piece of plastic pipe about four feet long with a
loop of cable run through it. One end of
the cable had a handle threaded over it.
He’d climb up to that cat and slip the noose end of that thing over its
head and pull the handle. When he did he
had a bobcat by the neck. He’d climb
down from the tree dragging that cat after him.
The dogs would worry the cat a little while Doc was getting it into a
carrier. Then he’d sell the cat to a
zoo.
It cost far more
to feed and care for those hounds than he got for the cats he caught, but that
wasn’t a problem. To a dog man, cost was
not an object. The fun was in the chase
not the ending, or worrying about cost.
Doc often turned them hounds of his loose where he found a cat’s tracks
crossing a dirt road. He always followed
them hounds on foot, until he caught a cat, or had to give up cause the hounds
was wore out. Doc never wore out.
I took one of my
beagles to his clinic one day that had gone and got snake bit, and was in a
pretty bad way. He laid her down on a
table as gentle as a baby lamb, gave her a shot of something, and we sat around
talking for a few minutes, I guess, to see what was going to happen next. Doc was standing there next to her table and
sort of stroking the soft fur on the back of her neck.
“You’re going to
be all right, little lady,” he was crooning in that drawl of his.
“Do you really
think so Doc?”
“She’ll be fit as
a fiddle in a few days. Don’t you worry
none about her. I’ll do all the worrying
necessary for the both of us. Hand me that
bottle of stuff right there by your elbow, will you?”
“Doc, I don’t know
how to thank you sometimes,” I said.
He said, “I’ll
tell you what you can do,” as he slowly nodded his head.
“Anything you say
Doc, just ask and it’s yours.” At this
moment I was vulnerable.
Damn, the man had just saved my
Becky Sue. I had gone rabbit hunting
this morning just at daybreak.
Mississippi might be in the deep south, but don’t you believe it can’t
get cool on October mornings. I had five
of the beagles running and had managed two cotton tails and one cane cutter
already when I heard a dog snuffling in a brush pile not too far from me. It was just a minute or so later, I heard
this sharp little yelp and Becky Sue came running over to me like she was
asking me to make it better. I looked
and seen this faint trickle of blood on her off foreleg. I suspected I knew what happened so I walked
over to where that yelp came from. Sure
enough, there was a big old rattler laying up along side a windfall pine. The sun had got high enough now to warm him
up and get him moving for the day. I
raised my 20 gauge and sent him to meet his maker or at least parts of
him. A load of number six high brass
will do a job on a diamondback.
So here I was
ready to give the Doc anything I had as long as he could save Becky Sue. It had taken me a while to round up the rest
of the dogs, get them home and in their pen, and then drive to the clinic so
she was panting pretty good when I got her there.
“Doc, just what is
it you want from me?
“Well, you know
how I’ve always told you these little beagles was totally worthless?”
“Yeah Doc, you
have, but you surely can’t think she was at fault for getting bit by a
rattler. Any dog is liable to do
that. Even them mutts you run the
bobcats with must get it once in a while.”
“First I want you
to know they ain’t mutts. Them is some
of the finest cat dogs in all Mississippi, if not the whole southeast.”
“Okay doc, I was
just funning you.”
“Secondly, I want
you to remember what I told your wife a few days ago.”
“Doc, I didn’t
even know you had seen my wife lately.”
“Yes, she was in
with that little seal point Siamese of hers.
It’s going to have kittens and she was just making sure it was in good
shape for the task. I told her then that
the Siamese was fine and if she just let the cat alone everything would be
okay. We talked a while about the cats,
and what it was like raising them. She
told me sometimes it was hard letting the kittens go as she was often attached
to them. We had us a real good chat
about them cats, yes sir.”
“Doc, can you get
to the point? What is it you want from
me?”
“Well it’s not so
much I want something from you as it is I want something from your wife.”
“Now you wait just
a minute here Doc, don’t you go saying something stupid and make me wipe up
this office with you. Now I’ve always
liked you, but I ain’t going to take no garbage about my wife from you nor
nobody else.”
“Well what I
wanted from your wife was a promise that she never get rid of them Siamese
cats.”
“Well that’s a
whole lot better than what you got me to thinking, I’ll tell you right
now. But what do you care whether she
keeps them damn cats or not.”
“Well, just like I
told her,” he said, “I just want to make sure you keep some animals on that
place of your’n that ain’t totally worthless.
Now get this mutt outta here and bring me a rabbit next time you’re by.”
