Dog Man

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.”