My Mom had enough kids that she didn’t need to have a pet to take care of as well, so when we asked for a puppy there was no ‘maybe’. It was a firm ‘no’. Firm as she was, she is also a loving, compassionate person and sometimes she just couldn’t say no when one of us brought home a lost or hurt critter. The occasional turtle, a mother bat with clinging babies, etc.. A golden retriever puppy, gangly and thin, covered with ticks, stopped by one weekend and we children just fell in love. He jumped on us, licked us, backed loud enough to rattle windows and broke our little hearts. We quickly dubbed him Goldy (not very original, I know). My Mom wouldn’t have a dog in the house and our land lord was decidedly iffy on the subject dogs entirely, so the dog ended up at my Grandmother’s chicken farm on the edge of town.

My Grandmother raised chickens, ducks, geese and other fowl and sold the eggs. We helped on occasion and at any one time she would have roughly thirty to forty birds fenced in a large ‘free-range’ enclosure. I am not sure how my Mom talked my Grandmother into it, but she agreed to take the dog, provided we help care for it, which we attempted to do with walks, baths, pulling the ticks off, etc.. This worked for about one week.

On a weekend morning my Mom received a phone call from Grandma, asking us to come to the farm. When we got there, there was a surprising lack of chickens on the chicken farm. There was however a very contrite puppy that looked quite a bit less scrawny than it had the week before.

Here’s what happened: Goldy had chewed through the rope that was attached to his collar. He then dug under the fence into the chicken yard and chased down and caught and then buried thirty-four chickens and ducks. (It was quite a morbid graveyard of little feathered mounds.) Two geese and three ducks had somehow made it over the fence (they had clipped wings, but were apparently really motivated) to the creek below the house, returning later and recaught by Grandmother. As I viewed the little feathered mounds with the occasional foot sticking up I was struck with the bone deep certainty that my stern Grandmother would soon be doing in the dog and probably following up with the grandchild. In a surprising move, and for which I remember and love that old woman, she did neither. She didn’t even make us pay for the chickens, though I suspect my Mom did. We helped clean up the mess and that was almost the end of it. In the local paper that next week, the following ad appeared in the classifieds.

Golden retriever puppy.

Approximately six months old.

Free to Good Home.

VERY good bird dog.

Other stories by me:

http://www.authspot.com/Tales/Miss-Annie-What-Happened-to-Their-Penis.648641

http://www.authspot.com/Short-Stories/Little-Girls-Dont-Grow-Up-to-be-Han-Solo.658875

http://www.authspot.com/Short-Stories/I-Was-a-Crash-Test-Sister.659185

http://www.authspot.com/Biographies/Allison-in-the-Rain-or-Why-I-Dont-Teach-High-School-Anymore.532979