The Day I Almost Ran Away

Once when I was a little girl, I had a dog…a wonderful mutt of a dog.  He was about the size of a German shepherd and probably had that breed in him along with several others.  He was mostly white with black and brown splotches.  He had floppy ears like a beagle, and his face was beagle-shaped.  His tail looped up in German shepherd fashion.  He was of a very gentle disposition, but was protective of me.

He appeared in our neighborhood out of nowhere.  We lived out in the country, and my parents figured that someone didn’t want him anymore and just dropped him off and abandoned him.  He attached himself to me, and I adored him.  We took him in, and I named him Skippy.  He slept every night on the throw rug next to my bed.  When I played outside, he hung around.  If I walked somewhere, he went along. The only time he ever made me angry was the day I saw him trotting through the back yard with a rabbit in his mouth.  I didn’t feed him that night.

However, he did make others angry, specifically my parents and the neighbors.  It seems that Skippy was a bit over-sexed.  If there was a female dog in heat anywhere in the neighborhood, he was there fighting off other dogs.  He would come home with injuries from these altercations.  If we tried to keep him inside to prevent these incidents, he would howl loudly….all night long if he thought it necessary.  On those nights, he did not sleep next to my bed.  My Dad would lock him in the basement, but that did not prevent the howling, and it made my Dad furious, because he needed to get up at 5 AM to get to his job.

My parents put up with this quirk for a couple of years, but when he broke down the neighbor’s cellar door to get at their female in heat, it was the last straw.  My parents informed me that we could not be having trouble with the neighbors over Skippy’s bad behavior.  My Dad said he would take him to the pound.  My parents tried to convince me that he was such a nice dog that someone else would adopt him.  In my heart, I feared the worst.  I was inconsolable, even when I was promised that I could have one of the puppies that had resulted from his breaking and entering the neighbor’s cellar.

The night before he was to leave us, he slept next to my bed oblivious to his fate.  I lay in bed crying and trying to figure out if there was a way for me to run away with him.  No matter how hard I thought about it, or how hard I cried, I couldn’t imagine how Skippy and I would find food and shelter.  He could hunt rabbits, but what would I eat?  Where would we sleep at night?  How would we stay warm?  My heart was broken the next day when he obediently got into the car with my Dad, and he was gone forever.

I picked a sweet little female from the litter…the one who looked the most like him.  She was a smaller dog and slept in the chair next to my bed.  Queenie was a nice dog….but she wasn’t Skippy.   

I never told my parents how much I had wanted to run away.   I don’t think they ever knew how badly I hurt….but here I am thinking about it with sadness 60 years later.