Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 30, 1994 TAG: 9401280017
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-2 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: STEVE KARK
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
I should have taken the buzzards as a warning sign. I mean, when you get home from work and find a dozen or so lurking in the trees above your house, it shouldn't take a Shakespearean prince to see that something's rotten in Denmark.
But no, not this transplanted city boy. I parked the car and found the dogs barking in the yard and the cats snoozing under the deck chairs like they always do. After a brief survey revealed nothing out of the ordinary, I quickly put the incident out of my mind.
A couple weeks went by before I noticed that the dogs disappeared for longer stretches when I let them out at night. They sleep indoors, but I generally let them out before I go to bed.
Our nearest neighbor is a far piece over the ridgeline, so I know the dogs shouldn't bother anyone. Besides, they usually don't wander off in the darkness, and almost always come racing back after my first call.
But lately, they'd stay away 30 minutes or more. And let me tell you, when I'm ready to hit the sack those minutes-in-waiting sorely try my patience. What, I wondered, could they be up to?
The first hints appeared gradually. (I'll try to put this as delicately as possible - this being Sunday and all.) As you probably know, dogs have an odor about them that I wouldn't describe as unpleasant, but I also wouldn't go so far as to say I'd like to bury my face in it.
Suffice it to say that our dogs don't generally smell like those men's cologne tear-outs that come inside my monthly copy of Esquire. At best, after a good romp through the woods around the house, they have a clean, woodsy odor to them. At worst . . . well, that's coming.
Maybe you don't have a dog. That being the case, you may not know about their apparently instinctive habit of dragging obnoxious things home for your approval. Or maybe that's precisely why you don't have one.
You'd think they'd know better, what with those big snouts poked out the front of their faces. Everybody knows that they're supposed to have well-developed noses. Can't they tell that that unrecognizable glob they just dragged out of the woods smells to high heaven?
Oh, they know it smells all right, but they like the smell. They seek out smelly things. And when they've found something that smells so bad it brings tears to your eyes, they like to roll in it and wear its scent like some doggy badge of honor.
Ours will even go so far as to drag whatever awful thing they've found and deposit it at our doorstep. They'll sit there with that vile thing before them, tails a-wagging and chests puffed out with pride, waiting for our approval: "Oh my, that's about the smelliest thing you've ever found. Good Dog!"
As I was saying, I began to detect a gradual change in smell when they returned from their evening jaunt. I knew there was something nasty out there, but I hoped it was far enough away where I could keep them away from it if I didn't let them run off to get into it.
No such luck. The buzzards should have been the tipoff. I later followed the dogs along a well-worn path and discovered the ghastly remains of some unfortunate deer. And, without going into detail, it was pretty obvious that the dogs had been at it for quite some time. (Though I don't think they killed it.)
They bounded around the dead deer like it was treasure, and clearly didn't understand my efforts to keep them away.
Oh well, they're dogs after all. Still, it would be nice if ours were like the ones I see on TV: like the dog that runs barking through a burning apartment to awaken its sleeping owners, or the dog that swims to a drowning child and drags it to safety on shore.
Who knows? Maybe our dogs would do the same thing given the chance. Maybe they'd drag us unconscious from our beds during a fire and save our lives.
Yeah sure, but not while there're rotten deer bones to chew on instead.
Steve Kark is an instructor at Virginia Tech and a correspondent for the Roanoke Times & World-News. He writes from his home in scenic Rye Hollow, in a remote part of Giles County south of Pearisburg.
by CNB