Almost everyone has a pet of some kind, and they vary with the individual's taste. From the time I was 6 years old, several dogs were always around and under our house. Of course we had cats, but they were barn cats, and earned their keep by holding down the rat population.
Some dogs stand out; I remember one better than all the others. When I was about 12, one Friday afternoon Mr. Benton drove up in his old pickup with a skinny brown hound in the truck bed.
I was raking the front yard, and my dad walked out about the time Mr. Benton pulled up. I couldn't help but notice the hound. Daddy and I walked over to Mr. Benton's truck and said hello, then Mr. Benton pointed back to the back of his truck and said to my dad, "Jack, I'm agettin' too old for huntin', and I am gonna get rid of my old hound. Y'all want this dog? It'll tree 'most anything."
I walked up to back of the truck and the hound came over and licked my hand while I petted him.
"Let me have it, Daddy. I promise to take care of it," I begged.
Daddy started talking with Mr. Benton, and I knew with a nod that I had a hunting dog. Shoot, I couldn't wait to take that dog out hunting. I named him Browne, but after taking him into the woods, I changed his name to Sniffer, because the dog was almost constantly sniffing.
Sniffer was my dog until I graduated from high school. I featured his name in several of my books. "Sniffer, the Hero Dog of Norphlet" is available on Amazon. It's fiction. Mark Twain was asked if his Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer books were based on real-life experiences and he said, "Well, these stories are about things that could have happened to boys in the South." Yes, that fits the Sniffer story.
Along the way, when I was 12-14, I had a pet possum. I had picked it up beside the road after its mother was run over. I couldn't housebreak the possum, so it had to live outside, and finally it ran off with another possum.
I tamed a big red-tailed hawk which I'd caught in a steel trap, and it would fly across the yard and land on my arm. I was training it to hunt, but when I finally understood that the renowned hunting eagles in Afghanistan pursued prey in the desert, I encouraged it to fly off.
After Sniffer died of old age, I didn't have a dog until I was out of college and working in south Texas. That's when a friend in Corpus Christi gave us a female Dalmatian. A year later, she gave birth to 11 puppies on a day it snowed in Corpus Christi. We had to bring those 11 puppies inside, and ended up with a bathtub full of mother and puppies. We liked to have never gotten rid of all those puppies.
When Lara, our daughter, lived in Santa Fe, she visited the dog pound, and was told two dogs there were going to be put down that day. So she sent them to us. Not the best present I have ever received, but I will say this: The big red-haired dog was an excellent guardian. If a car he didn't recognize came down the driveway, he would bite the tires and, if it were our guests, I would have to go out and escort them in.
Our last dog was probably the best ever. Mollie was a female mixed lab that someone dumped in front our house, and was so friendly that we adopted her. She refused to come into the house, and our grandkids loved it because when they visited, Mollie would come to the kitchen door with a tennis ball, and all they had to do was throw it out the door. She finally died of old age, too feeble to chase the tennis ball any more.
We had a deaf white kitten for a couple of months when our kids were 6 and 8, and one morning I jumped in the car to take the kids to school and the kitten was under the car. Yes, I ran over the kitten with the kids in the car. It was an upsetting experience, to put it mildly. I put the kitten in a shoebox, and that afternoon we had a funeral.
Over the years we have added some rather unusual pets, and as I write this our small pond in the front yard contains an estimated 35 koi. About 20 years ago we bought around 10 small koi, and when our kids went off to college, we shut down our backyard swimming pool and made it into a large koi pond.
It worked fine except, with the dark water, you couldn't see how many fish we had. After about five years, we decided we wanted our pool again. When we pumped it out, I was amazed at the number of large koi. We put them in our house's front pond; it seemed to be exactly what we wanted.
The water was clear, and when we fed them it was a sight to see. However, the crowded situation turned out to be a problem, because first we had a couple die, which I assumed was from a bacterial infection, and then we had a wholesale dying off.
We got down to two koi, and for several years there were only two fish in the pond. Then one of the two died. We decided the large 10-pound koi needed company, so we bought 10 four-inch ones. Over the next five years only one died, then we noticed several smaller ones.
Then tragedy struck. A big blue heron grabbed two of the original 10 before we set up a sound system, which ran it off, and then the old koi from the first batch of fish, which was at least 25 years old, died.
We still had seven koi, which now weigh around two pounds each. Over the past year, we started noticing a variety of small koi and a school of 10-15 solid black fish that are growing like weeds. I don't think the black fish are koi, but how they got there and what they are is a mystery.
This past February the pond seemed to be solid ice with eight inches of snow on top, and I thought it was curtains for the fish. But I didn't lose a one.
Email Richard Mason at richard@gibraltarenergy.com.