Bone Dog

Here's another reminder that the natural world isn't always pleasant to the adult mind but that kids left to pursue their natural curiosity aren't constrained to dealing with just the pleasantries. As an illustration I'm rolling out another memory of a situation from my childhood just as it happened. If you're finding this post really bothers you, please skip it.

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The Experiencing:

One day on my way home from checking out Froggy Pond I turned off into one of the grassy fields that was just slightly higher than the railroad tracks. I had no real reason for turning off except curiosity. But come to think of it, that was about as fine a reason as one could have for walking into a field of autumnal brown better-than-knee-high grasses full of whirring brown and yellow flying grasshoppers. At the top of the three-foot incline I surveyed the unexplored land. It was pretty flat. About twenty feet away a small wild cherry tree caught my attention. Not because it was there, but because it had an old piece of cotton clothesline hanging down from a point about three feet up the trunk. I figured some other kid must have discovered this field before me and had built something there, something that needed checking out.

I loped over to the tree and looked down to where the rope trailed away into the grass. There was a skeleton lying in the grass. I bent down to have a closer look. It was the skeleton of a dog: clean and white, which I now know means it was probably at least a few months old. The rope was fairly well deteriorated too, but I could still see the loop that had at one time been around the dogs neck.

In a matter of seconds I was overwhelmed by the questions running through my mind and some very bad feelings that went with them. How did this dog get here? How long ago? Did somebody tie it to this tree and leave it to die? I couldn't image anyone doing that. Yet the rope was definitely tied around the tree. It couldn't have been accidentally snagged behind a running dog, which I wanted to believe in preference to thinking of this as a deliberate act. Could somebody have tied the dog here, gone away for a while, and then forgot about it? No matter how I tried I couldn't find a reasonable explanation. My mind was unwillingly captivated by a picture of this dog patiently standing and uselessly barking and barking for someone to come.

The mind looks for escape hatches in the midst of true horror. In the midst of my bewilderment I found an escape of last resort. I recalled a black lab my maternal grandfather used to have. It was at a time when I was so small I didn't have more than a general memory of it. As I got old enough to understand things I asked my mother why my grandfather didn't have the dog anymore. She told me he had bought it for hunting and when the dog turned out to be useless for hunting he took it out and shot it. At the time that haunted me as a very sad death of a good dog that could have been fun to have around for a long time.

But now as I stood looking down at bone dog this same recollection gave me the escape I sought from my confused frustration. Somebody had tied this dog to the tree and shot it. Perhaps it was sickly, dying anyway, and the owner didn't know what else to do. In any case it died quickly. That must have been what happened. That was bad to think about, but not as bad as picturing a slow lingering death.

Now I wanted to know more about bone dog so I squatted down in the grass to examine the remains. From the size, the shape of the skull and the remnants of hair still visible in the grass I knew bone dog had been a collie. I looked for any evidence that bone dog had been shot, but I didn't see any obvious bullet damage in the skull. Then I figured that bone dog could have been killed with a shotgun blast which might not leave visible damage in the skeleton. After all when my father brought home rabbits and pheasants from his hunting trips they had only a few tiny pellets in them.

I had never dealt with a skeleton before so I spent time just looking at how bone dog had been put together: backbone, ribs, leg bones all were just about where they should be. In fact looking back now I'm surprised that the skeleton was intact. Apparently no predators or scavengers had pulled bone dog apart.

My final act was to pick up the skull and look at bone dog face-to-face. I wiggled a canine tooth and it came out easily. Then I could see how it had been set into the jawbone. Finally I laid the skull and tooth back where I had found them and took my leave of bone dog. For some reason I have never recounted this episode to anyone until today, even though it has popped up to the level of consciousness at various times in my life.

The Knowing.

Probably the most powerful lesson from my encounter with bone dog was that human nature could be unfeeling. The idea of leaving a dog to die was untenable. But even if bone dog had been shot in some merciful way he/she at the very least deserved a respectful burial.

At the material level I learned something about how animal skeletons are put together. At the time it was just interesting information to a curious, exploring kid. Sixty years later I see that it was an early indication of my lifelong interest in biology. And had I been taught to stay away from such things as bone dog I would have missed out on an important learning experience along the path to my later professional life.
And I still say “I’m sorry for whatever happened to you bone dog and sorry that I never knew your name. But I thank you for the lessons.”