Ben the Wonder Dog

    Ben the Wonder Dog

 We got him the year the twins turned three.  Lively two were wearing us thin and they needed a wrestlin'  dawg.  This one  was one of the litter at the farm down the road.  A good friendly farm dog for a mother and who knows the father?  Looking at the mother, a border collie of sorts, the father must have been a lab of sorts then, as this pup had a lab tail for sure.
      I chose the name Ben after one of my hero's--Dr. Ben Spock, and everyone agreed. Well, what do three year olds know, they'll agree with most anything.  They were more interested in the wrestling  and chasing that was going on.  And of course The Three Musketeers were inseparable, and the troupe were a veritable household chaos machine.  It was "the boys and Ben" or "what are those guys up to?"  And after a chaos mission around the house all morning, nap time was wherever the three dropped, usually in the same place, in one big lump on the living room floor.
       Ben seemed to be born with the bad "chase cars" gene, as he did that from nearly the very beginning.  We lived in the country and though he never got into the road, he delighted in chasing the cars and especially the trucks along the side of the road.  Later in life, he turned that chasing into something more exotic, but later for that.  We tried breaking him of chasing but to no avail.  Broken and chewed ropes, dug up fences.  It just wasn't worth it, considering he seemed territorial and didn't leave the property. 
      We moved north to a wonderful rural peninsula and a house on an orchard about a mile from a bay of Lake Michigan.  By this time, the boys were getting ready to start school, there was another child and one more on the way.  Days after school and weekends were filled with cutting wood for the winter pile.  Ben learned to fetch, rather chase pieces of wood.  It was the start of an obsession, chasing anything thrown and then chewing it up.  Yes, finishing it off until there were only toothpicks left.  This lifelong habit led to two by fours being dragged into the yard and after a few throws, over to the garage to spend a couple of days devouring the timber. 
      This fetching perchant led us to believe we now could have a baseball team in the back yard--the boys permanently up to bat, Dad the pitcher, Mom the catcher and Ben the outfielder.  We soon found that this position was never permanently  filled by a ball fetcher but by a ball thief.  Too much time spent chasing the fetcher led to the game never being a really bit favorite pastime, or else, if we did want to play, we had to lock Ben in the barn. 
      Now back to one of the car chasing aspects that had our whole end of the county talking.  The road that went past our house was a shortcut to the feed mill north of us, as well as the hardware store and whatever else fruit farmers went to in that village during the day. At that point you took a 90 degree turn in front of our house to go due north.   That was the paved road.  Now you could also go straight on the road, whereupon it turned to gravel, went up a steep hill and led to a couple other desirable places for farmers to go.  Ben, being the truck chasing  dog he was, devised a game.  He would chase the farm trucks down to the next road if they had turned north, of course never getting on the actual road.  If the truck went straight onto the gravel road, Ben's goal was to reach the top of the hill where the buzzing phone pole was before the truck got there.   But it proved to be too easy for him.  Ben beat the trucks every time.  So it occurred to him to sit in front of the house, wait until he determined which direction the truck was going, and then start running, but this time around the house in the opposite direction, just to give the truck a bit of a point advantage, or handicap, as it were.  Now, every farmer in the north of the county made it a point to drive the shortcut every day.  And the topic of talk, we heard from the hardware store owner, was whether they beat the dog.  "Yep, I beat 'em today!" or "Damn, I almost had that mutt, but he made it to the pole before me, and I gunned it hard."  Though we were only there for 2 years, the dog is still a legend up there. 
      By the time we moved to our own 40 acres in the southern part of Michigan,  Ben was five years old.   The trucks on this road weren't a real big challenge, so Ben took to chasing other things across the 40 acres, things like small aircraft and lightning.  The airport was nearby and every time a plane came by, Ben would traverse across the pasture, down the old cornfield to the far corner of the 40 acres, by the hickory tree.    He seemed to know where the 40 ended as he never crossed the old fence line.  And when the big thunderstorms came, no cowardly dog this.  While all the other dogs and cats cowered in the barn (yes, by this time five dogs and three cats and plenty of farm animals), Ben was off  across the field at the first crack of thunder, barking fiercely all the time.  Sometimes in an especially long thunderstorm, Ben would come back to the barn with laryngitis.  Everyone laughed about what he would really do if he caught one.
        The farm was Ben's heaven.  He had 40 acres to roam, a pond to swim in daily in the summer, a swamp to muck in,  other dogs to rule over, a driveway to protect when cars came in to get eggs, and two 10 acre fields to help farm.  Yes, help farm.  When it came time to hay the fields, it was Ben's duty,  so he thought , to lead the way in front of the tractor as we cut the hay, racked and baled it, and finally brought it in on the wagon.  Of course, everyone in the family was out there in the field to help bring in the bales, and Ben was there, running circles around the slow-moving wagon and that old yellow tractor.  Four wagons full later, Ben made it up to the barn and fell asleep in the loose hay while everyone unloaded and stacked the bales in the mow.
      Ben and the other big dog Stormy spent days chasing the two little dogs up and down the hill behind the barn, when there wasn't work to be done.  The littlest dog, Willie, though, had the big dogs in tow.  He would lead them on a merry chase several times up and down the hill, around the barn and finally made a mad dash under the picnic table. The big ones invariably skidded to a halt or hit their heads on the table.  This never seemed to faze Ben though, as he was already immune  to blows to the head, as regularly he managed to get hit on the head by the big "logs" he would bring up and beg to be thrown out.  (by big, I'm talking 4-7 ft. boards or limbs)  As he would shake his head and stagger a bit, he would pick up the log, work to balance it as he brought it back,  begging again and again.  If it were not for all the kids there to help with the throwing chore, it would have gotten weary.  (My husband and I regularly brought kids home for weekends from the residential special schools where we both taught.)  
      Well, other stories of the prowess of the mighty dog included  swimming across the lake to chase the six ducks back to shore so we could catch them for Thanksgiving dinner. His doggie friendships were numerous. The first dog Jessie (Voigts) had was the same age as Ben and the two of them were best of friends, standing on their hind legs and hugging and licking each other's faces when the  family visits came.     There were too many  times he came home with a mouth full of quills, never learning that lesson.  The legendary power tail that could wack anything placed on any surface for a distance of at least 5 feet.  His nose could scout anything dead on the property, and he would then promptly lead the pack to a good stinky dead carcass roll.   Ben led the dog pack in the famous Thanksgiving  raid. 

      It was a hot summer day in August when Ben was 17.  Never one to let old age get in the way, he was out in front of the tractor, helping with the farming.  The twins had already left home and just the girls were helping with the farm now, and old Ben.  Even Muttly was too old to come down to the field, but Ben, the oldest, remained true to his calling as a farm dog.  After four times up and down the field, Ben staggered and dropped by the edge of the field, right near his beloved pond and the high bush blueberries he had roamed in, chasing rabbits and chipmunks, while we had picked the ripened berries the week before.  We all held Ben, taking turns stroking him, while  Dad dug a grave right there.  We knew he would be gone soon.  We all cried, as we lowered him into the grave  at the end of the field by the pond.  The girls made a mound of rocks, taken  from the stone wall, over the head of the grave.  We called one of the boys long distance that night.  He bawled.  The other twin wouldn't find out about his friend until he came back from West Pack 2 months later.  Ben's pictures in every album  and on the bedroom picture wall make us smile at his legend every day.
 
copyright 2006  Carol Voigts