Full Moon Mutts

The Full Moon does something for the mutts. I leave the back door open, and that does even more for them. It’s late, three in the morning, but I can’t sleep and they don’t want to sleep; they want to hunt. I get up and get dressed and Bert dances around the room. It’s not a large hunting area, but the dogs don’t care. A little more than an acre and a half fenced in is plenty room to snuffle around in, and hope for the best.

I can see the dog paths Bert and Sam have created out here. I wonder if they use these path as sort of a olfactory roadmap of where everything is. They start at the Southwest corner, where the brush is thickest and work their way towards the center. I stop walking and listen. Nothing. There is no sound. The two dogs have disappeared entirely. I know they’re there. I know where they are. But they’ve become predators again. They’ve become wild wolves trying to track down prey. Something scurries in the underbrush and I hear Bert make that sound. When Bert breaks towards a prey animal, he gives a short coughing growl. It’s an odd sound, and he never makes it unless he is chasing something. I can’t see either dog and I sure as hell can’t see what they’re chasing. I hear them both. The animal breaks towards the center of the woods, where I am, and I realize the dogs have planned this. Chase the prey towards the middle, chase it towards Mike, and then that will be that. They’re right, of course, I hear the sound of the chase coming right at me, then I see a shadow twenty feet in front of me. Twenty feet. That’s how close Sam got to me before I saw him. A dog moving at top speed can cover twenty feet in less than a second. I would have less than a second to decide what to do if that seventy-pound tame wolfkin decided to find out what it looks like from the top of the food chain.

Sam is silent. Part Greyhound, part Black Lab, Sam isn’t interested in the sport of hunting. Sam doesn’t play with his food. The abuse heaped upon him before Bert discovered him turned him into a cold-blooded killer. Anything not of the pack is a threat to the pack. Every crime is punishable by death. Nothing escapes, nothing walks away, and Sam, never misses. The animal senses me and tries to break back between the two dogs. Sam is waiting for this. Sam knew this was coming. The shadows hide all but the dark movement of Sam’s body and I can see Bert charging through the brush to join him. It’s odd that Bert is more invisible than Sam. Jet Black is Sam, but that provides contrast with all that isn’t total darkness. Bert is brown, tan, and reddish brown. He blends into the background as if he doesn’t exist. Both are barely visible. Both converge on one point. I could stop this, and maybe I ought to stop it. But I struck a bargain with these two long ago; this is their territory to do with as they please. I do not make the rules in the woods and I do not interfere. It’s dead, whatever it was. Sam pads over to me with his head up and his tail wagging. Once Sam has killed something, he never looks back at it. He doesn’t examine it, he doesn’t snuffle it, and he doesn’t ever notice it again. This isn’t hunting for food. This isn’t hunting for sport. This is pure unadulterated territorialism executed by an animal who believes deep in his soul that there just isn’t enough food to go around. This is the only place on earth Sam has gotten a decent meal on a regular basis. He is more that happy to fight, kill, and if it comes to it, die, to protect that. Bert just likes to hunt. Bert snuffles the dead animal and lunges at it once I get near. Just in case, Mike, just in case it might attack, you know. Bert is more likely to carry a dead animal around a bit.

The body is limp and lifeless. It was once an armadillo, a young one, but it did not heed the warming of the mutt path around the perimeter. Armor means nothing here. Sam kills by grabbing an animal by its head and shaking it until the neck breaks. I’ve never seen it take more than a few seconds. One second to break out into full stride, five more to kill; a half dozen seconds separates the living from the dead out here.

As we walk back towards the house, the mutts take up position on the flanks again. It never stops. They keep their noses down, tails up, and every fiber of their being pure canine. We leave behind us a reminder to the rest of the world that this is our home and that here dwell predators. I wonder if I could stop them, and I wonder if the fact I do not says more about humans than it does about dogs.

Take Care,

Mike