I was planting fenceposts. Back then, we coated post bottoms with creosote to preserve the wood from rot. Wise to my dog, Soc’s, ways of drinking things he shouldn’t, I guarded the creosote bucket like Cerberus before hell’s gates and stopped him mid-sally on his way to sample a mouthful. Thinking I came to play, he zigzagged out of my grasp and ran into the ditch where he disturbed a different kind of poison. Yellow jackets surfaced from a stirred-up ground nest and blitzed him like dive-bombers after the Bismarck. At first, I thought he was playing by the way he was yelping and rolling in the mud until he sprinted our way. We saw his escort then. Side-by-side we raced for the house, Uncle Harry and I darting inside the screen door and Soc skidding under the porch for cover.
We suffered some stings but nothing like Soc. By the time he quit caterwauling and we coaxed him out, he looked like a prizefighter who’d lost big time, one eye swelling shut beneath a puffy eyebrow. Even his tongue, hanging out during the retreat, sported a welt.
Uncle Harry, who teased that there weren’t enough nickels in a five and dime to leach out all the bee stings on Soc’s body, hollered for Aunt Helen.
“She’ll know what to do,” he reassured me.
Quick to the punch, she ordered us to wash him with dish soap and well water while she went in search of baking soda, meat tenderizer and iodine, the latter to keep him from licking off the cure to come. Adding water to make a paste of the ingredients, she rubbed him down until he looked like an elementary school paper mâché project. Then she washed him gingerly and dried him with towels, all the while blaming hapless Uncle Harry for not paying attention again. Even I earned a glare that time. Soc, on the other hand, spent the afternoon inside where Aunt Helen spoiled him with table scraps and attention.
Soc’s true hemlock, though, was skunks, a history with whom he was inclined to forget and doomed to repeat. With bird season bearing down on us, I started working him mornings before school and evenings after supper with a check cord, trying to put meaning to my commands. He was a genius at “sit,” probably because he smelled the food rewards in my pocket. “Stay” followed easily along with “no” and “heel.” With “here” or “come,” though, my inexperience at using both commands confused him. Couple confusion with young dog stubbornness, and disaster arrived when an unwelcome, early morning visitor impolitely waddled into our lives.
Too sleepy to discern between cat and skunk in a gray dawn, I paused with the check cord slack in my grasp. You’d think “come” meant “charge” given Soc’s missile-like launch toward the wary skunk that sprayed without discretion, its Iron Dome defense capable of downing a dozen dogs based on the jagged green streak that painted Soc’s chest. By the time I collared him, I reeked of stench as badly as he did. Suffice it to say that “skunked” for us would often mean more than an empty game pouch.
