David's Blague

Ralph was the fastest, smartest, bravest dog in all Klickitat County, maybe even in the whole state. I'm not saying he was the friendliest, but he did have friends, and Dan and Doug and I were three of them.

We found Ralph, or maybe he found us, on Spring Creek Farm. We weren't farming it, but we moved out there because Roger Falter was farming it and there was a house on it, and he already had a house. Mr. Falter went to church with us. He told us before we moved out there that we might see a dog that he'd been feeding, but that was all I remember him saying.

The place is still there, and I was surprised recently to find it on Google street view:


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Anyway, when we got to Spring Creek Farm, it was early in the summer of 1983. We walked up, and there was Ralph, limping along on three legs, with the fourth leg tucked up underneath him.

I guess he was part Saint Bernard. He was a big dog, with a mouthful of teeth, and my cousin Matt used to call him Cujo after the dog in the Stephen King novel, but we'll come back to that later, and why it wasn't a very good nickname for the fastest, smartest, bravest dog in all of Klickitat County, maybe even in the whole state.

So here's this big dog with questionable social skills and he's got a bad foot, and Dad was only recently gone back to work after getting his back broken by a tree, and it's pretty clear the dog is in bad shape. On the farm, this was generally the sort of circumstance that would lead to the dog being euthanized, by which I mean someone would dig a hole, put the dog in the hole, and shoot it. That's how dogs are euthanized in the country.

But, for whatever reason, we took the dog in to see Carl Conroy, the vet, whose daughter Jodi was in my class, and he told us that it looked to him like Ralph had been caught in a coyote trap and he'd pulled hi foot out and pulled most the skin off of it. He couldn't do much with it, but he didn't see any reason to amputate it, since the wound itself seemed to be healing up okay. Carl told us the foot was just kind of dead.

We only ever got Ralph to ride in the truck twice, I think. That time and once when he got a mouth full of porcupine quills that we just couldn't get out with pliers.

Whenever there were any people around, Ralph would tuck that leg up under him and limp around like he was a three legged dog, which I guess he sort of was. Except that after we'd only been on the farm for a little while, we heard a noise across the fields over by the canyon that sounded like:

"Rrrrowf!"

"Yi yi yi yi yi!"

Wouldn't you know that Ralph was out playing some kind of game with a coyote, where he'd chase the little bugger across the field until he caught it. He'd "Rrrrowf!" at it, and then run away until the coyote gave up chasing. The he'd turn around again, and chase the coyote back until he caught up, and so on.

Ralph was running on all four legs, without any apparent problem.

That wasn't even the surprising part of the story. The surprising part of the story, is that when he came back, he had those damn coyotes' lunch with him. A juicy, meaty spine from a little deer, that we figured he must have taken from the coyotes, though I bet he left some for them, too.

I think he was friends with the coyotes, too. And he tried to make friends with the skunks and the porcupines, but those are stories for later.