Ben Metcalf - Against the Country

Almost died, on this and many other occasions, of infection or crush wound but refused and grew larger, which naturally he should not have, and grew stronger, which naturally he should not have, and in time there was no animal in the area who could match him for size and strength and simple deadliness. Earned, by that size, and that strength, and that simple deadliness, a respect from our father we children could not hope to match, since we never thought to greet the man in the yard with a turtle we were currently chewing to death; nor to lay before him the corpse of a groundhog or a cat we had no good cause to kill; nor to shove our snouts repeatedly into pond water after fish, always missing because we did not understand the principle of refraction; nor to jump up and bite viciously at airplanes, due to a possibly related issue with depth perception; nor to swim around and around, back at the pond, in a seeming schizophrenia, until it was noticed that we were chasing after a dragonfly we had no hope of catching until, suddenly, we raised up out of the water and ( chomp! ) it was gone.

Bounced in the fields whenever everybody, dogs and people, headed back to the pond. Was assumed for years to be bouncing for joy, he did so love the water. Eventually we learned that he was frightening field mice into showing themselves so that he might eat them. Throat-killed a deer, just before I left, and spent most of a day dragging it up into the yard. Had, nonetheless, a retriever’s mouth so soft he once caught a too-low bird on the wing and brought it down to my father, who did not look until the dog got his attention with a “Woof,” at which “Woof” the bird flew away.

Never bit a person, this dog. He may, for all I know, have murdered Blackie, and Brown, and Ginger, and Jackie, and all the rest, but he never did bite into us.

I last saw him many years later, alone but alive in the backyard of a Southern Illinois rancher. He was deaf and mostly blind now, and I did not think he would recognize me, but he did, and he gave me a bounce, and I said I was not a field mouse, and he licked me. I spooned with him in the grass for a spell, as we had when he was just a puppy, and then I let him be. Later, by telephone, I learned of his fate. My father, ailing himself by then, though we did not know it, had come across the near-dead dog in the yard and had gone to fetch a shovel. He began to dig, and by the time the hole was done the dog was ready for it.

BEN METCALF was born in Illinois and raised in that state and later in rural Virginia. He was for many years the literary editor of Harper’s Magazine . He has since taught at Columbia University’s School of the Arts and joined the Lapham’s Quarterly editorial board. His writing has appeared in The Baffler, Harper’s Magazine, The Best American Essays , and elsewhere.