A Dog with One Blue Eye

I told my husband we should get rid of the dog.

It was a Siberian Husky with one blue and one brown eye. When he looked at you, playfully, with his head cocked to one side, you might be enchanted. But then he would run and jump on you so roughly that his paws would bruise your skin and his claws would leave red marks.

That summer we were staying in a little house in the country outside of Hillsborough, North Carolina. It seemed like there were thunderstorms all the time. The storms never seemed to pass to the right or the left of us; instead, they would center themselves directly over the house and then stay there, simultaneous lightning and thunder, and water falling violently from the sky.

The house was surrounded by ten acres of land. The dog should have been content with all that space. It was enough space for a normal dog to wander around in without getting into trouble. He could have chased squirrels and birds and nobody would have minded.

One day I heard a lot of barking coming from the neighbor’s property. Their land was parallel to us, sloping downward to a sort of gulley and a stream, eventually coming to their house, which was at the bottom of the slope. There was a wire fence enclosing their property, to keep in the sheep and goats that wandered up and down the hill and drank from the stream.

The barking was coming from the direction of that gulley and I wondered if it was our dog. He didn’t come back for a long time.

The next day there was a knock on the door. It was the neighbor who owned the sheep, a tall guy who worked as a firefighter. He said that one of his sheep had been killed and he thought the husky did it. He said could we make sure and keep him tied up. Once they tasted blood and made their first kill, he said, they kept on killing. It was in their nature. Like wolves.

But keeping him tied up was not as simple as he might have thought.

There was a wooden animal pen that was fairly secure on the outside of the house and I locked him in the pen. He immediately started digging a hole under the fence like a prisoner with a life sentence tunneling out of jail. The holes he dug were deep and wide and he would force his body through them until he was free.

I tried tying him with a heavy rope to a tree but he would chew through the rope. Then I tried a heavier collar but he would shake himself back and forth and pull backwards so vigorously and quickly that he would either break the collar or get his head out of it. And then he would run off into the woods.

I walked through the woods looking for him. But it was no use, because he would not come when called. In the woods, I looked at the trees all around me. Because of the rain and moisture that summer, the leaves were big and fat and huge spider webs started appearing, white extensive nets draped over the branches. Even if you did not see the spider, you knew that something that created a web that big had to be oversized itself. I had seen programs on television about people with spider bites where the venom slowly started eating away at their flesh until more and more was lost to decay.

In bed sometimes, I laid awake and looked at the window of the second story loft. The wood around the window frame had cracks that I knew were big enough for a spider to crawl through. My husband didn’t sleep upstairs with me. He slept downstairs in front of the TV, and he would leave it on, loud, while he was sleeping. “Can you turn it down?” I would ask, from the loft, and he would either say nothing, or he would say “Shut up! It’s my damn TV.”

The dog would come back, in the middle of the night, with muddy paws and a muddy face. I prayed he had not killed another sheep.

There were lots of bugs too that summer, mosquitoes and God knows what else, and one morning I woke up with swollen glands on the left side of my body and armpit because of all the bites. My neck was stiff and painful and I could barely move my head to one side.

My husband was on his way out the door. “I think I should go to the Urgent Care,” I told him. “I need the car today,” he said, and he left. The dog darted out of the door after him, and disappeared into the woods.

I felt like I was running a fever. But I opened the door and went outside when I thought I heard barking from the gulley. I walked over by the woodpile and jumped back as a black snake slithered out from under the lumber.

I called the dog, but I didn’t expect him to come back. I wondered if my husband would bring the car back before the Urgent Care closed. But I really didn’t expect him to.

The day passed and the sky got dark. The thunder and lightning started, and the heavy rain came down. I wondered how many sheep were dead, and I thought that maybe the best thing would be if the neighbor took a shotgun and just killed the husky. He might be pretty, but he would never bring anybody anything but trouble.