(animal injury/death)
When I was 9 or 10, one of the rez dogs that hung around the teacher trailers attacked a porcupine and got a faceful of quills. We sat for hours cutting the ends and pulling them out with pliers, wiping away the blood while the dog shook and tried to stay still. We did what we could to clean him up and prevent infection, but rez dogs lead their own lives, and he had gotten what he needed from us. A few weeks later, he attacked another porcupine and showed up again with long brown needles all over his face. Edward, the school maintenance man, shook his head at us while my mom sat on the steps of our trailer and pulled the quills out. He said, "A dog who bites a porcupine will never stop, he'll go after them again and again, trying to get even." My mother stubbornly finished the job, smeared bacitracin on his face, and the dog ran off with the rest of the pack.
A few weeks later, he was back again with hundreds of thin white quills in his muzzle like a dandelion. Wounds on top of wounds, infected and too sore to let us touch him, too sore to eat or drink. My mother stood outside and talked with the other teachers and Edward. She came back into the trailer looking grim. When she had to explain tough parenting subjects like sex or racism or homophobia or death, my mother just laid things out plainly and let me draw my own conclusions. “The dog won’t stop, so Edward is going to put him down.”
“Put him down?”
“Kill him.”
“How?”
“With a gun.”
“When?”
“He’s taking him now, out over the hill.”
My chest clenched up, but I couldn’t think of anything else we could do. It was a 3-4 hour drive over dirt roads to the nearest veterinarian. We couldn’t afford to take him. And even if we could, he would just do it again when he got better. So far the other dogs he hung out with - including my dog, Buckwheat - hadn’t attacked a porcupine, but maybe they would if he did it in front of them. If we didn't do something, he’d suffer and die of infection, thirst, or starvation.
Our couch was against the window, and my mom sat down next to me to look out. I don’t know if I looked, too, and saw Edward walking away with a long gun over one arm and the dog on a rope lead, or if I just visualized it into a memory, but I can still see it. I slid off the couch onto the floor and pushed my fingers into my ears. My mom put her hand on my shoulder. “I know. But this is the way they do things,” she said, and I could hear her, so I knew I’d hear the shot no matter how hard I covered my ears.
There was a long quiet minute, a small distant muffled bang and a sharp pain in my chest, and then a horrible relief that it was all over. I felt guilty about being relieved.
This is how it was. My mother rescued bugs as a kid, and later on she learned to save birds and kittens and dogs. Once she carried a rattlesnake out of the school on a shovel and the Navajo admin had to have a ceremony to cleanse the building because they saw her talking to it ("Don't you try to bite me, go home"). Before switching to teaching, she took two years of nursing school, so she can give injections, tape broken legs, and staunch blood. Smaller animals only survive half the time, though, and when they die they tend to do it at night. We woke up to a lot of dead animals. I have a harder time with rehabbing than she does. I feel panicky pain for bad injuries, and have nightmares about finding hurt, drowning, or dead animals in boxes or tied to things. Every day they survive is another night of nightmares, and every morning is a Hitchcockian walk across the room to look into the cage or shoebox or coop to see if they’re still alive.
So I wasn’t too happy about finding another baby bird on Father’s Day. The best thing is to try to reunite it with its parents, so I spent the day climbing the roof, trying to get it back in its nest, letting the parents feed it while they tried to lead it up the lychee tree branches, but it tumbled down again each time, and wouldn’t stay in the makeshift nesting box tied to the tree. My mother came to help, but it wouldn’t accept bird formula or sugar water, so we set it on the patio table for its parents to feed for as long as they could, then cuddled it up at night in a little cage, nestled on warmers and away from the cats.
It woke up dead. Mike took it outside to bury because I was having a hard time looking at it, feeling like I’d killed it. (Too warm? Not warm enough? Could I have gotten more food into it?) You have to remind yourself that all you can do is your best, and it's better to die warm, safe, and dry than cold, scared, and wet.
Then yesterday, over at my mother's house, the injured cardinal died. It had a traumatic brain injury and was partially paralyzed on one side, but she was giving it a chance to recover because birds can regenerate nerve damage better than humans. It was improving and seemed happy, but it must have had a stroke or aneurism in the night.
For some reason it had me thinking about that rez dog and the porcupine.
It all makes songs hit differently on your morning commute.
I'm glad Zenny was away at camp this week, and the boys slept through it. I'll take all the nightmares.
