On Christmas Eve it is our tradition to kill our own food and cook it. Actually we kill it by cooking it, shoving live lobsters into a pot of boiling water. More, we eat raw oysters for an appetizer, prying the shells apart with our favorite oyster knives. It’s as close as we get to frontier food. Of course there are many Texans we know who kill and dress deer, hogs, even slaughter a longhorn on occasion, and fill their freezers with food to grill or smoke all the livelong day. My partner and I are not native Texans nor do we have a ranch. Nor do we hunt or fish. Truth be told, we used to be a little squeamish about cooking the live lobsters we buy on Christmas Eve at Quality Seafood but only until we learned how much better they taste fresh. Now we clip the rubber bands off the claws and plunge them into the boiling pot before their little lobster consciousness realizes what happened, what with being on ice in the fridge in an open plastic bag for the prior few hours.
Live lobster headed into the pot.
Our dogs are similarly civilized (soft? unskilled?) or so we thought. We have a 75-pound boxer and two miniature dachshunds weighing in at 9 and 12 pounds. We live in a neighborhood full of wildlife. Deer roam the yards, possums are a regular nightly sighting, and coyotes even come out sometimes. It’s not like we’re in the woods—we are effectively two blocks away from Bee Caves Road along one of the busiest stretches. But in the neighborhood there are hills and undeveloped sections, especially when you get back towards Redbud Trail, Westlake Drive, and Lake Austin. Wildlife central.
The boxer loves to play. When a small armadillo or possum or feral kitten makes it into the yard (we have a six-foot cedar fence around the back yard), she chases, catches, and tosses the animal around in the air. She loves it. Unfortunately, the [insert small animal species here] dies halfway through the game. Possums literally “play possum” and, when they get away with it, the dog loses interest. The next morning, the “dead” possum will have walked out of the yard.
A year ago we got the two miniature dachshund puppies in Luckenbach. We drove out Highway 290, through Johnson City, nearly to Fredericksburg before we turned off onto Luckenbach Road—a two-lane curving hill country road if there ever was one. We passed ranch land, a gated place or two, then some homes closer to the road that looked like they’d been there forever. One had multiple buildings, barns maybe? Storage? We saw a man in a football jersey and plaid pajama pants prowling along the side of a white building on his property carrying a shotgun. Clearly something was up and he’d been rousted from his recliner on this Sunday afternoon to take care of it. Then we saw the turn-off to Luckenbach Loop and, ahead on the roadside, an electric sign in the back of an old pickup truck advertising music nightly at the Dance Hall.
The new puppies, in early 2014
The puppies are adorable and, as it turns out, fierce. In an effort to keep them from chewing on shoes and furniture, I have bought dozens of plush dog toys. It doesn’t matter how many toys I bring home, there is always ONE that they both must have. Racing around and squabbling ensues. It takes less than a day for the squeaker to be extracted. One toy, Flat Cat, did not have stuffing, just a squeaker. A neat hole was chewed, right where Flat Cat’s mouth is; the squeaker was removed and destroyed. Flat Cat is still a favorite, carried around and required for sleeping, but Flat Cat now looks like Surprised Cat with a gaping hole of a mouth.
Other toys, the ones that have stuffing, are eviscerated within days. The limp fake fur “skin” becomes the toy dragged around the house and somewhere a section of our home is redecorated to resemble a blizzard—white fluffy stuffing covers a larger area than seems possible given the size of the formerly stuffed toy. Lately, before the stuffing comes out, the fur is chewed off so that the stuffed tiger or leopard looks like it has some sort of fabric mange.
For our part, we thought maybe the dogs were just neurotic and had specific but unknowable methods to their madness. Then, the squirrel thing happened. There are quite a few fat, bold squirrels that run along the top of our fence, up and down our oak and ash trees, and venture down to the grass where they have buried nuts and other treasures. When the dachshunds were puppies the squirrels taunted them, running down the tree to just above where the puppies could leap in failed attempts to get them. The squirrels chattered at the puppies, flicked their squirrel tails in the air, and ran back up the tree. It drove the dogs mad. They had had enough. One day, when I returned from errands, the two dachshunds were sitting in a single kennel. I knew something had happened. Upstairs, I learned the sordid story. The dogs were making a huge racket in the backyard. My partner thought one of them was being attacked and—in her fear that I would leave her if anything happened to the puppies on her watch (her own fear, I have never said I would leave if anything happened to one of the adorable puppies that I love dearly)–she investigated. She found them in the shrubbery, near the corner drain pipe of our gutters, squealing and barking and pulling a fat squirrel out of the drain by its tail. She tried to call them off. She poked into the thick shrubbery with a rake handle. She shot jet streams into the bushes with the hose. The puppies would not come out. They killed the squirrel and still would not come out. Somehow she got one of them, then the other, wrangled into her arms and locked them in the kennel. Hearing the story, the delivery was hilarious: “Indie just plays with wildlife, but those two are cold-blooded killers.” The teller was not amused—she was frustrated and grossed out and still afraid that one of the dogs might have been maimed in the mayhem. Outside, I found the squirrel in the shrubbery near the drain pipe. It was dead. It was huge, maybe bigger than the puppies themselves. And some of it’s fur had been chewed off.
Cold-blooded Killers
This was their first kill. They had just turned a year old. All their stuffed animals had apparently been training exercises; with the live squirrel they thought they were in the Wildlife Olympics and they had gone for the gold. Two weeks later, I couldn’t get the dogs to come in at bedtime. One of them was near the trampoline sniffing what looked to be a large stuffed animal. It was a possum. It looked dead. The boxer had lost interest and come inside. One dachshund was poking its nose near the possum, sniffing. The other was running along the fence line looking for new blood. I put them inside and latched the doggie door; they frantically pawed and cried to get out and kill again. When I went to remove the possum, I realized it just had slobber from the boxer; I didn’t see any actual blood and it wasn’t chewed up like the squirrel. Plus, I was tired; it was dark and cold. I decided to leave it. The next morning it was gone.
The not-dead, slobber-coated possum.
The puppies are fully themselves. They were bred by a good breeder. They are from a hard-scrabble place in the wilds of the hill country and yet they spent the first six weeks of their lives indoors, contained with their litter mates and their mother. It is their instincts that drive them to destroy toys, to hunt and kill wildlife—and roll in it like hound dogs to get the scent on themselves. Apparently, it is also their instinct to burrow under the covers, rearrange everything until they get it just right and, finally, curl up behind my knees in the bed, completely buried in 400 thread-count sheets and a down comforter on a pillow-top mattress.
We are all fully ourselves and we are all fully masked. We call it manners or social skills in people. We call it good training in dogs. We all have a dark, unspoken side. A killer side maybe, but at the very least a side which would allow us to be ruthless and, yes, cold-blooded. We tame it. We keep it inside. Perhaps we keep it ignorant and, as a result, unskilled, which is probably what my cousin who runs a gun range would say. At the same time, maybe it is that dark side, or some thread of it, that allows us to survive. It is what allows us to leave relationships and manage losses of all kinds. Right? Isn’t there some good that comes from being cold-blooded, or having the capacity to be cold-blooded? Or, is it that being cold-blooded must be balanced by all the good elsewhere in us, all the good we do, by the confessions we make. If confession is being honest about what we feel, then does that honesty raise us above animal instinct?
Native Americans killed to eat and used every bit of the animal. They apologized to it after they killed it. They thanked it for all it would provide. They did that for animals, but reading Philipp Meyer’s The Son, it seems the Comanches did nothing like that when they raped and pillaged a homestead in the Texas territory. White people were not animals that would provide anything for them. The distinction between the respectful killing of animals and the killing of people is an important one. Is the animal instinct required for each rooted in the same place, if killing to survive is killing to survive?
A long time ago, I was writing a story and now I can’t remember anything about what was going on—or was supposed to be going on—narratively except that the protagonist went outside her house onto a patio where a dog was chained. She picked up the dog’s metal food bowl and began beating the dog in the head with it. I stopped writing. I got up and never went back to that story. I have always loved and spoiled my dogs. We have had completely co-dependent relationships and have been very happy. I would never raise a hand to a dog and yet I was beating one to death in a story. Did stopping there keep me from developing as a writer? Maybe. Did it keep me from developing as a person? Probably. Is it incumbent upon us as sentient beings to have the courage not just to face our fears but to face what we fear in ourselves? To face the unknown capacities we unwittingly harbor? Is awareness an opportunity to understand, or try to? To attempt to manage? Can we live without letting the terrible parts of ourselves be known, even to ourselves? Is that a fear-based existence? Is it fear- and ignorance-based? And what happens when that part of us is cut off, silenced? When I had cancer, the only way we knew the fairly large tumor was there was that it had become twisted, cut off its own blood supply, and part of it was dying. That’s what caused the pain that brought it to our attention. Even bad tissue, when it is dying, hurts. If the bad parts of us are shut down, does that cause psychic pain? Does it kill part of us? If so, how does that manifest?
A good friend has a job which involves working with a wide swath of the public—she is a nurse. As you might imagine there are a number of difficult people she must deal with, resulting in a correlatively high degree of frustration for her. She is fond of saying that she can handle the aggressive people and she can handle the stupid people. “It’s the aggressively stupid people I can’t deal with,” she said.
For my part, I wrestle with these questions of the good and evil in the world and in myself. I am handicapped by an extraordinary lack of formal education in philosophy, theology, and survival training, among other disciplines that might provide elucidation. My hope is to learn what I can, intellectually and experientially, and, at the very least, try my best not to be aggressively stupid.
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