Dark
Newt
TW: death of pet
The first thing I saw when we moved into this town was a dead dog in the road. Not a random country road but in what could be considered in town, in the median. Of the family I was the only one who saw it and thought, well, fuck, that’s a bad omen.
Animal lives are cheap here. The last time I researched it, there were over a quarter of a million (!) feral dogs on the Navajo Nation and from time to time they kill people (we are rural because this was the only place we could find to rent mid-Covid). pH and I stopped at the top of a nearby hill once to take pictures and were “approached” by a pack of feral dogs and we got back in the car in the nick of time. Maybe they would have been friendly…but I had my doubts. I mean, I’m not a person who’s ever been scared of dogs, but I haven’t gone for a neighborhood walk since, well, we got here.
Not long after we moved here, a small heeler showed up on our porch, in the middle of a blizzard, with three kittens in tow. They were tiny. The dog had a collar that was too tight (and starting to choke her). The dog was relatively recently postpartum and was nursing the kittens.
We named the dog Newt. Newt was always going to be a Rez dog (not actually a pejorative term, at least not here) which meant she was always going to wander, but we figured the best thing we could do for her would be to get her shots and get her spayed. This isn’t how I owned dogs in the past. It’s not how I’ll have a dog in the future. But we had no fence. There’s nothing akin to a no-kill shelter here. We accepted this was a shitty situation that would probably end badly, somehow but there are right and wrong things to do. She was scared of coming inside but eventually did. She ended up being the chillest dog pretty much ever. Never had to train her to do….anything. Never an accident.
In the summer she would take off and hang out with other dogs (we imagined) although dogs here being dogs, her pack was slowly thinned out and killed by other dogs.
Thankfully, Newt got along with all the dog packs nearby.
In the summers, she’d show up around midnight, bark to be let in, and would be out of the house again at first light. We had healthy food around, which meant she preferred eating at other neighbors’ houses (she was a community dog).
This went on for three years. Occasionally she’d be gone for longer and there would be texts with the neighbors, trying to find her. We discovered some guy down the street (let’s call him K because his name starts with a K) had been keeping her around because he wanted to get puppies from her. (Another neighbor laughed and said good luck with that; she’s been fixed.)
Monday night she didn’t show up. Okay; not too weird. Tuesday? Nope. By Thursday we were freaking out and texting with our (good) neighbor. Friday we tracked down K who said, “that dog ain’t comin’ back.” The story as it was reported to me was: she was hit by a car (a hit-and-run, he said), he found her, and he buried her.
So many reasons to think that story is a bunch of bullshit. So many. Like, why not fucking tell anyone? My theory is that K’s responsible for killing her. I know what it’s like to try to dig in the ground here; you can’t without an actual backhoe. I don’t know what happened to her. I’ve got another neighbor trying to figure out where she’s buried because that’s a reasonable question a reasonable person should be able to answer, yes? So far nothing from K.
It took me a long time after we moved here for me to say out loud, “I hate it here.” I tried to be positive. I tried to see the best in the place. Accepting that something is going to end badly, somehow, is not the same thing as being ready for it. Fuck you, K. And RIP Newt, best girl.
2 Responses to “Dark”
Damn, I’m sorry.
Thanks–this place. This has been the longest four years of my life.