Who’s afraid of the big bad woof?
- Feb 2
- 9 min read
“But if a mask is what it takes to get back to normal, I can deal with that. I think we’re finally on our way!”
The wind was cool in the early-morning shade. It drowned out the Witch’s voice so she had to shout for Mom to hear her stories. It blew through Mom’s sweat, freezing her front paws into useless stumps. Mom grabbed and flailed at the branches reaching across the trail to pull herself up with paws that couldn’t feel the sticks they were grasping for. I bounded up the slope, Mom scritching and slipping behind me. Even with the slippery mud, loose rocks, and overgrown bushes, it was easy to tell where to put your next step by where the bushes were thinnest. That is, until the trail was swallowed by the most aggressive flower bush I’d ever seen.
It was taller than the other bushes, towering high over Mom’s head. There was no walking around it; it was stuffed tight into all the good walking spaces and reached around and over us like a long-armed defender trying to block a basket. It flexed its beefy leaves. The flowers stuck out their tongues as if they were hissing.
I stopped and waited for Mom to catch up and give me instructions. The Witch’s droning voice told me where Mom was without my even looking, so I turned back to the bush and casually sniffed for clues. A rustling from deep inside the shrub ripped my attention away. What sounded like a giant creature was crashing through the brush.
When Mom saw my ears stiffen, she rushed to my side and grabbed ahold of my collar. The Witch didn’t notice a thing and droned on with her story at the same volume, which suddenly sounded much louder than before. It’s supposed to be Mom’s job to shush the Witch if we hear someone coming, but that tattletale wouldn’t recognize Mom’s freeze-dried fingers as a living thing. As the Witch nattered on, the rustling among the flowers turned and came toward us. Mom dropped my collar and poked more insistently.
With Mom distracted, I alone was left to deal with the monster closing in on us through the Great Wall of Flowers.
“COME OUT WITH YOUR PAWS UP!!!” I screamed in the voice-cracking bow-wow-wow I save for real danger, like if the mailman actually opens the gate.
Mom clapped her stumps together. “Oscar! C’mere!” she snarled in her dragon voice.
I paused just long enough for Mom to catch up, but I kept my hackles unholstered and never took my eyes off the rustling branches.
“I think it might be a bear,” I whispered, before bow-wow-wowing again loud enough to shake the mountain.
The flowers trembled. Now that Mom was here, I looked around for the best escape route. If I got away first, the bear would be more likely to gobble her up instead. It would be sad if Mom got eaten, but it wouldn’t be so bad to live a collarless life in the woods with the Raccoon family.
“Don’t you dare take off!” Mom hissed, hooking her frozen claws around my collar and trapping me for monster meat.
The bush split open and a couple of scrawny humans stepped out. I looked for signs of what breed they were to assess the threat, but their Captain Kangaroo hats and little round sunglasses might have been anything from software engineers to PhD students. Luckily, neither breed is aggressive unless poorly socialized to dogs.
“Cheeses, he never barks at people like that. I thought you were a bear,” Mom said without releasing her ice-claw from behind my hackles, which were still twice their normal size.
“I’m glad he did,” said the she-bear. “We lost the trail and almost went in the other direction until we heard him.”
“You shouldn’t go around scaring people like that,” I barked. “I wasn’t scared, but Mom had to use her dragon voice and I bet she probably sprayed her anal gland.”
When the danger had passed, Mom finally let go of my collar and scowled. “What the hell is the matter with you?”
“I thought they were dangerous,” I said. “Gol-ly, if you hadn’t been around to use as a shield, I don’t know what I would have done.”
Mom’s scowl softened. “It’s okay to be scared. We all confuse the danger in our imaginations with real life sometimes. But you really can’t get so worked up that you might hurt someone. What would’ve happened if you’d bitten one of those nice people?”
“I’d tell them it was an accident and then it would be okay. Once I explain that whoopsie-daisies, I thought you were the big, bad wolf, everyone would laugh, wipe up the blood, and keep hiking.”
“That’s not how it works, Oscar. Accidents happen, but there are consequences when you can’t control your behavior and someone gets hurt. Especially for loudmouths with sharp teeth like you.”
“Can’t you just tell people I didn’t mean it? If I wag a little to show I’m sorry, I bet they’d forgive me.”
“Have you ever heard of Oscar Pistorius?”
“Another Oscar? Is he a runner, like me?”
“Yeah. A really good one. Or, he used to be anyway. They sent him to prison because he shot his partner and she died. He said he thought she was a burglar, but a lot of people didn’t believe him.”
“Oh boy, I bet she was real mad when they brought her back to life. But I’m sure they had a good laugh when he explained why he thought she was a mailman.”
“You can’t take back murder. Accident or not, the result is the same and an innocent person is gone forever.” Mom looked sad. “They can’t let him keep walking free if he’s dangerous when he’s scared. That’s why he went to jail.”
“Why didn’t he tuck back his ears to make his eyes look extra big? Or cry to show everyone that he was really, really sorry?” I asked.
“He did cry, but it didn’t matter. Even accidents have consequences and there are things that being sorry doesn’t undo. You don’t want to wind up like Oscar Pistorius, do you?”
“I know you’ll protect me, Mom. I’m not worried.”
I followed her into the flower bush. She let go of a branch and it slapped me in the face, but I forgave her because I knew it was an accident.
“It goes both ways, you know,” she said over her shoulder. “Did you know that a lot of people are scared of you?” She stepped out of the bush and knocked the leftover leaves and petals off her hat and sleeves before hiking on.
“Me? But I’m a snuggle-butt. What’s not to like? Look at my lovable smile!” I bared my long, shiny teeth as a reminder.
“Some people don’t have enough experience with dogs. When they see a dog like you running toward them, they don’t see the floppy tongue in your smile and the wag in your tail. They just hear you barking and see a mouthful teeth and think that you’re coming to eat them. I live in fear of what might happen if you scare the wrong person, because I can’t protect you if an accident happens. That’s why I get so upset when you greet strangers like a bat out of hell.”
“That makes sense. It’s like that nasty dog in the igloo in the woods or that lady who wanted to muzzle you. Some people just turn their ugliness outward when they’re scared. If some dumdum can’t tell a good dog from a bad dog, somedog might get hurt. Obviously we’re all safer sending them to the pound like the Bad Oscar.”
Mom wagged her head. “People don’t go to jail for being scared of dogs, no matter how wrong they are.”
“What? How can that be?”
“Danger is in the eye of the beholder. If enough people are afraid of the same thing, you don’t need to be right to convince others that your mistakes were a good idea. Those people don’t just get to walk free, they spend the rest of their lives thinking they were right and never learn their lesson.”
“But you can’t let them get away with that. Someone could get hurt.”
“We’re trying, Spud. We’re really, really trying.”
We didn’t get lost but once, and then only for a minute or two before the ground evened out and began to behave. Before long, it did what Mom loves best and opened its trees wide to flash a clear view of chiseled mountains against a neon-grey sky.
Without trees to block their way, Mom’s eyes climbed the tallest mountains, searching them like a cereal-box maze for a route to the tippity-top. It was a relief that the mountains were so far away and my paws wouldn’t have to follow the perilous route Mom’s eyes found. It looked slippery up there. I drained my bowl and we sat together for a little longer, taking in the mountains and the sparkly sky-grey lake in the distance.
After a few miles, the trail turned and faced a raging river. We’d crossed a few little streams already, but they all had sock-safe stepping stones. This river was deep enough for the water to have a mind of its own, and there were no hopping rocks to keep a landlubber dog from getting swept away.
I followed Mom up and down the bank, looking for a place to outsmart the river. Every so often, Mom poked a stone with a toe to see if it wobbled, which it always did. Once she had goaded the river into a white fury Mom stopped searching.
“What now?” I asked.
“We get wet,” Mom sighed.
Rawr, said the river.
I stayed on the bank and watched Mom stagger over the pointy, slippery underwater rocks as the river did its best to push her over. When I was sure that she definitely wasn’t coming back, I splashed in.
Once the river saw that we were worthy, it relaxed into a sparkling lake. It sunned itself, sprawling shamelessly without regard to the ring of equally nude peaks gathered around to gawk. Mom oohed and aahed at their reflections in the lake as if she hadn’t been looking at a less ripply version of the same mountains all morning.
I’d first seen this lake from above a few years ago when I climbed to the top of the pyramid-shaped mountain that was now waving hello from the far bank. From up high, this lake had looked like a skin of water no deeper than a puddle in a flooded car kennel. It beckoned me to run across it just for the pleasure of making a tidal wave.
Now that I was standing on the lake’s shore, I saw through its lies. What made it look so shallow from the sky were the Jillians of drowning rocks poking their faces above the water for a last gasp of air. They looked small from the surface, but underneath, their gigantic roots disappeared icebergily into the sky-grey abyss. Some desperately held up a single, bedraggled tree like the cartoon finger of a drowning man showing how many bobs he has left before joining the mermaids. I wondered what other mysteries might be hidden below the gem-grey water, but you could take a lifetime getting to know the heart of a lake, and we still had a long way to walk.
“Hey, Mom. Where’s the trail?” I asked, trying to look calm as bugs buzzed in my ears and attacked my eyeballs.
Her eyes climbed out of the lake and back onto the land around our paws. “Oh.” She reached for the Witch with one hand while the other slapped it away because there was a mosquito on it.
“You weren’t supposed to cross that river back there, you dimwit,” the Witch navigated.
“Dog doo. This is the wrong trail,” Mom confirmed.
When we reached the river again, Mom searched for the place where we’d crossed before. I could tell by our scent trail that we’d come out a ways down the bank, but Mom has no scents of direction, even when she’s only been away for a few minutes. She looked at the river, baffled. Her eyes landed on something and purpose returned to her stomp. I followed her up the bank to where four logs just so happened to fall across the river alongside each other like a bridge.
“What luck!” I said, tromping across before Mom had time to change her mind and go for a swim.
Life is like that sometimes, I thought as Mom tottered across to meet me. Something can be so difficult and uncomfortable that you dread the next time you need to face it, but when you come back and look at it from another side, you see the solution you were missing the first time. The next time people thought that everyone was out to get them, I was sure that they would remember what the boogeyvirus taught us about building bridges. Then, instead of fighting over who started it, everyone would reach out their hands to steady each other and feel the togetherness that washes over you when you cross something deep together and meet safely on the other side.
I was ready for a leisurely picnic in the shade of the Wagon, but we still had miles to hike before we reached the end of the graph. Mom got ever-quieter as we trudged past many lovely lakes and beautiful mountains without stopping for portraits. I smelled the frustration lines shooting out of her like lightning bolts every time we yielded the trail to let a herd of people wander past in the opposite direction.
“Hey, Mom. Maybe you’ll be less grouchy and impatient if you eat your snacks,” I coached.
“I’m not hungry,” Mom growled like a belly.
“What do you mean you’re not hungry? We’ve been hiking all day. What’s the point of hiking if you’re not going to enjoy extra snacks? Here, give me a cookie and I’ll show you how it works.”
“I want to enjoy my lunch and a nice cup of tea sitting in the air-conditioned van,” she said like a threat. “I’ll wait.”
Want to keep reading? Grab Oscar’s book, No Place Like Alone on Amazon.
