Snarks and Ladders

It was about 11pm when we go home from the pub. We’d both had a few drinks, and it had been a pretty enjoyable night.  The boy had just finished his dinner, and I was lying in bed re-reading The Hunger Games books while the boy gave me a back rub.  It was probably the first night since we had our big argument that everything seemed to be going ok.

At about midnight, the dogs started causing a fuss.  The boy got up to investigate, and he found Izzy convulsing on the front lawn.  He brought her inside, and while he tried to figure out what was wrong with her, I started calling the vet.

Unfortunately, the vet who works in my town also runs a clinic in a town 150 kilometres away.  Just so happens, Wednesday night is the night that she stays in that town.  She told me it sounded like a snake bite or some other type of poison, and recommended that we get her to a vet ASAP.  She wasn’t able to get to the clinic in her town, as she was minding two small children, but she advised me to try a couple of other vets out of town.  Unfortunately, the closest was 280 kilometres away.

Now, both the boy and I had been drinking, and we had definitely had too much to drive.  But there wasn’t anything else to be done – we jumped in the car and I drove as fast as I possibly could while he nursed Izzy, who was still convulsing and foaming at the mouth, in the back seat of the car.  It was probably madness – here we were, both well over the legal limit, driving far in excess of the speed limit, in the middle of the night, dodging kangaroos all over the road, which was wet and slippery from all the rain we had been having.

Unfortunately, about 15 minutes outside of the town we were headed to, two hours after we found her in the front yard, Izzy passed away.  She went quiet, and about five minutes later, she was gone.  We drove her home, and put her in her bed, where the other dogs slept all night with her.  They haven’t seen death before, and they were very confused, spending all night licking her, trying to wake her up.

We thought that the dogs must have disturbed a snake, and it had bitten her, until later the next afternoon, when we found out our next door neighbour’s dog had died that night as well. Dog baiting is horribly common in our community, although usually the poisoned food is left in paddocks or on the levee bank, rather than thrown into yards.  It’s far too much of a coincidence for both dogs to have been bitten on the same night.

I honestly don’t know what I will do if I ever find out who did it.  I hope it isn’t one of my students, or their parents, because I just don’t think I could cope with it.  Crime in general is getting worse, and this sort of thing is becoming a problem. Just the other day, someone threw a marrow bone over a friend’s fence for their dog to get.  However, they had wrapped the marrow bone in barbed wire.  I don’t understand what sort of sick, twisted person would do this to someone’s pet.  What pleasure could they possibly get out of it?

Farewell, Izzy.  You were with us for such a short time, but you were one of the most wonderful dogs I have ever known.