‘Greatest Christmas gift'

It was the winter of 1972, one of the coldest in North Texas for many years, when I unknowingly at the time received the greatest Christmas present that I will ever get in my life. His name was Davey, a name my mother bestowed upon the tiny black puppy, and she found him in the high grass about 100 yards away from the barn on our farm a few miles south of Alvarado. She was feeding the cattle, because I was sick, (age 14), with double pneumonia and stuck in the house. It was afternoon and the sun was barely shining through the thick clouds that rolled southward across the sky. I remember that she had been gone a long time and started walking down to the gate to see what was going on, and I saw her carrying something in her arms. It looked like a puppy, but I couldn’t tell exactly.

Sure enough, she drove up to the house in the International Travelall truck and had a big smile on her face, my beautiful mother, as she hopped out of the truck without even closing the door and jogged over to me and in her arms was a little black, hairy puppy, with grass burrs all over him and he was yelping. In fact, it was the puppy’s yelping that caught her attention. She could hear it over the sound of
the cows mooing and moving about in the barnyard as they positioned themselves to eat feed from the line of wooden troughs inside the barn.

She walked a little ways into the field and heard the sound grow louder, so she kept walking and into the high weeds she could see him, a little black dog all alone in the terrible cold and sleet, and snow, and her heart sank. The mother had apparently abandoned him or had gone off looking for food in the desolate winter landscape. She reached down and picked him up and carried him back to the barn and to the truck.

She told me to go turn on the bath water and make it hot, so I did. A few minutes later she placed little Davey into the warm water and took some scissors and began to cut the grass burrs off his hair — he was covered in them. The big kind of grass burrs too. We used to call them cockle-burrs.

In an hour or so, she had little Davey warmed up and cleaned up and wrapped in a towel, and we fixed a big box for him and put some towels and hay inside it and sat him beside the fireplace in the living room, so he could stay warm. Mama took good care of Davey — she named him for Davey Crockett, of the battle for the Alamo. Because he was a pioneer-type of dog, found in a wilderness of winter. And he would grow to live up to that name. Davey was a country dog who had his own territory and each day
after he was older, he would travel a mile or two in the pasture and in the woods down by the creek, and he’d be gone a long time. But he’s come back home after a few hours and my mother and brother and sisters and I would all have fun playing with him.

He grew to be a dog of about 80 or 100 pounds — a big dog. Good natured, friendly, but very protective to us. Always at my side as I walked the territory around our farm, hunting for small game. The most mystical experience of my life happened one morning when Davey and I were in the big woods just a half mile north of our farm house. I was carrying a shotgun, and Davey was walking beside me, and we were in a creek-bed near a fence when he suddenly stopped, and growled, and the hair on his back stood up. His ears perked up and slanted forward. I looked at him and said: “What’s wrong, Davey?” Then looked ahead and right in front of us was a pack of about six or seven coyotes. And they stopped. Even though I was standing there. Davey growled and looked at them, and then he walked up to the lead coyote and the morning sun was shining on them when they smelled of each other for a few seconds. And then, the coyotes headed off into the woods. I was astonished, as if I’d seen a spirit
of some kind. When I got home and told my mother, she said it was because Davey was part wolf. She could tell somehow. He was a wild dog, after all — she found him in the wild and he did look like a wolf.

When I’d go running down the road to get ready for football season, Davey was always running beside me. And when dogs from a house I jogged by would run out after me, Davey would just growl at them and they’d invariably turn back, even the big dogs. He just had some kind of an aura that they picked up on.

Finally, I left home in November 1977 to serve four years in the military, and a couple of years later
while on duty I received a call from my mother telling me that Davey had been run over and killed by an electric meter reader in his truck. She watched as the ever-protective Davey chased his truck out of our long dirt road driveway, and he was barking, and the driver swerved to deliberately kill Davey. He died
within a few minutes there in the driveway, a big black ball of fur, just as he was when my mother found him in the field not two hundred yards away from that spot.

I was tremendously angry and called that electric company and told them the driver had deliberately killed our great dog, Davey. And my mother did too. So the company fired that driver. I wanted to find him and beat hell out of him, but was 600 miles away and on duty. And to me Davey was a person, same as the others in our family. Just as loyal, just as close, and as caring.

All those years hunting and walking for hours in the woods and fields with him, we became good friends. And he knew me and I knew him. So when I heard about the truck running over him and killing him, I intuitively knew that his last thoughts as he lay dying, were of all the good times that we had together, him and me. And when I cried that day, it was for an old friend that I would never see again but would forever remember as the best Christmas present I would ever have.

My mother died of cancer at age 68 in September 2003, and it was at home in her bed. Before she died I asked her if she remembered Davey, and tears came to her eyes as I know she recalled that winter day when she rescued the little dog from certain death. She couldn’t speak, but she remembered him before she died.

My dad buried Davey out in the garden behind the house. He built a little coffin for him out of a few scattered boards that he nailed together, dug a hole out by the fence, and covered it up. And he is still there. And all these years later, I still can see his glistening eyes, his smiling face as he barked and played and chased me around the yard. The joy of that dog. And he never left my side.

John W.
Flores,

Albuquerque, N.M.