Redford, shown above, was adopted from Pintler Pets in Anaconda, MT. His story is one that should never have to be told again.
Fireside Steel
A study of what little things can do to have a large impact; the transference of energy, emotion, and humanity.
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"...he looks through me, beyond the faults of a keeper. It is only one brush stroke among many - a small part of him that hints at his past but fails to define him. " |
There is an odd shape hidden between the folds. A fine little thing made of metal – yes it must be metal. It is an orb. A perfect shape, a perfect circle. I can barely touch it, just enough to determine that it is an orb but no more. It is smaller than a pea, this significant little thing. It is too small to be buckshot and yet much too individual to be birdshot. My guess would be a pellet – a BB. It lies just there, just below the shoulder, lodged beneath the skin of my dog.
At some point, a person in a factory somewhere melted down blocks of steel, maybe added some tin or other metal, then would engage a lever that poured the molten metal through a screen. The metal would fall and harden through its descent, and become round and permanent once again. A hopper would collect these hundreds or thousands or millions of beads and through a series of mechanical passages and rollers and causeways they would filter out, divide, become poured and contained and packaged. They would get stacked and boxed and labeled and stacked again. A person would drive a forklift to put them in their place on the back of a truck. And another person would drive a truck from the manufacturer to a warehouse. Then someone at the warehouse would pull one of the boxes off of the shipment and send it to a store. Another person would carry it, open it, put those small containers on a shelf where they would sit until one day a passer-by would reach for the third or maybe the fourth container, have a look, and take it to the checkout counter. Maybe it is purchased as a gift for a child with the air rifle to go along with it. Somewhere inside that container would rattle a single pellet from the original molten block that passed through all those hands and traveled all those unknown miles to a remote location on a desolate Indian reservation near Browning, Montana.
It passed through hands and souls and packaging and pockets until it wound up in the firing chamber of a Crossman or a Browning or a Remington perhaps. Then, with maybe 3 to 5 pounds of pressure on a trigger, it would travel through a barrel at no less than 600 feet per second, aimed by the last person who would touch or see it, and become a permanent fixture once again.
There would perhaps be a sense of triumph for deterring a scavenger. Or maybe elation from a child who hit his target. But there would also be pain in this exchange. There would be pain and confusion and fear. Upon impact, there would be a gash and a flinch and an outcry that you or I will never hear, an outcry that nonetheless existed once at that moment. Maybe you have heard it, or something like it, and dismissed it like so many others.
The rest of the story is lost. At some point, he would lose all his hair to mange – a mite that that burrows and breeds in blood and open wounds and is preventable except in extreme cases of neglect. His teeth would become worn to the gum from itching or attempts to escape. His skin would become bare and wither and show the underlying curvature of bone. He would become hideous. Rejected. Then, an animal team would pick him up as a nuisance roaming the streets in a town where none dared to touch him. The orb and its host would travel again – 257 miles south to a shelter, then 279 miles west to a small bathroom and eventually to a tub like any other.
As I wash him I can touch it. It does move slightly, encased in a scar tissue with little range of motion. It’s kind of like a relaxed kneecap. Or the tendons at your wrist. I bathe him and offer what little comfort I can provide while attempting to rinse the putrefaction from his skin caused by the mite. I offer what little aid I can to a body trying desperately to heal. Blood clots and hair blur the lines between healthy skin and rot. The act to cleanse is painful. It will take more than two years for these wounds to heal but his hair will only return half of what it once was, thin and patchy like a cancer patient at his best. He shivers but the water is warm.
Four years have passed since that first bath. I fuck with him constantly – squish his face, yell his name for no reason, poke his belly when it appears full, grab him by the nape. And he soaks it up. His eyes have changed and they tell me something different than what he has known. There are no more clots to abate or winces to coo away. There is an occasional “guy nod” between us, a nudge here and there. But the orb remains unchanged, relentless. It is a loud reminder of a time I’d rather forget and a truth that is impossible to ignore. He has carried it hundreds of miles into my house under my roof in front of my fire place. It rises and falls with each breath he takes like some Tell-Tale object that weighs heavier on me than it does on him. Because I know better. We are supposed to know better.
I search for meaning and hope in all of it. I drive to change this story and am instead deafened by the white noise of ratios and facts or figures. How often it happens, the behavior behind it, the causes both known and unknown. The grim results. Commercials don’t solve the problem – they can be skipped or ignored or walked away from. It happens.
Yet inside my living room is a strange, condensed mass, a manifestation of something I despise. How is it that a dozen hands or more could not have stopped the path of this meaningless sphere now heavy with hate or carelessness? None of them could have known. It’s not their fault. It’s not his fault either. One action. One incident. One result. One coincidence.
One dog.
The destiny of this little thing, this little insignificant thing was pronounced and punctuated by a single hand and lack of reason at 600 feet per second.
Now, a bastard host is bound to carry the weight of an irreversible action. This little orb, heavy for its size, carries the velocity of the worst in us every time he takes a step. Yet he does well not to parade it around like a badge or a conversation piece. Instead, he looks through me, beyond the faults of a keeper. It is only one brush stroke among many – a small part of him that hints at his past but fails to define him. He was a scavenger, a freak, an outcast no doubt, roaming the streets searching for something in the bottom of a can that can never be found.
Our walks through the farm fields are different. He sees the world as something to look forward to. Simple things await his return. Food. Water. A bed and a warm fire. A touch.
For some reason, he doesn’t hate the humans around him though he has every reason. He does not lash out or attack. He is lucky that he can forget. How many chances he gave just to be a part of a family. How many strikes he endured before chewing his bonds. How many meals he would go without in order to get far, far away from his previous owners.
Long before the adoption, the journey, or even the first contact, I sought out an inanimate object and found it in an Oriental market. There was a type of knife I had been seeking for some time and I finally found one in a glass counter near the back. It was black, slender, highly illegal - in a word: perfect. However, there was no price on it or anything else in the display case. I was the only customer in the store and soon an elderly Asian woman behind the front counter came back to help me, likely suspicious of my scrawny hovering frame.
There was a brief conversation – why go out of my way for such a thing, how much it would cost, and what my intent was for it. She watched as I felt it in my hands. She appeared cheerful, perhaps happy to have someone in her store, and I handed it back to her. It appeared somewhat larger in her strong little hands. I told her I had seen one like it not a week before in a pawn shop for a few dollars less. Then her attitude changed. Her demeanor didn’t shift to anger but instead to one of heartfelt concern.
There is energy, she told me, that transfers with misfortune. Those who fall on hard times sell off their belongings and those items absorb a part of the misfortune. And when someone else comes to buy the item, they take on more than just material, worldly goods.
Here it is, in my house, this little hunk of metal. It is random in every way that a thing can be random. It is precise in every way that a thing can be precise. Someone else’s baggage, poor parenting, maybe, or blatant disregard. There are statistics out there to which he might belong as a result of this perfect circle. But the facts, whatever they are, become white noise for a cause and they mean nothing to an animal. They do not reveal the years of healing needed to recover from a singular moment of brutality. They do not show the story in-between – the fear in a tremble, the longing for a safe touch, the winces that are born from experience.
On cold nights when I go to stoke the fire, new fuel engages the old coals glowing low and hot. Sometimes he moves, usually he doesn’t. He has found his place at peace in my home, by my fire, under my roof. I close the door to the wood stove and the flames light up an otherwise dark room through the glass, bringing heat as warm as the glow. I try not to stare when the foreign light casts shadows on the small bulge at his shoulder. But I cannot help myself. When I reach out to touch him, he flinches and lifts his head enough to recognize me and relaxes again. I touch his bare skin slowly – like that of a child – and feel the tiny lump beneath my fingers as they pass over.
I am his human. He was a dog to someone else, but never again. He has a name. He has a name, and a scent, and gait, and a personality. He has a story. It lies there, in my home, just beneath the surface.
At some point, a person in a factory somewhere melted down blocks of steel, maybe added some tin or other metal, then would engage a lever that poured the molten metal through a screen. The metal would fall and harden through its descent, and become round and permanent once again. A hopper would collect these hundreds or thousands or millions of beads and through a series of mechanical passages and rollers and causeways they would filter out, divide, become poured and contained and packaged. They would get stacked and boxed and labeled and stacked again. A person would drive a forklift to put them in their place on the back of a truck. And another person would drive a truck from the manufacturer to a warehouse. Then someone at the warehouse would pull one of the boxes off of the shipment and send it to a store. Another person would carry it, open it, put those small containers on a shelf where they would sit until one day a passer-by would reach for the third or maybe the fourth container, have a look, and take it to the checkout counter. Maybe it is purchased as a gift for a child with the air rifle to go along with it. Somewhere inside that container would rattle a single pellet from the original molten block that passed through all those hands and traveled all those unknown miles to a remote location on a desolate Indian reservation near Browning, Montana.
It passed through hands and souls and packaging and pockets until it wound up in the firing chamber of a Crossman or a Browning or a Remington perhaps. Then, with maybe 3 to 5 pounds of pressure on a trigger, it would travel through a barrel at no less than 600 feet per second, aimed by the last person who would touch or see it, and become a permanent fixture once again.
There would perhaps be a sense of triumph for deterring a scavenger. Or maybe elation from a child who hit his target. But there would also be pain in this exchange. There would be pain and confusion and fear. Upon impact, there would be a gash and a flinch and an outcry that you or I will never hear, an outcry that nonetheless existed once at that moment. Maybe you have heard it, or something like it, and dismissed it like so many others.
The rest of the story is lost. At some point, he would lose all his hair to mange – a mite that that burrows and breeds in blood and open wounds and is preventable except in extreme cases of neglect. His teeth would become worn to the gum from itching or attempts to escape. His skin would become bare and wither and show the underlying curvature of bone. He would become hideous. Rejected. Then, an animal team would pick him up as a nuisance roaming the streets in a town where none dared to touch him. The orb and its host would travel again – 257 miles south to a shelter, then 279 miles west to a small bathroom and eventually to a tub like any other.
As I wash him I can touch it. It does move slightly, encased in a scar tissue with little range of motion. It’s kind of like a relaxed kneecap. Or the tendons at your wrist. I bathe him and offer what little comfort I can provide while attempting to rinse the putrefaction from his skin caused by the mite. I offer what little aid I can to a body trying desperately to heal. Blood clots and hair blur the lines between healthy skin and rot. The act to cleanse is painful. It will take more than two years for these wounds to heal but his hair will only return half of what it once was, thin and patchy like a cancer patient at his best. He shivers but the water is warm.
Four years have passed since that first bath. I fuck with him constantly – squish his face, yell his name for no reason, poke his belly when it appears full, grab him by the nape. And he soaks it up. His eyes have changed and they tell me something different than what he has known. There are no more clots to abate or winces to coo away. There is an occasional “guy nod” between us, a nudge here and there. But the orb remains unchanged, relentless. It is a loud reminder of a time I’d rather forget and a truth that is impossible to ignore. He has carried it hundreds of miles into my house under my roof in front of my fire place. It rises and falls with each breath he takes like some Tell-Tale object that weighs heavier on me than it does on him. Because I know better. We are supposed to know better.
I search for meaning and hope in all of it. I drive to change this story and am instead deafened by the white noise of ratios and facts or figures. How often it happens, the behavior behind it, the causes both known and unknown. The grim results. Commercials don’t solve the problem – they can be skipped or ignored or walked away from. It happens.
Yet inside my living room is a strange, condensed mass, a manifestation of something I despise. How is it that a dozen hands or more could not have stopped the path of this meaningless sphere now heavy with hate or carelessness? None of them could have known. It’s not their fault. It’s not his fault either. One action. One incident. One result. One coincidence.
One dog.
The destiny of this little thing, this little insignificant thing was pronounced and punctuated by a single hand and lack of reason at 600 feet per second.
Now, a bastard host is bound to carry the weight of an irreversible action. This little orb, heavy for its size, carries the velocity of the worst in us every time he takes a step. Yet he does well not to parade it around like a badge or a conversation piece. Instead, he looks through me, beyond the faults of a keeper. It is only one brush stroke among many – a small part of him that hints at his past but fails to define him. He was a scavenger, a freak, an outcast no doubt, roaming the streets searching for something in the bottom of a can that can never be found.
Our walks through the farm fields are different. He sees the world as something to look forward to. Simple things await his return. Food. Water. A bed and a warm fire. A touch.
For some reason, he doesn’t hate the humans around him though he has every reason. He does not lash out or attack. He is lucky that he can forget. How many chances he gave just to be a part of a family. How many strikes he endured before chewing his bonds. How many meals he would go without in order to get far, far away from his previous owners.
Long before the adoption, the journey, or even the first contact, I sought out an inanimate object and found it in an Oriental market. There was a type of knife I had been seeking for some time and I finally found one in a glass counter near the back. It was black, slender, highly illegal - in a word: perfect. However, there was no price on it or anything else in the display case. I was the only customer in the store and soon an elderly Asian woman behind the front counter came back to help me, likely suspicious of my scrawny hovering frame.
There was a brief conversation – why go out of my way for such a thing, how much it would cost, and what my intent was for it. She watched as I felt it in my hands. She appeared cheerful, perhaps happy to have someone in her store, and I handed it back to her. It appeared somewhat larger in her strong little hands. I told her I had seen one like it not a week before in a pawn shop for a few dollars less. Then her attitude changed. Her demeanor didn’t shift to anger but instead to one of heartfelt concern.
There is energy, she told me, that transfers with misfortune. Those who fall on hard times sell off their belongings and those items absorb a part of the misfortune. And when someone else comes to buy the item, they take on more than just material, worldly goods.
Here it is, in my house, this little hunk of metal. It is random in every way that a thing can be random. It is precise in every way that a thing can be precise. Someone else’s baggage, poor parenting, maybe, or blatant disregard. There are statistics out there to which he might belong as a result of this perfect circle. But the facts, whatever they are, become white noise for a cause and they mean nothing to an animal. They do not reveal the years of healing needed to recover from a singular moment of brutality. They do not show the story in-between – the fear in a tremble, the longing for a safe touch, the winces that are born from experience.
On cold nights when I go to stoke the fire, new fuel engages the old coals glowing low and hot. Sometimes he moves, usually he doesn’t. He has found his place at peace in my home, by my fire, under my roof. I close the door to the wood stove and the flames light up an otherwise dark room through the glass, bringing heat as warm as the glow. I try not to stare when the foreign light casts shadows on the small bulge at his shoulder. But I cannot help myself. When I reach out to touch him, he flinches and lifts his head enough to recognize me and relaxes again. I touch his bare skin slowly – like that of a child – and feel the tiny lump beneath my fingers as they pass over.
I am his human. He was a dog to someone else, but never again. He has a name. He has a name, and a scent, and gait, and a personality. He has a story. It lies there, in my home, just beneath the surface.