The New Dogs

There was, every spring, a new batch of pups,

Yipping, nipping, clumsy balls of nappy fur,

Looking for all the world like speckled tennis balls

Before they’d learned any hard lessons at the hands of a racquet.

They chased their tails and each other,

And various other denizens of the barnyard:

Frantic chicks, cranky piglets, the occasional bemused draft horse,

And sometimes they chased us as well, yelping childishly,

Rolling on the ground with us, nipping bare fingers and toes,

Afterwards lying on the ground asleep, looking (save for the rhythmic twitching

Of their paws) positively angelic.

 

Come late August, the time would come to set them on the coons.

We’d long since stopped thinking about it, much less questioning it

(I had, one year, asked my father if the puppies had to go one time too many

Until, with a look that brooked no further conversation, he said flatly

It’s what they’re born to.), and we went on with the business

Of the soft, slow late summer until one evening just after sunset

We would hear the baying of the hounds out toward the back fields,

Mechanical and workmanlike at first,

But soon strained and syncopated with excitement,

And at some point there would be a cacophony of cries and snarls

Until there was only silence.

 

The next morning we would see the dogs,

And we’d pet them and rough-house a bit,

And sometimes there might be just a trace

Of an oddly rouged spot on their coats here and there,

Or one of them might sneeze out a bit of fur that didn’t rightly belong to them,

And every year our Uncle Bryce would slyly opine

You boys may want to be a bit more careful around their mouths, hear?