Brutus and Sally

This time, I am going to tell you a story. This story is a chapter out of my life. A small one, brought out from really old times…times that have faded in memory but will never be completely forgotten.

I was a young lad of ten years then. I believed in a lot of things and I was scared of nothing, until that day.
I was playing at my grandparents place. It was great to go back there, play with nature, as some people would put it. For at that time my grandparents had a house made of wood and we had farm animals - chickens, cows, sheep, cat and a couple of dogs (too bad the cats ate the chickens, and the dogs scared the cats away, but that happened much later). I was in a boarding school then so, obviously, I savored every moment of my time there. It so happened, that my grandparents house was home to a stray female dog (bitch doesn’t sound politically right, so I’ll call her Sally…all you girls out there named sally…no offence intended) and her pup Brutus (names have been changed to protect the identity of the dogs).

Somehow it got into lill Brutus’ head that I was a piece of meat, for him to chew on. So, he was looking at me greedily, as I hung up there on the windowsill. I looked down, and saw the love in the dog’s eye. I mistook his love for meat as his love for his master – I believed I was his master. I couldn’t help jumping down to take him up in my arms and he bounded towards me in joy, it seemed. How wrong I was.

I was standing there with my arms outstretched to welcome him into my bosom, but he had other plans. He took evasive action and cleanly avoided my arms, turned around and took a mighty bite from the fleshy part of my leg. It was like I was hit by a thunderbolt (surely getting hit by thunder cant be worse). If the hurt from the bite wasn’t bad enough, I had the additional trauma of being betrayed. He would have happily partaken another mouthful from the tasty snack had Mother Nature not intervened. My legs, all of a sudden, got a life of their own and begin to run. There was no other option for the rest of my body but to run along. Brutus didn’t manage a second bite...my two legs were faster than his four.

Since then I am scared of dogs. Maybe it has something to do with the 14 injections I had to endure after that Brutus of a dog bit me. Each of those fourteen injections has a story of it’s own that I might pen down some day.

What happened to Brutus and Sally? Sadly, they died soon after so there was always a doubt that they might have been rabid, hence the fourteen injections. Ouch!!!!!