©Scott Sines
Sometime around 1975, I think it was our junior year at the University of Cincinnati, Teresa and I bought a dog and named him Walter just because he looked like a Walter.
We stopped on our way home from picking him up to buy some dog stuff. When we returned to our Volkswagen, Walter left us a tidy pile of turds on the driver’s seat. It was the beginning of a relationship that would last over 10 years, span three states and thousands of miles.
He was built like a dachshund. He wasn’t much of a swimmer but he was a great digger. No fence could hold him on garbage day. He was too short to stand up and pull the garbage cans over so he would get a running start and fling himself against the cans until they tipped over. Nothing more endearing than the breath of a bearded dog whose spent the morning eating garbage.
We lived on the second floor of a big old house with a postage stamp backyard that had one of those umbrella type clotheslines. The landlady lived below us and she had a big white cat. To say the cat was stupid would be overstating its intelligence. She used to tie the cat to the pole of the clothesline to keep it in the yard and it was nothing but a target for Walter.
He’d lay in the grass just out of cat-reach and wait for old whitey to fall asleep. Then he’d go full speed at the cat, when he was a couple of feet away, he’d let out a couple of baritone barks and actually jump over the cat. I have witnesses. Enraged the cat would run out to the end of the rope. You’ve all seen it before on Wiley Coyote cartoons. Sometimes he’d run around the cat in circles until all the rope was gone and the cat was tight up against the pole. Then he’d sit just outside the cat’s reach and take a nap.
He loved to fetch a tennis ball and again he made good use of his sausage shaped body. I’d throw the ball at the stairs which made him mad. He’d growl about it, and like a hockey goalie does he’d throw his body in front of the ball to block it and keep from having to run down and up the stairs.
When we moved to Eastern Texas we lived in a little four room house on a five acre tract. We grew a huge vegetable garden and Walter got to run with the wild dogs. The thing to understand is that Walter thought of himself as a big dog. He had a big, deep bark and when he looked in the mirror he saw a Great Dane.
Well he got the hell beat out of him several times. One time he ran with a pack of dogs chasing a lady in heat. I found him laying by the side of a dirt road with a deep puncture wound in his shoulder and hole bit all the way through an ear. We got him stitched up but the next day he was right back at it hobbling along at the back of the pack.
The little house sat on a patch of weeds and occasionally I’d have to mow it. There was a little shed attached to the back of the house where I kept the mower but mostly it was home to a colony of nasty yellow jackets.
To get the mower out I’d get a can of Bee spray from under the sink, stick my hand into the shed and soak the place down with Bee spray. It didn’t kill the bees but it knocked them down long enough for me to get in there and get the mower out. When I was done it was a rinse and repeat kind of thing.
That summer we were in a severe drought and had 42 days in a row over 100 degrees. I needed to mow the weeds so I reached under the sink to get the Bee spray and I heard something fall. I thought I’d knocked something off the shelf but when I looked it was a Copperhead snake about three feet long. He came up through the hole in the floor where water pipes came into the house and had wrapped himself around the pipes to get cool I guess.
Anyway I kept a sawed off shovel handle under the bed for protection. I got it out and went after that snake like a crazy man. The snake never had a chance. Maybe he died from the beating or he might have died of fright. I don’t care.
Teresa was due home any minute and I knew if she saw the snake she would never sleep in that house again. So I grabbed the snake, went out to the front porch, swung it around in the air several times and flung it as far as I could out in the field toward the garden.
I went back into the house to clean up the mess when I saw Teresa turn off the main road, onto the dirt road that led to our house. When I went out on the front porch to greet her there was Walter. He had retrieved the dead snake brought it back to the porch and was looking as proud as can be. I grabbed the snake ran through the house, out the back door and flung the snake again. This time it stayed in the field and I didn’t tell Teresa that story until years later.
Sometime around 1980 I was hired as a photojournalist at a major metropolitan newspaper in San Antonio. We were able to buy our first house, a tidy two bedroom home with a nice grassy yard and lots of shade. It was a perfect Walter house.
In 1985 while my Dad and Mom were visiting my Dad began having seizures and tests revealed an aggressive form of brain cancer. He died in December of 1986 and we had to have to Walter boarded while we went to Cleveland for the funeral and to tend some family details.
When we returned to San Antonio I went to the Vet to pick up Walter and Dr. Long told me that Walt had been ill so he ran some tests. He took some X-rays that indicated cancer. He’d done a biopsy the morning of the day I went to pick up Walter and the results weren’t good. He was eaten up with the disease and would have to be put down. Anyone who has ever had to do it knows how painful that is. He was still asleep when I got there so I asked if I could see him one more time.
Dr. Long wheeled him out on one of those stainless steel carts. Walt was asleep and his belly had been shaved. I petted him and talked briefly with the Doctor but Walter heard my voice and he woke up. He couldn’t stand but he pulled himself over next to me and leaned against me. He was panting but he had the same smile on his face as you see in the picture. I swear to God he thought he was going home and I guess maybe he was. I don’t know if pets have their own heaven, or just a booth in the big room. We’ve had a few pets come through the house since Walter but he was and always will be The Dog.
