Shrill piercing howl puppy whine.

Ha! They got it!

There they go, I’d pointed furiously silent. I’d signaled with my arm toward the sprinting pack of four evil dogs. He had been coming toward the house were I was.

He turned back around toward were I pointed. I can’t shoot that way he signaled back. There is nothing to stop the bullets. The neighbors, you know.

The dogs scattered. The shot rang out from the other direction. Friendly neighbors. They look out for us. Then, that terrible puppy in pain yapping pierced everything.

Those four goat wounding, chicken snatching, kitty killers in the pack, keep looting our fenced yard animals.

The white laying hen narrowly escaped, but her tail feathers hadn’t. The chicks didn’t. The golden, hen and her chicks didn’t.

We rescued Daisy. She was the slowest the smallest of our little goats. Those dogs had her surrounded. They were snapping at her furry legs when we reached the hysterical barking, and bleating. We ran to her, ran shouting those predators away.

Three dogs escaped.

A smallish black, and white border collie mix flinches in a horrid way, filling the stillness between shots with this squashed puppy, shrill howl.

Even saying “border-collie-mix” crams my heart in my shrinking throat.

Nothing feels safer.

I feel worse.

Can’t watch this puppy massacre.

Can’t watch them tear up the other animals, either.

Those bad dogs had caught, and tore up the half-grown kittens in the middle of the night.  That piercing yawall of caught, crushed kitty, from the night before, it echoes- a scream going on and on.

I need this unbearable sound to stop.  We’d found the tiny white once silky body torn up out near the pond. Not fluffy.

A dead little border collie mix, all black white and furry, doesn’t make it better. I can’t look back there.

It’s worse! I know what it looks like, what that puppy looks like, while I”m running away. I’m worse. The world is worse. There is no hope for any of us!

Weeping, running away, I’m seeing the little thing flinch, and whimper. It squealed just like Skinny Bones squealed under the bump of the pick-up truck tires.

He had fallen, gotten up, run a few steps, just enough so my heart rises up. Then fell to his side, irrevocably still.  Thud.

That thud, I fled from it.

But, it didn’t flee from me. It must have happened while I was running to the house, out of control, tears streaming through the air behind me. Two more shots, thud. It happened. The thud was worse when I imagine it.

Thud.

This thud, infinitely worse than the torn up stiff bodies of kittens; more desolate than the missing hens; sadder than no more chicks.

He comes back with a firm step.

We did it! Don’t think those damn dogs will be back here on our land messing with our animals again.

I’m defeated. These are puppies, and chickies.

There is no solution. I can’t see.

There is no hope. It’s woman and children dying, and being defended by fathers, and brothers of dogs, and men turning mothers into widows, and children into survivors.

My kind, we haven’t even managed to make peace for pets.

((((

THUD!

))))