In 1977 I lived in a cottage on the shores of a wild lake in Minnesota with my husband, our baby daughter, our husky and our collie. We had moved there two years before as this was where my husband’s first ‘real’ job was after graduate school and where we chose to start a family…we handled the bumps…long freezing winters, a husky that wanted to eat the neighbors’ chickens, a job that was not what had been hoped for, and a baby that only wanted mother. On her sixth month birthday we decided that we two adults, without baby, needed time out for lunch in a beautiful restaurant, and so we left the family in charge of a babysitter, with strict instructions that the dogs were not to run free.
The dogs flew the coop….bigtime.
The collie returned at a reasonable hour, covered in mud and upset, but no husky.
At midnight a knock on the door…a policeman….announcing that the husky was dead, that he had been kiiled by a neighbor for attacking his sheep.
Our agony does not need explaining…. as my husband left for work in the morning, we agreed that I would go to the farmer’s home with a check, to pay for the loss of his sheep.
I was met at the man’s door with outrage and gleeful satisfaction, as he said that he had been waiting for the culprit that had been picking off his sheep for the last few months, and that he had set a trap and now it was done.
Sasha had not been running..not once…in those months…and the trap was on the land, but not near the sheep. He had not been caught in the act.
I paid the man for all of the sheep because I chose not to tell my husband what I learned. I was afraid that this news would be a fuse for something more.
We moved to New Orleans a few months later, which we might not have. Heat and color and cajun food and jazz.
The collie and I ran in Audobon Park every morning before breakfast, and another baby was born….Life… New Orleans!
Thank you, Sasha.