Old Spot

By Myrtle R. Reynolds © 1996

Issue: Summer, 1996

When I was a child quite a few decades ago, we cherished our farm animals, as they were part of our every day life. One of these that stands out in my memory quite clearly was a big white hound dog my father purchased from a kennel in Kentucky, we named him Spot as he had a few brown spots over his body. Although he was a hunting dog, he was also our beloved pet and had a personality all his own.

One day he had been chasing some kind of animal along the creek bank that ran through our farm and of course was muddy and tired when he gave up the chase and came back to the house. No one observed him entering the house and some time later imagine how Mother must have felt when she went into her bedroom where she had just that morning put a clean white bedspread on the bed and found Spot peacefully taking a siesta right in the middle of it!

Father would go quite a distance from home to coon hunt and once when he returned he brought a coon's foot for evidence that the hunt had been a success, I suppose. Anyway we children found that dampening the foot would bring out the scent, which we did and tracked it all around the place and up an old apple tree that had a big knot some distance up in a limb. We coaxed Spot to smell the track and immediately he joyfully set off on the trail, barking as he went, when he got to the tree he sat down at its base and spied that knot on the limb, for quiet a while he sat there turning his head from one side to the other, barking his "tree bark" to our amusement as we supposed he thought he had treed a coon.

When Father decided to give up hunting and send Spot back to the kennel from which he purchased him, it was with sadness we watched his departure, gnawing on a bone we had given him for a going away present dolefully rolling his eyes up at us as if he knew he was saying good-bye.