One day in July, I began digging the hole.
Moving 4 feet of earth — all the rocks, the roots, and about two tons of mid-Atlantic clay — is hard work. It’s harder when you’re digging a grave for your dog.
It’s even harder when that dog is as good as Scout.
Our neighbors at our former home in Maryland probably thought we were crazy when we added Scout to the family. Our 900-square-foot brick colonial was already teeming with an unreasonable quantity of life. Our fourth child was still crawling more than walking.
Didn’t we have enough on our hands? Weren’t we worried about how the dog would handle our children? How they would handle the dog? And Katie, my wife, had never had a dog.
The half-pit bull and half-boxer brindle pup named Scout — the Carney Family’s best friend and protector for nearly 14 years. (Courtesy of Timothy P. Carney)
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The half-pit bull and half-boxer brindle pup named Scout — the Carney Family’s best friend and protector for nearly 14 years. (Courtesy of Timothy P. Carney)
But one day in April 2013, we came home with a four-month-old puppy. She became our family’s best friend for nearly 14 years.
Scout was a brindle — a word I learned when we adopted her. Her fur was mostly brown, but with black stripes. You’ve seen brindle dogs around, but you’ve never seen a brindle as beautiful as Scout. Most of her sleek, short fur was chestnut-brown, and the black stripes were an understated accent, except on her face, which was more black than brown.
Her sleek appearance reflected her awesome athleticism. She was fast. She could jump. She could change directions like Barry Sanders. Years later, when we got a second dog, Valentine, it was one of my great joys to watch them chase each other around the yard and wrestle.
Scout was a mutt — half-pit bull and half-boxer — but I firmly believe she should have become a breed of her own.
The pit bull loyalty was strong with this one. She never ran away. If she escaped our yard, it was in an attempt to herd Valentine, the younger dog, back through the gate.
One Sunday, we drove to Grandma’s house for dinner, and left the front door open. When we returned five hours later, Scout was sitting on the front porch, guarding the entrance.
We had a neighbor back in Maryland who hated Scout — and Valentine, too — because they were dogs. But one day, over the fence, Mrs. Hoang saw Scout kill a groundhog in my backyard. She asked if I could sic Scout on the groundhogs plaguing her garden.
Within a week, I saw a groundhog run by while I sat on the front porch with our dogs. “Sic!” I shouted. Valentine flushed the poor creature out from under the Hoangs’ deck, and Scout grabbed it in her mouth. After a few violent seconds, it was dead. Scout, the reader of this column knows, would go on to kill three or four raccoons, most recently at age 13.
But Scout’s protectiveness mostly involved no violence.
Whenever our children played in the backyard, Scout would join them — not in play, just in the backyard. She didn’t chase them or want to be chased. She wasn’t much at fetch either. She would simply sit guard, upright in the middle of the play, making sure everyone was all right.
And this fierce hound, this guard dog, would often protect us by cuddling. When Katie was pregnant — and nauseated and bed-ridden — Scout was her constant companion. For a child home sick from school, Scout was there.
Given the amount of life in our home, one friend noted that very few dogs in history received as much love as Scout. She had six children to hang on her, and Katie to dote on her.
Most of our children don’t remember life without her. So when she began declining this summer, we prepared them. Preparation included digging the hole over the course of a few weeks, along with my older boys.
The end came mercifully fast. She was fine on a Tuesday, ill on a Wednesday, and come Thursday, it was time.
Our children came home early from school, just before the vet arrived. The youngest boy, in fine Irish tradition, dealt with his grief by taking on manual labor: he carved a grave marker from a paving stone.
TIMOTHY P. CARNEY: WHEN A CHRISTMAS VISITOR IS A RACCOON
My boys and I carried Scout’s body down the slope, across the sod, and to her final resting place. As they gently placed the clay and loam in the hole, I felt I had to say something, and so I just said what I always say: God gives us beautiful things in this world, but they are always on loan. All earthly beauty is fleeting.
Scout’s loyalty was the greater part of her beauty. It inspired us to deserve it — to try to be the people she thought we were. And in digging that hole, and carving that stone, we tried, in our own small way, to pay a bit of that loyalty back.
Timothy P. Carney is the senior political columnist at the Washington Examiner and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
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[ H/T Washington Examiner ]
