predator

Helpful hint: You might want to click on the death roll photo to check out guthrie's face.

i have mentioned guthrie's dearly departed crackle skunk in other entries. he mourned it so much we found him a new crackle toy and it immediately became his beloved. but dog toys, especially canvas ones, disgustify fairly quickly and his second crackle paper went to join the first and the crackle skunk in dog toy heaven. he has been making do but has obviously been suffering crippling emotional pain. and if you've never seen an emotionally wounded dog, let me tell you. it will ruin your heart.

then today on our afternoon walk, guthrie and i stopped by the dog store. you see, in our new apartment we have this thing we've never had in and apartment in winter before. not ever in guthrie's whole little dog life. heat. lots of it. so much heat that we use two tiny radiators to heat our whole apartment and still keep two windows open. now, guthrie is not used to all this heat and the dryness that strolled into his life right along with it. he's become scaly. his skin gets so upset it comes right up through his fur, lizardy and cracked. so i was headed in for some dog emollient but guthrie had other plans. he went right over to the dead animal section.

that's right. go into any pet store around and you'll find a little section of soft, fake animals without any insides. just a squeaker in the head and another in the tail. all sizes. i found a badger the same size as guthrie and showed it to him. he is, after all, a badger hound. he glared at it, glared at me. i showed him the raccooon, something he could have worn as a coat. he looked insulted. he jumped up and whimpered for the small skunk right next to it. i picked it up and he jumped high enough to rip the limp creature right out of my hands. i figured he wanted a smaller animal to carry so i handed over the small badger. badger hound. he actually turned away from the brown clump of fur. so i picked up the skunk again and held it out. he grabbed it and ran to the front of the store where he dropped it next to the cash register.

we waited in line behind a woman ordering a tag for her own dog. she could not spell the name, a name involving real and actual already established words which the clerk had written down properly. "no," she insisted. "like minnie mouse. miny. miney. yeah!" she glanced down at guthrie, all stripey sweater and stripey skunk, glaring up at her. "that dog is so cute!" she said, louder than she needed to since we were standing right there. guthrie continued to stare. "what is he? a greyhound?" i looked at her a minute and the clerk stopped writing and looked at her the same way. "he's a dachshund," i said as the clerk went back to misspelling minnie the way the woman told her to. "huh," she said. "not a greyhound." i smiled. she had too much confusion for me to add any to it. we left her to her dog tag.

now, guthrie is pretty particular. he loves crackle. he loves skunk. not badger. not raccoon. only skunk. so i got the skunk and i got the dog lotion and the clerk put them in a bag. when i opened the door, guthrie sailed past like those dolphins at sea world, graceful arc of lean animal, and snatched the whole bag to the ground. so i pulled the stickers and tag off the skunk and held it out to what had become a raving wild beast. he grabbed it by the neck and trotted off down the street.

for those of you who don't know, these little soft lifeless skunks look like real live actual dead small animals. and guthrie walked in the late afternoon getting-dark part of the day with the tail end of a skunk hanging out the left side of his jaws and the drooping head and baby animal front legs hanging out the right side. plenty of folks cringed as they passed, thinking he really had a carcass in his long snap-jaws, but one woman walked up and yelled, "hey, dog, you got you a skunk!" and she laughed as she walked past.

when we got upstairs, we took off our sweaters and guthrie settled down with his victim. i don't know what you know about alligators, but when they catch their own prey they do what's called a death roll. this is to render a very large snack helpless and also break off a few bite-sized pieces. you are probably already realizing guthrie and his own kind have a similar behavior. he pinned his baby skunk to the ground, bit all around the head until he found just the right place where his jaws closed tight around its neck. and he shook it like a tiny tornado.

the skunk is sitting now on the bottom shelf of the freezer where all guthrie's toys live. he has spent the last 47 minutes crying in front of the fridge. i have offered him his old toy. i have offered him dog candy. he is inconsolable. he is heartbroken. there is a fake dead skunk in the freezer and it is his. he will not rest.