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A Little Bit of Fearlessness
by D. PATRICK MILLER
In the semi-rural surroundings of my North Carolina childhood, wildness was much more present everyday than it has been in my urban California adulthood. The woods on two sides of our property were deep enough to get lost in, and although my parents didn’t make their living from the land, the land nonetheless kept my father and I busy outside most of the year. When there were not fallen limbs to gather from a score of towering oak and hickory trees that covered the flood plain downhill from our house, there was grass and weeds to control on our four acres. A creek that ran through the property would flood once or twice a year, turning the lower half of our land into a bewitching, muddy sea that was alive with eels and turtles and surface-skimming snakes. Our grand old trees were tall enough to attract more than our fair share of lightning strikes; I remember watching a thunderstorm outside the window of the den when a bolt split an old oak tree, no more than two hundred yards away, right down the middle, leaving the house frizzed with ambient electricity and the tree stump blackened, faintly smoking, still warm to the touch the next morning.
At such times, you realize that Nature is an awesome force engaged in much more than composing scenic vistas for our roadside appreciation — and also that there are some good reasons we have removed ourselves into shelters more or less safe from the storm. For the closer you live to Nature, the more you realize that it is a force which favors no single thing or being over another. Anyone’s lease on life may be revoked by a sudden, impartial rearrangement of the natural order.
Although our family never went camping or hiking into true wilderness preserves, I still grew up feeling close to wildness. And my dogs were like ambassadors from that wildness, the furry mediators between life inside the house and life amidst the vine-ribboned woods. However fearless I was in my almost daily excursions into those woods, easily half of my courage depended on my canine companions, whom I depended upon to scout out interesting new stuff and alert me to unseen dangers. They usually had better instincts about Nature’s inherent threats than I did — but not always. And therein hangs the perilous tale of Little Bit.
A foot-high, wheat-colored, short-haired beast who looked and behaved like an overgrown chihuahua, Little Bit showed a little bit of unexpected pedigree when he occasionally assumed the forward-leaning, raised-paw point of a bird dog, entirely without coaching — and also without the cue of any bird worth hunting in the vicinity. To this day I don’t like to envision the mating that engendered such a creature, and even as a kid I found Little Bit dislikeable. He wasn’t cute, he had the twitchy demeanor of Deputy Barney Fife with about half the smarts, and he loved to pick fights with bigger dogs, then yap frantically about the unfairness of life in his necessarily hasty retreats. The successor to my beloved dog Beau who died under tragic circumstances, Little Bit was a stray we took on out of pity and seemed to spend half our time getting out of trouble.
Given my tendency to roam the woods, a bonafide miracle of my growing up was that I got all the way through it without getting snakebit. Sometime during my elementary education I found schoolbook confirmation of the exciting fact that snakewise, we lived in one of the most dangerous areas of the entire world. (I’m still bragging!) Within a stone’s throw of our house one could find no less than four species of poisonous serpents: coral snakes, water moccasins, copperheads, and Eastern rattlers. Water moccasins were so common that I didn’t usually give them a second thought. When you walked by the most overgrown parts of the creek, you expected them to drop from overhanging tree branches into the water with a slithery splash, letting you know that you’d interrupted their sunbathing siesta. But like most wild animals, they were generally more concerned with getting away from humans than attacking them. Territorial disputes aside, most untamed beasts take a chance on attacking things they can’t eat only when they feel cornered.
One summer day when I was about about twelve, I was helping my dad clear fallen branches on the lower part of our land, close to a snaky grove of saplings and underbrush that we let stay wild and ungroomed. I was raking the ground about thirty feet from Little Bit when I heard him start up his characteristic chorus of yapping — “Look at me! I’m an idiot! Look at me! I’m an idiot!” — that gradually grew more frantic and hysterical, accompanied by lots of jumping backward and forward and running in tight circles. I leaned on the rake and watched disdainfully until curiosity got the better of me. Dropping a very useful tool, I walked over to the mad dog, asking “What you got there, Little Bit? Who you got now?” and peering into the underbrush where his attention seemed to be focused.
At first I couldn’t see anything, but I could hear what sounded like the buzz of a very large June bug. A June bug is a kind of giant flying beetle that always held a special fascination for me, because it symbolized an unspoken cultural line that I knew better than to cross. Bad kids of my acquaintance liked to tie threads to the tough legs of June bugs, then fly them around and around like motorized model airplanes until the insects would sputter out and drop dead from exhaustion. When you grow up white and middle-class in the South, there are certain things — mostly stupid and cruel things — that you don’t do not only because they’re stupid and cruel, but also because they are the signature behaviors of “poor white trash.” Flying June bugs was one of those things that the children of poor white trash did; it was stupid, cruel, and fun, so I never did it. Which is not to say that I never thought about it.
At any rate, it sounded like our white-trash dog had cornered the biggest June bug of all time, only I couldn’t see it in the high weeds and dense undergrowth at the edge of the sapling grove. With my hands on my knees, I kept leaning over farther and farther, laughing at Little Bit’s hysteria over a June bug, when I got my first lesson in the effectiveness of natural camouflage. A little blur in the grass caught my eye and I realized that my nose was no more than eighteen inches from a full-grown, coiled rattlesnake with its tail going in a high-speed shake and its head nervously bobbing around, trying to keep track of both me and the crazy little dog. No doubt it was preparing for a strike that would be over and done with before either of us realized what had happened.
Now I was the one jumping backward and running in circles, trying to shoo Little Bit away, screaming “You stupid dog, that’s a rattlesnake!” My father was almost a quarter-mile away, at the far corner of our land near the road, out of earshot. I started running back and forth chirping with false cheer, “Come on, Little Bit! Come on! Let’s go get some lunch!” or some such nonsense, but the nutsy canine would have nothing of it. If I got away from the snake he would lunge back at it, only emboldened by my presence. I had actually never seen a rattlesnake in the flesh before, but I knew that I couldn’t defend myself or the dog without a weapon. I decided to make a run back to the rake, but I was no further than halfway there when I heard Little Bit’s yapping end abruptly in a hurt, surprised, and piercing yelp.
Now I was getting mad, and probably would have done something stupid if the snake had still been coiled in place when I got back there. But it was gone, and Little Bit was hopping around with one paw in the air, whimpering in disbelief. He was too skittish for me to pick him up at first — understandably wary of anything coming directly at him — but soon he stumbled and fell in the grass. I grabbed him and cradled him in my arms, and he looked up at me plaintively, his beady eyes starting to roll.
Little Bit was already swooning like a drunk, but the firewater in his veins was far more dangerous than the stuff my grandfather used to stash under his porch. About an inch above his right paw, a trickle of blood was starting to run down the dog’s bony paw. That frightened me more than anything I’d seen so far, and I bolted up the hill toward the house, screaming for my mother and father with as much urgency as if I’d been snakebit myself. After all, the good citizens of Mayberry may have thought Barney Fife was a joke — but anybody who saw him got shot would cross the line of fire to save him.
I got up to the house within a minute, but Little Bit’s eyes were now flickering weakly and there was blood oozing from a slightly higher point on his paw. That didn’t make sense; had he got himself bitten twice? By now my mother had heard my yelling and come out of the house; my dad was on the way as well. I quickly described the harrowing scene I’d just witnessed; my mother knew enough to tie a tight tourniquet at the top of Little Bit’s leg. She called the vet, who was fortunately in his clinic just a couple miles away and urged us to waste no time getting over there. By the time we had all piled into the car, Little Bit had gone limp in my arms, and I figured he was good as dead. He looked littler than ever, and the rattler was growing ever larger in my mind’s eye.
At the clinic, the vet asked me what the snake looked like over and over, trying to confirm the species. I told him it was a huge rattlesnake. Then I asked if Little Bit was dead already. “No,” the vet said, “he’s probably just in shock. See where the blood is coming from?”
I looked at Little Bit’s leg; the blood was now oozing from a point more than halfway up his leg. I nodded, numbly.
“That’s how far the venom has traveled,” the vet explained. “The poison destroys tissue as it moves upward, and that’s what causes the bleeding. So the venom hasn’t moved very far. It’s a good thing your mom tied on the tourniquet right away.”
I knew this information was all meant to reassure me, but what the vet had said about venom destroying tissue was probably the scariest thing I had ever heard in my life. With a chill I remembered how close my nose had come to the roving head of the rattler. If I’d been bit, my whole face would be a bloody mess by now!
My parents quietly asked the vet if Little Bit was likely to make it, and he nodded with a smile. “Oh, sure. I’m going to give him the serum right now and that should stop the progress of the poison. It’s a good thing that it was such a big snake, because it means he’s probably an old one. If it was a young rattler, your dog wouldn’t have made it here. The venom is much more deadly in a young snake.” He paused to fill the needle with the serum he’d taken out of a cabinet, and added in a stage whisper to my parents, “Might lose that leg, though.”
Oh, man. Now I was thinking of Vicky, a dog our neighbors used to have; she was a brandy-colored cocker spaniel mix who had an obsessive-compulsive fixation on motorized vehicles. As far back as I could remember, Vicky had had only one leg — the other three having been lost in succession to cars and lawn-mowing tractors. She moved about by a series of lurching hops that always brought her head crashing into the ground — yet she kept moving. For as long as I knew that dog, she kept chasing cars and lawnmowers that way. The only reason that she died of old age with her last leg intact was that she moved too slowly to maim herself one last time.
From what I knew about Little Bit, his learning curve was likely to stay as flat as Vicky’s. And now he was one limb down. So I was destined to live out the waning days of my childhood with a crippled dog who would have an even harder time escaping from the next rattlesnake, snapping turtle, or Great Dane that he decided to take on. Legs two and three were sure to follow quickly; I didn’t know if I could take the indignity of it all.
But Little Bit would keep his leg. To give him a chance, the doctor set the limb in a splint with a little cast, explaining that the leg had the best chance of healing if it was immobilized. We also had to drug Little Bit for a couple weeks to keep him moving as little as possible. But after that period the splint and the cast came off; after limping and whimpering for a few days, Barney Fife seemed to be okay. It was something near to a miracle (or that snake was a real senior citizen).
Another unexpected healing was the reformation of my attitude toward Little Bit; he’d earned a new status in my mind and heart. After all, he had survived the attack of an enormous rattlesnake — and I had helped to save him. It would be a few years before I heard the Native American teaching that you become responsible for the life of a being whom you save, but I felt the truth of it nonetheless. I kept a closer, more caring eye on Little Bit after that; after all, who knew when he might need rescuing again? Freakish as he was, I came to see a kind of nobility in the feisty mutt — the fragile fortitude of the little guy who makes a habit of taking on life’s heavier dudes and, with a little help, survives to test himself again on the morrow.
In fact, Little Bit would survive long enough to fall prey to a senior-citizen kidney disease that led to the vet’s recommendation to have him put down. Whenever I find myself facing turning points in life that can only be negotiated with the foolhardy brand of courage — and I’ve faced more such moments than I care to count in my life as a self-employed writer — I think of that crazy little mutt and his willingness to take on anything.
Copyright 2001 by D. Patrick Miller. All rights reserved.
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