Midnight on the Farm

I pulled a bright yellow sheet of paper from my mailbox, stood in the road, and read the heading, “Lost Dog,” written in thick black marker. Below was a message:

Black Lab Mix has a white patch on chest! Comes to Midnight . Has a Red Collar. Last Seen on Marshfield Rd Just Passed Baker Rd Albany. If Seen Please Call ______. Leave Message of info about the Dog

So the name of the dog that died in my farmyard two days ago was Midnight. She was a sleek young female of about 60 pounds, and her master, a country person from the notice—a woman, I decided, from the sort of trouble she took—loved her. The woman cared enough about her pet to stuff fliers into mailboxes up and down the road. But she’d failed to keep her dog home, allowing Midnight to come to our farm to kill and be killed.

That bloody day began at the mailbox, too. I’d tugged down its door and heard a car horn and seen a van in the distance trying to pass two dogs trotting down the middle of the road. The animals were specks in the curve, and I thought they were my neighbor Don’s dogs. His spaniels sometimes made it partway up the road before turning back. I went inside and dropped off the mail, and while I was pulling on my rubber boots beside the front door to finish my chores, I saw dogs in our front yard. They were strays, one medium-sized with a short black coat, and one smaller with long brown hair. Jack, our terrier who in the day is tied on the porch, started barking. I ran inside for a rifle. In moments they’d attack the chickens.

Grabbing a .22 and jamming in a clip, I dashed outside and saw that the dogs already were on the other side of the house, right beside the porch—and the black one was atop my son’s pet chicken. The yellow and black elderly rooster, which Tom calls Imperial Gustav, lives at our house so that he can eat the cats’ food and avoid young roosters in their prime down at the barnyard. Imperial was flapping his wings under the dog, which was trying to trap the bird with its paws and get in a bite. I stepped off the porch and shot—pop pop pop—and the dog broke away. I’d hit it, probably twice. The brown dog sprinted past me, retreating to the road.

The black dog was weaving down the driveway toward the barn, and I aimed carefully and shot again, and it yipped and staggered sideways and dived under my truck, where it thrashed on the gravel, dying. I walked over and squatted, and it looked at me. A mortally gunshot dog has watchful, expectant eyes. This one regarded me reproachfully, too, with an almost human look of disappointment, its sad expression abetted by a vaguely human domed skull and blunt snout. This dog had known only kindness. A film puckered across one dark pupil as the life left its eyes. I shot it twice more, in the chest and neck, to hasten its death. I did a few chores, dragged its body out, checked its gender, and looked in its mouth. She had the pristine white teeth of a young dog. I stuffed her body in a feed sack for disposal.

What kind of man kills a dog like that, so quickly and thoughtlessly, and bags it up like so much garbage? All stockmen used to, and shepherds like me still do. So does a farmer who has found his chickens torn apart, who has followed blood and feathers through the grass, who has found mauled carcasses in the weeds and lodged in brush. Chickens are defenseless and can only run and try to fly, but dogs chase down the birds, witless in their panic. Dogs don’t even eat their victims.

Because I love dogs—as a boy I stood weeping and pleading for one in front of my embarrassed father and was...