Tails on the Hill: Stories about a Family and Its Dogs

Prologue

1 M ornings started with a slight breeze, but by noon that breeze would become a gale. The wind would blow hard from the south and the next day it would blow hard from the north, but every day it blew hard from somewhere. I’d stand at the kitchen window and watch Mother’s sheets whip around and around the clothesline and the dog pans bang and bump doing cartwheels across the yard till they all piled up against the fence. My daddy always said that was just part of living in West Texas. Mother and Daddy met each other in college and I guess that’s when they fell in love ’cause they got married and Daddy took Mother to Olney. Mother said she had to make a lot of changes, moving from a big city like Fort Worth to a small town. She said it wasn’t easy-like she didn’t know she shouldn’t wear shorts to the grocery store and she thought the neighbors were a little too nosy. Daddy said they were just being friendly. Prologue 2 Tails on the Hill He and Mother were driving over to Newcastle one day when they spotted a hill smack dab in the middle of fields and pastures. It was “love at first sight!”-an answer to problems of living in a small town. They built a big sprawling house on top of that hill and had me. Daddy thought I was going to be a boy and they were going to name me after his college roommate James, but I fooled them so they had to name me Jamie since I turned out to be a girl. My room was on the side of the house next to the doggie yard. Sometimes I got scared at night because Clarence Kunkel told Daddy that Indians used to camp out here and buried their dead on the side of the Hill close to where my room is. Being born there didn’t make me like the wind whistling ’round the corners of the house or the windows rattling, shaking all day long. Sometimes I’d close myself up in the bathroom and turn on the water in the tub as hard as it would go just so I couldn’t hear the wind blow. But I never thought about wanting to live anywhere else. On still nights the creaking of the windmill put me to sleep. Our barn was a place for make-believe-a playhouse, a hideout, a fortress, a stage for play-acting. The fields and pastures gave me lots of room to run and holler and play cowboys and Indians. I had all the friends I could ever want. Of course, they all had four legs instead of two, but that made them all the better to run with. We had little dogs, big dogs, a few giant dogs, sweet dogs, ornery dogs-all kinds of dogs! Daddy called them the Hill Gang. The membership went up and down all the time. It depended on how many puppies had been born or who decided to move on, or who ran across the highway without looking beforehand, or who was dropped off down the road because some hunter got mad at it for not doing its job. We had lots of those castoffs. I had two special girlfriends, Neva Lou and Eva Joy, but my doggies were my really special friends. Like all kids I had chores to do, but somehow, they didn’t seem nearly as bad because I had my doggie friends. I managed to play some of the time. Daddy said “a lot.” Mother said that’s all I did-play, that is. The best times were when Daddy and I would 3 Prologue sit out on the porch and talk while the sun went down. Mother would be fixing supper and we could smell good things cooking on the stove. We talked about lots of things, but I really liked it when we talked about the dogs we had known, the special ones we loved, and the ones we didn’t especially love. We giggled or laughed, remembering some of the dumb things they did. Some had weird stunts they liked to show off. Some were so smart. We wondered what happened to those that moved on. But none of them were “just dogs,” as certain people said. We...