Susie on the Farm

A boy’s best friend is his dog. He is your friend, your partner, your defender, your dog. You are his life, his love, his leader. He will be yours, faithful and true, to the last beat of his heart.

Author Unknown

“That’s your hound barking, Roland,” Matt said and laughed. “She didn’t waste any time getting back to the house.”

We had just left the pond where we had been fishing all morning, and with only a few hundred yards left to reach Matt’s house, Susie had run ahead of us, as she does, but had stopped near the old barn to bark at something that caught her attention.

“Yeah, I hear her.” I turned to face Matt and shrugged. “Wherever I take her, she wants to be first to get there.”

Matt’s house was on the same dirt lane as mine, but closer to the road. I lived in the farmhouse at the end of the long dirt lane that ran between two crop fields my Aunt Eloise rented to local farmers. An old, barbed wire on cedar post fence marked one side of the lane.

The pond was down an overgrown tractor path in the woods behind the farmhouse where I lived, and the tractor path ended near the swamp that crossed part of the property. The house had been my great-great grandfather’s place, a one-hundred-year-old replacement for one that had burned not long after the Civil War. Matt’s house was old, too, but it was still newer than the one where I lived. In fact, the only structure left from the original farm was the huge barn behind Matt’s house.

My aunt didn’t like us being around that pond because it was so close to the swamp. “There’s poisonous snakes all back in those woods,” she told us more than once. “You have to watch out for water moccasins in the pond and swamp, but Roland,”- and she looked at me- “you need to be careful not to step on a copperhead- those devils will lay coiled up on top of dead leaves and you won’t see it until it’s close enough to strike at your leg.” She shook her head. “And if you get yourself bit you’ll need to see a doctor right away, and it’s a long walk back.”

But Matt and I had taken Susie down there, anyway. She had been in the woods with me a lot at our old house; she knew to stay away from snakes and keep me from walking up on one. We sat on a shaded bank as dragonflies sunned themselves on the water lilies or zigzag through the air above the water, eating mosquitoes. While we skipped stones across the wide part of the pond, Susie went the entire way around it, sniffing at everything the way dogs do, sending songbirds into flight and small animals scurrying through the underbrush. When a Great Blue Heron, wading in the shallows of a cove at the far end of the pond, caught sight of Susie, it spread its huge wings and flew up, almost silently, above the trees. A mallard led her ducklings off the water and back into the brush on one side of the pond as soon as she spotted Susie, but the place she led them Susie had already sniffed out and passed by on her exploration, so the ducks were safe there.

The swamp was only about fifty yards from the pond’s dam and trees towered far above. Huge black woodpeckers with white crests on their heads marked out their territory with drum-like pecking high on dead trees. I had never seen woodpeckers that large; they were bigger than crows. In fact, the air was full of tropical-sounding bird calls coming from the forest canopy that were even louder than the woodpeckers’ background drumming; it sounded like a Tarzan movie. But we saw no snakes.

There were a lot of snakes in the swamp and pond- we just had not seen any that morning.

“I wonder what she’s after, now,” I said.

“Probably chasing the chickens again,” Matt replied. Susie liked to chase Aunt Eloise’s chickens when they were in the yard, but she never caught one. I had tried to stop her from chasing them the first time I took her up there, but Aunt Eloise had just waved it off.

“Don’t worry about that, Roland,” she had told me. “I don’t clip their wings, so they can fly up into the trees when needed; if a fox can’t catch them, I’m pretty sure your beagle can’t, either.”

So after that, I let Susie run back and forth around the yard after the chickens; she enjoyed it and it was funny to watch her trying and not quite catching up with any chicken she chased...

“No,” I told Matt, “She isn’t barking at the chickens; I think she’s found a snake.”

Matt rolled his eyes and looked at me. “You can’t even see her from here, Roland. How do you know what she’s barking at?”

“Because she has a different bark for chickens or birds that are just going to fly away than she does for a rabbit,” I told him. “She can’t catch a rabbit, either, but barks the whole time she’s chasing one. And that yelping bark you hear now means she’s found a snake or a turtle. I'm guessing it's a snake, since box turtles are less likely to be in your yard.”

~ ~ ~

I had learned to recognize the different pitches in Susie’s bark as soon as I started taking her along when I went ‘hiking’ in the grassy fields and woods in the National Park behind our old house. When she came across a box turtle, she would jump straight up and down with her feet hanging free like a dog in a cartoon. And the whole time, her non-stop barking was a drawn-out yelping rather than her normal bark. Of course, the turtle just withdrew into its shell and Susie soon lost interest. It would not run, so she had nothing to chase.

The next time I heard that same bark, I thought she had found another poor woodland turtle to harass, so I rushed to catch up with her. But it was no turtle. It was a brown and tan splotched snake, coiled up in the strike position and slowly turning to keep Susie in sight as she leapt up all around it. She circled the snake while jumping up and down but stayed between me and it. When the snake relaxed from its striking position and started to crawl away, Susie followed behind it and went from side to side, still barking and jumping until the snake disappeared into the brush. When I described the snake to my dad, he said that it was probably a copperhead, a very poisonous snake that might have killed Susie if she had been bitten by it and possibly me, too.

~ ~ ~

“You're sure?” Matt asked.

“Yes, I'm sure. She’s barking at a reptile, and if it isn't a turtle, it must be a snake.” I looked at Matt. “I’ve been taking Susie into the woods as long as I’ve had her, Matt. She kind of howls when she’s chasing a rabbit or something that can run from her, but if it’s a turtle her barks are lower, more growling and for a snake it becomes a sharper, harsher sound. With either, she starts jumping straight up and down around it, barking nonstop.”

Matt listened for a minute. “So that’s her ‘Hey, I found a snake bark’?” Matt asked and he laughed.

I laughed. “Maybe- It’s her ‘I found a reptile’ bark, at least,” I replied with a smile. “She hasn’t stopped barking and isn’t chasing anything; she’s staying in the same place. It could be a box turtle, but I really do think it’s a snake.”

“It sounds like she’s up at the barn,” Matt said. “We’ll find out soon enough.”

We kind of jogged the rest of the way up the dusty, dirt lane and then cut across a short pasture to the old barn. And it was old; a lot older than even older than the farmhouse I lived in. Horses had been kept in it at one time, so it had a hayloft on an upper level. The iron arm and pulley for lifting hay bales was still above the small door to the loft, but they were so rusted the pulley would probably never turn again. And the door to the loft had been nailed shut years before.

One of the double doors on the end closest to the lane was part way open, and Susie was in the doorway, looking up into the barn, jumping, growling and yelping.

“Susie,” I called. She gave me the quickest of glances, never turning towards me, and just kept on with what she was doing. As soon as we got to the barn door we leaned inside and looked up and I froze- a black snake was on top of the door sill with its body stretching almost two feet up the wall, trying to reach a swallow’s nest. A mob of swallows was attacking the would-be egg thief, trying to peck its eyes to drive it away. Between the swallow attack and Susie’s barking, the snake gave up. It dropped back down onto the door sill and slithered into the darkness in the corner of the loft. With the snake out of sight, Susie calmed down and the swallows settled back in their nests. Then Susie wagged her tail and wiggled her whole body to get my attention. In her mind, the crisis was averted: she had just saved me from a dangerous situation. I praised and petted her, of course, the way she expected.

“Well, that was one stupid snake,” Matt said with a laugh, “trying to steal eggs while the swallows are still in the barn! They’ll mob attack anything that gets too close to their nests, or to their babies- even people. It should’ve waited until the evening, when all the swallows will be out feeding.” Matt thought for a few moments. “But it’s good that Susie found it- I’m not sure the swallows could have stopped that snake if it really wanted the eggs.”

“So, the swallows feed in the evening?”

“Yeah, you should see them,” Matt replied. “All of them fly out of the barn in the evening and swoop around the yard until dark, eating any insects flying then: they really help keep the mosquitoes down. You know, if Aunt Amelia was here, she’d have grabbed that snake by its tail and thrown it in the woods.”

My Aunt Amelia's family attended a church where the men handled vipers- she was not afraid of any snake.

“That was a black snake, anyway,” I said. “They’re not poisonous so it couldn’t have hurt Susie.”

“I don’t know about that,” Matt said. “They’re not poisonous but they bite, and they carry all kinds of germs that could make her real sick.”

“Yeah, I guess so… Come on, Susie, you chased off that big, bad snake,” and I patted her head again. “Let’s go home, now.”

No sooner was the word “home” out of my mouth than she was over at the lane, wagging her tail, waiting for me.

“I’ll see you later, Matt. I’m going to take Susie home and eat some lunch.”

“Okay,” he said and started toward his house, then turned and faced me. “So, if Susie had come across a snake around the pond, she would’ve done the same thing?”

“Yeah, she would. And she sees them before I do- that’s why I like to take her along whenever I go into the woods. She’s my ‘early warning device’.”

I crossed the pasture and started down the lane back home, Susie trotting ahead and circling back, waiting for me. I knew mom would make lunch for me whenever I got home, so there was no reason to hurry. The sun was warm and the sky cerulean; small yellow and white butterflies fluttered over the soybeans growing in the field to the right of the lane. Wild honeysuckle vines grew along the rusted barbed wire fence on the left and filled the air with their sweet scent. Corn, just beginning to tassel, grew in the field behind the fence and mourning doves sat on the power lines, cooing…

It was too nice of a day to rush to get anywhere, so I took my time. If Susie wanted to run ahead, she could. Instead, she waited for me to catch up with her and then she trotted along beside me, head held high- clearly proud that she had saved me from that snake. Even though it was not a poisonous snake, in Susie’s mind, she had saved me from a profound danger.

Aunt Eloise had worried about us running into snakes around the pond, which did not happen. Instead, the only snake we saw that day was in the barn right behind her house, and we would not have seen that one if Susie had not found it. I was glad the swallows had not lost any of their eggs that day, thanks to Susie. I thought it was kind of ironic that the place we had thought might be dangerous was not, and the place we assumed was safe- was not either.

~ ~ ~

This story was originally posted on Medium.

Thank you for reading this short piece and I hope you enjoyed it. I have other stories and poetry written and more to write, along with my thoughts on issues of the day, spirituality, religion, politics, and more. You can subscribe to Vocal using my link and see all new work as I publish it and you can also read the thoughts, stories, and viewpoints shared by thousands of writers. And part of the money from every membership helps us all continue to publish and share our work.

I can also be found on Medium, Simily, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.