I wrote this yesterday in some airport:

My mom says she heard two shots, and on the second one she ran outside to the field and saw the men walking towards my dog. These men graze sheep on our land, and some had been injured a couple of days ago. They saw my dog and shot her, I guess to protect their sheep. They shot her twice with a twelve-gage shotgun. As my mom and Lonnie both ran to the field and called her, she struggled unsteadily toward home until finally collapsing. The men came on to kill her, but Lonnie got there first and carried her over the homeward fence.

She is alive, now, at home and I am going there to see her and to take care of her.

I'm not sure what I'm supposed to feel, I guess. I always get like this when something bad happens. Self conscious. Too much emotion? Not enough? Is it right? Am I wrong? Am I dead? Do I feel?

When I close my eyes I see her, Kino. I try to see her playing and running real fast around in circles, but sometimes I see her lying there, the white fur of her chest rising slowly as she breathes, and then I try to imagine her skin, mottled pink, showing where she's been shaved the wounds, bruised and purple, the little holes oozing blood while she lies panting.

And I feel angry. In my fantasies I go to the men's house with a gun. I make them beg. Or sometimes I pick a fight with them, and get beat up, lose my teeth. Sometimes I avenge her death, because in some of my fantasies she has died.

These fantasies fill me with shame, but maybe they are a way for me to compensate for what I perceive to be an insufficience of emotion. Maybe I, feeling guilty for enjoying a hamburger while my dog is in pain, punish myself with these dramatic scenarios.

I don't know what the right way to feel is. I hope my dog is okay because I love her a lot.

***

When I cam home and walked in the door she was there to greet me, and wagged her tail and did her best to look spry. She has over fifty pieces of shot in her, mostly on her left side but some in her mouth and head, and on the inside of her back leg. The vet says that there's no internal bleeding, and that the shot to her head did not penetrate her skull, so her chances of recovery are good. To me she seems in pretty good shape, considering. She drinks, and last night she ate a little food.

When she was young I watched a pickup truck screetch and skid over the tip of her tail, missing crushing her by a fraction of an inch. Her body slid just beneath the front bumper, seemed to fill the negative space under the truck perfectly for just an instant before she sprinted away in fear. When the shaken driver and I looked at where she had been, I swear I saw some white hairs stuck under his front left tire.

Lucky dog.