The Faerie Dog

Summer of 2017 I found myself at home alone at our little hippie shack in the Appalachian woods. It was a noteworthy day because I didn't find myself at home alone very often in those days. A year before this I had had a brilliant vision of a past-life, triggered by the (re)discovery of a small meteorite that only someone more powerful than I am could have possibly led me to. I was itching for more...

So I spoke out loud, mostly to our little cabin, or so I thought at the time, explaining that I was a hard-headed materialist atheist, that I WANT to believe that there's more to life on this planet than that, but that I had never seen much reason to BELIEVE that there was (meteorite story aside...). I said, "I'm pretty thick, and set in my ways, so if you want to get my attention I'm going to need louder signals. Please and thank you."

Nothing happened. Nothing seemed to have changed. Just me and my little cabin, same as it ever was. Oh well, I shrugged mentally, and continued about my strange little life.

Then one day this happened:

A few months later, in November, my wife went to work in the usual way, leaving me and the kids at home for a typical day of home-school and gardening. But we had a newcomer lurking about that day - a white and brindle pit-bull was driving our dogs crazy, and it wouldn't go away. I ran it off repeatedly, shouting and waving my walking stick at it. It never let me get very close to it, so if I could've stood sentry out there forever it wouldn't have been a problem. But of course I couldn't do that; I had things to do. And my particular brand of incandescent loathing for this dog breed was making me hot under the collar. Nearly every time I had lost livestock in the past it had been to a pit-bull. So I decided to up the ante. The kids took turns watching for it from the loft windows, and every time they saw it come around they would alert me quietly. Then I'd sneak around behind it with my wrist-rocket pre-loaded with a 1/2" glass marble, and WHAM!, pop that f-er in the butt.

But it never flinched. Like it didn't even notice the marble had hit it. We're not talking about a kid's slingshot here, this was one of those high-powered jobs that braces against your wrist. They can kill small animals. I've done it. It should have at least made it wince and squeal a little, and take off running in the opposite direction. But it didn't even notice. So I'd just come out of hiding waving my arms and run it off again. And each time I did this it would run down the road, one direction or the other. (The "other" was an undeveloped hill at the end of the road, backed by a steep drop down to a rushing creek, so when it went that way I knew I'd probably get another shot at it soon. Because...) It never ran into the woods. It wouldn't leave the road.

This was all very strange to me. A dog that had no sense of pain whatsoever, but that also wouldn't run into the woods. Odd that. Very odd. But, after quite a bit of persistent effort, I thought I had finally run the thing off for good. I didn't see it for a few hours anyway.

While the dog's gone missing, there's another part of the story that's highly relevant and needs attending to before I get to the pay-off. About a month before this my wife's favorite necklace had disappeared from her nightstand. This wasn't just any piece of jewelry we're talking about. It was a peaceful face carved in bone, ringed with silver, with a small faceted citrine at the bottom, on a silver chain. It was a Mother's Day gift from the three of us, on the first Mother's Day that there WERE three of us. It was her precious. And she knew where she had left it, so carefully the previous night.

But it wasn't there.

We looked everywhere for that necklace; through her teary eyes we tore the cabin apart trying to find it. For days. We scoured the yard, and the car, her office, asked around at the farmer's market. Nothing. Nada. Gone. A dark and terrible sense of loss descended upon her countenance. I felt so bad for her.

Back to the pit-bull, though. Nightfall had come and my wife and I had just tucked the kids in and were getting ready for bed ourselves. I shined the Mag-light out the back door into the woods behind us...and there it was, stalking around the back gate. I just knew it was waiting for us to go to bed so it could break into our chicken coop and kill all our girls, for no other reason than the sport of it. I hate pit-bulls. So I told my wife that I wasn't going to be able to sleep as long as that beast was stalking about. What should I do? Just shoot it? So our chickens would be safe and we could all get some sleep?

"No," she said, "let's feed it instead. Maybe it won't bother the chickens if it has a full belly."

So I acquiesced, and she took a bowl of food out and dropped it off behind the back gate. On the way out there, walking down the trail, she could sense the dog outside the fence, just out of sight over near the car. But when she got back inside the cabin she said, "that dog just disappeared." What? "It was growling this awkward little growl that didn't seem to belong to a pit-bull as I was walking out there, but after I set the dog food down, well, it just vanished."

"Like, ran away?" I asked.

"No, like it vaporized. I couldn't feel its presence anymore. I couldn't see its eyes reflecting your flashlight anymore. It stopped making noise. It disappeared."

Okaaay...I thought. Maybe we should get some rest. It had been a long day, after all.

The next morning I rose at dawn, in my usual way, and went straight out to the back gate to see if it had eaten the dog food, and to check on the chickens, make sure they were alright. The dog food hadn't been touched. The chickens were blissfully pecking away at the floor of their coop in the early morning gloom, completely unaware that there had ever been anything to worry about. And the dog was nowhere to be seen. (In fact, we never saw that dog again.)

But while my wife and I were fixing breakfast that morning, our young son very excitedly started screaming, "Mama! Mama! I found your necklace!! It was right here on your nightstand where you left it!!" He was beaming - so proud that he was the one to bring that light back to his mother's eyes.

She took the necklace from him, asking where specifically he had found it. He showed her, the very spot she had left it a month earlier, right where she KNEW she had put it. And then she showed it to me...

It looked as though it had been on the ground in the woods for a month.