A Dog named Grim

 

February 15, 2026

“It was a Grim week, my friend.” 

 

            A lot of things happened last week. Unfortunately, most of them took place around the house. It started with a dog. I don’t have a dog. But one showed up in our fenced back yard.

            I don’t know how the monster managed to get back there. I keep the impenetrable gate shut. I couldn’t dig under or climb over the cedar barricade if I wanted to. I just haven’t been in the mood. But the dog? That monster must’ve been in the mood for a deep dig.

            The dog is the tallest, fastest, most cautious animal in the neighborhood. I tried slowly approaching him while holding my hand limply down to assure him I wasn’t a threat. I could tell right off that the dog could remove parts of me that would require a doctor to mend. I decided to call the creature “Grim.”

            Upon discerning that the animal enjoyed barking at me, I decided to grab an axe and some heavy shears from my shed and head for the front yard, to cut out a big chunk of a bush. I left the gate open in the hope of getting the dog to leave. And leave, it did.

If there hadn’t been so many neighborhood kids running around the cul-de-sac, I believe the dog would’ve followed me, barking himself sick. Follow me, he did… up until he noticed the kids. He enjoyed the kids. But he never let the kiddos touch him, but all the while showed himself to be no threat to anyone.

            By the time I had cut the daylights out of that feisty bush, I grabbed a big bucket and made several trips to dispose of the clippings in the backyard. It took me four trips, but the dog only followed me twice. I kept the gate open for all but my last trip. When that dog picked up on the sound of the closing gate it went bonkers. He stayed by the closed gate and barked.

When I walked to the east side of the yard to place my tools in the shed, the dog ran around to the east side of the fence and barked up a storm. It was at that time that I headed through the dense, thorny, shirt-grabbing woods that take up half of our back yard.

            I had to return to the tool shed to retrieve an axe and shovel, so I could find the area of the fence where the dog had made its entrance. I’m fairly sure I would’ve located the opening had there not been a massive pile of thick, wide, sawed segments of the giant pine tree that five guys had cut down a few years back.

I remember watching one of the guys climb the tree 15 feet from the top. Upon tying ropes around certain branches, he sawed off the top of the tree. The tree was about six feet from the back fence, yet it was never damaged by a fallen limb. When it gradually hit the ground, a crew un-tied it, sawed it into 18-inch blocks and hauled them out the back gate to their trailer.

            Before leaving, the crew-boss showed me what was left of the wooded area. All of the trees and larger bushes that had been near the tree were in place.

            As Kay and I walked back to the house, we both commented on what a great job the cutting crew did. At least, that’s what we thought for a few years, until I ran across that barking dog. That dog forced me to walk around the thick vines and bushes to locate where he had dug beneath the fence.  

            I never found it. I had too much trouble climbing over and around the thick spiny, shirt-tearing, shoestring grabbing, face gouging limbs and vines. I thought that would be the worst of it. Until I spied a stack of wood, limbs, and sharp vines bunched up around the back fence line. The gentlemen who had so delicately removed the massive tree ended up hiding at least thirty large segments of rounded 24+ inch portions of the pine tree sections on the east side of our fence. They were hidden behind a hill of limbs. I had never bothered to find my way back to the east side of the woods…not until that dog showed himself.

            I could’ve stayed happily ignorant over the dangerous mess that was left. Now I have to locate someone with a crew who could move all of the remaining felled timber. And you wanna know something else? Yes, you do. Somewhere beneath that hill of wood is a tunnel dug by a dog named Grim. Had he stayed away, I could’ve happily died not knowing of that massive mess.                                                                         

End

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