A Life with Dogs by Roger Welsch

Author:Roger Welsch
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Published: 2021-03-09T00:00:00+00:00

One of my favorite Nebraska storytellers, Harry “The Fiddlin’ Wheat Farmer” Hanson, once told me that his father was out in a field cutting hay when their favorite dog, running ahead of the mower, stopped to deal with a flea, and before Harry’s father could hit the implement lift, that sickle bar had passed over the dog’s back ... and cut his tail off right at the base. Well, the dog was sitting there crying and whining so Harry’s father said to his son, “Boy, run back to the house and bring me that bottle of Wizard Oil I keep by the sink.” Which errand Harry promptly did. Well, Harry’s dad—now, this is what Harry told me!—put some of that Wizard Oil on the dog’s stump ... and the dog grew another tail. Even more remarkably, he put some Wizard Oil on that amputated tail ... and it grew another dog!

Sometimes it seems we simply are not deserving of our dogs. “Pogo” posted on my Successful Farming tall-tale site on April 28, 2003, the one “... about the guy who went to look at a bird dog offered for sale by an old southern gentleman. The prospective buyer asked, ‘Does that dog have good bloodlines?’ whereupon the seller sniffed, ‘Suh, if this dog would talk, he wouldn’t speak to either of us.’”

My favorite dog story is one an old-timer told me almost 40-years ago when I first became interested in traditional American folk humor. He was in his 90s then, in a nursing home, and for a couple of days he told me tall tale after tall tale, some of the best I’d heard before or that I’ve heard since. But he also told me about the hardships he’d seen in his lifetime: family members who died during the horrendous influenza plagues of 1918; fires that destroyed barns, towns, and crops; dust storms, grasshopper storms, blizzards, tornados, floods, hail; bank failures, crop failures. He told me one disaster after another until he had told me maybe 30 or 40 things worse than the things that had ever happened to me in my lifetime. So, I said to him that I didn’t understand how he could tell me about a life so filled with tragedy and yet tell me at the same time some of the funniest stories I’d ever heard. The old gent thought over what I said a moment. Then he provided me with an explanation of the human condition and frontier humor that explained more to me than any 10 graduate seminars at any university possibly could have:

Roger, I’m not an educated man, so I can’t tell you the psychology or the philosophy of the matter, but I can tell you another story. I was once hunting down in the Republican River bottoms with my good ol’ dog. We came around a bend in the riverbank, and that dog ran right smack into a bobcat about three times his size. The bobcat took out after that dog and was gaining on him every jump.

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