A small shiver in the spine and not from the cold. For some reason I checked the load in the Marlin 35 Remington chamber....remembering that I had loaded the tube and then the chamber from the tube...the tube was down one. I replaced it, telling myself that surely it wasn’t because I was spooked for some reason. I had hunted alone like this countless times, in numerous countries let alone states...why would I be shook. But...I was. And with my background in war and the streets as an enforcer...I knew you needed to listen to the gut feelings over the ego...what was it...straining to hear....I slipped my hand under my coat and loosed the strap on the hammer of the 44 Colt S/A...it was heavy loaded with Keith slugs.

When he came for me it wasn’t a surprise but it was still a shock to see him break from the brush and the trees at less than 20 yards. I hit him twice with the 35 Remington loads but it didn’t stop him.. I suddenly had 60 pounds of feral dog body slam me in the chest...leaping right into my arms, hands and the rifle. I went down with him on top of me. I was trying to get my left arm...clothed in the heavy winter down jacket into his mouth...to keep it from my throat. He bit down near my shoulder cracking my collar bone...I fired two rounds from the 44 special right up thru him...and rolled him off. Another into his head....I think I might have even kicked his body a few times....anger doesn’t describe my feelings at that point.

Later friends went back and found the dog’s body, a Shepard/Doberman mix, and dragged him out of the woods to the road for pick up by the Va. Department of Public Safety..(state police)..so it could be checked for rabies...though that was a small chance..you still don’t take it. They found both the 35 Remington slugs had torn thru his top back and exited down thru his intestines.. One 44 broke his spine, the other rupturing from the bottom up ribs and lungs and such. The state pathologist was unhappy that I shot him in the head...that’s what they use to test for rabies. Personally I felt that was his problem. Something had warned me...who knows, a sound that didn’t register, my guardian angel...what ever..I’m glad it did.

In my private life living in the beautiful wilderness, it was the only problem we had. We lived in the wilds of the of the state...and at the time feral dogs were a scourge. We lost forty animals from our little farmstead over a five year period. Mostly ducks and chickens and pets...but one young horse and a calf. And the worst of all was my daughter being attacked.

She was about eight, waiting at the end of our wilderness road for the school bus one morning, and a mangy 40 pounder came at her. Hit her and was on top of her when the school bus driver saw what was happening when heading down the road. Quick thinking, she laid on the horn and aimed the bus at the dog and my daughter. The dog took off. I had heard the loud long horn and jumped in my jeep and headed to the them. My daughter’s snow suit saved her from any physical damage...though it took awhile for her mother and I to help her regain her emotional balance....seeing she was ok and the bus driver with her I went after the dog...

I caught him running the side of the road a mile or so away...driving right up beside him...I would have run him over but he was in the gully beside the road...I shot him in the back of the shoulders with my little PPK Walther .380 and a Super-Vel 88 grain HP. He jumped at the shot went under the barbwire and across a field...by the time I stopped he was too far for the little gun and follow up shot.

I was disgusted with the .380...I traded it in on a 357 Python. This Colt had it’s 6 inch barrel skillfully shortened to 5 inches and slicked up. Two weeks later going to work one morning I topped a hill on a country road...and 200 yards away was the dog. He was busy with something on the side of the road. I backed my unmarked enforcement car out of sight. And injin’ed up on him. At about 50 yards I put a 357 magnum 158 grain WW gilded Keith bullet into his brain. He had been eating a neighbors little lap dog...I went and told my neighbor the sad news, but had to go to work and left.

That night when I returned home my neighbor was waiting for me. The feral dog had killed his wife’s little Schnauzer. He dropped a flattened out slug into my hand, it was the .380 Super Vel...it had flattened out on the dog’s shoulder knuckle and stopped, he had dug it out. And to think I used to carry that little gun as a back up.

I set out from the time of my daughter’s attack to eliminate feral dogs from our area. In three years I killed 99 of them...from a near 100 lb monster sheep killer, to 20 lb+ chicken and duck thieves. All my neighbors also did their share...strange the tree huggers tell us wild dogs really don’t hurt much, that they eat mice and rats like the coyotes...yet in those three years the small game up to deer, exploded in population as the feral dog population suddenly went down. And no one around our area got attacked any more. Though state wide seven people were killed by dog pacts up to 1976, when we left Virginia for Arizona.

Virginia was a paradise for the hunter...where Arizona has many different species of animals their numbers are low. Virginia didn’t have many species..but what it did have, was great in population numbers. State law allowed a farm owner to harvest any animal that was destroying crops or property. As I said I fed a lot of folks in our area with deer meat.. At the same time I had a small deer herd on my property that didn’t damage crops and I protected them. We put out mineral and salt licks for them...made sure the dropped apples were dumped where they could get to them....and put out feed during bad winters. There were some princes in that herd...and their genes spread thru out the area.

The state prison in the western part of the state was raising turkeys and releasing them to restock the state. When you bought a hunting license in those days it was five dollars...you got two deer tags, three turkey tags and a bear tag. Unfortunately those days are gone forever. They raised pheasant also but when they released them they all went to Maryland where it was colder...Maryland had a wonderful pheasant hunt that year.

Just for fun we released a bunch of Guinea Hens into the wild to see what would happen. Boy that was a mistake....these green turkey looking birds are closer to the peacock family...and they scream at the drop of a hat. Trying to stalk thru the woods would end in one of them giving an alarm to every living creature for hundreds and hundreds of yards around. So we hunted them to silence. Good eating too.

Oak trees give off mast nuts. October would come and the nine hundred foot logging road leading into our property and home would be covered with a thick blanket of them. The squirrels would go nuts...no pun intended...frenzy and fury...grabbing and hiding...burying and filling their tree hollows with them. I would stock up on squirrel for the freezer. I like squirrel fried and in stew.

When we first moved into the wilderness we were babes about country living. But making friends was easy...and country folks look out for each other. You may not know the neighbor in the next apartment in the city...but you would know your neighbor a mile away or more in the country...wild country. Folks did for each other...I would hunt meat and varmints for many that didn’t and they would cook goodies for us...or come and plow our little 100X100 foot garden each year for us. Each country farmer had a contract with the state to clear the rural public roads that adjoined his property every time it snowed. Many times in the winter the country roads were passable but the cities were still locked up.

My friends would come over with their front loaders with blades on them and clear our long lumber road. And a number of times my neighbors would call me because of criminal activity on or around their property...because the sheriff’s office was many miles away. I would respond to their emergences, and they would watch over and care for my family when I was away. It was good living.

One neighbor and close friend, was the state’s head veterinarian for the state prison system at the time. In those days the prison system was self sufficient...they raised all their own food...dairy, meat, produce, all of it. They produced clothes and furniture, the inmates working these endeavors were paid a small hourly wage so they would have something when they were released. The ACLU stopped all that by taking the state to court to force them to pay the minimum hourly wage...the system couldn’t afford that so they had to drop all production and paying of prisoners...so everybody lost.

My close friend was in the stall of a large bull working on one of it’s front hooves one day. This bull was known to be non aggressive (horns removed) but for some reason it started body bashing my friend against the heavy wood stall. The inmates came to his rescue, one actually leaping up on the 2000 lb bulls head and neck...while the other two pulled my friend from the stall. It took six months for him to heal. But there were some serious complications and he had to retire. Like all bureaucracies they held up his retirement on disability, time after time, for more and more medical tests.

Since I was the Commissioner for Drug Abuse Control for the state at the time, and had the ear of the Governor...I spoke to him about my friend. One phone call and two weeks later he was retired.

But he was still hurt and I wound up helping him around his 140 acre farm when he needed help. It wasn’t all one sided...I learn a great deal about wild country living from him. For example one late March winter morning it was about to snow, and I found my friend outside our house spreading grass seed! At my surprise he explained that the seed is covered with the last snow fall of the season, when spring comes the snow melts the seed is covered with the dirt in the snow...the birds can’t get it...and the seed germination is automatic and deep. I had serious doubts...so in the spring I planted grass in an area that he had not. His stuff came up thick and healthy...mine came up in bunches and bare spots. Guess what I was doing the following year just before the last snow of the season...?

He called me over to his place to help him castrate a large boar pig. This guy weighed well over 300 lbs. My friend put a fifty five gallon barrel in the pen laying on it’s side with feed in it. When the pig went into the barrel head first we tipped it up...I and another friend held his back legs over the lip on the barrel...while he did the surgery. Neat. Oh, one other thing...we left the pig in the barrel and ran for the fence getting out of the pen. Wow...that pig fell over in the barrel and was out of it in a shot...he was so angry you could smell it. He destroyed that big heavy barrel, smashing it all over that pen. It was a very funny sight.

All the neighbors got together and had a meeting. We had a hawk move in us, and he was as smart as he was vicious. We put a bounty on it’s head of a box of ammo of choice to the one who nailed him....sometime afterwards getting up early and still dark out...I saw the shadow of a large bird on top of the security light/poll down on the end of a stand of our trees. The security light was red, because animals don’t see that color all that well and they think they are still in the dark. We used to watch all kinds of animals come on to our property at night...especially racoons. They are great night time foragers. So with the light dull red and shining down from the reflector around and above the bulb, the top of the light poll up high was dark...with just enough diffused light to show me it was a large bird and I knew I had the hawk that was raising cane with our ducks and chickens. He was waiting for first light and the little farm animals to come out....

Using a silent rifle load I shot for the middle of the shadow, and was satisfied hearing the body fall down thru the branches of the trees around the poll. We had breakfast...and when it well into morning I went to recover my prize. Imagine my surprise when I found I had shot our rooster!

Oh well another lessen learned...besides we found we didn’t need a rooster to get the gals to lay eggs.....and he was a loud mouth every morning anyway...Barbara had to boil him for hours he was so tough.

Some idiot convinced the state legislators to ban all shooting of predator birds. Do you know what happens when you put a total ban on shooting any species when that species is already thriving? They go completely out of control in numbers...hawks and turkey/vultures in a very short few years were everywhere. Turkey buzzards/vultures what ever....are very slow birds to take off, they are very big, you come around a bend in a country road and suddenly the front of your can is blending with three or four of them. The damage can be horrendous. Hawks are some of finest predators on earth..you get a pair hunting your chickens, ducks, pups or cats, and there is trouble...protect them and then you have dozens to contend with not just singles or pairs.....we of course stood on the law that any animal that was destroying property could be eliminated. There were folks that for one reason or another didn’t use firearms....they of course had bigger problems.

But all in all it was paradise. Want to test a load...roll the glass sliding door of the living room open and shoot it out into the back yard. We were surrounded by 1000+ acres of uncut timber land...a 50 caliber machine gun couldn’t get thru....spring time and the dogwood would explode into flower...pink and white everywhere....small critters running around and over and thru and up and down the trees. I would drive in at night and I had two young raccoons living in a hollow tree on the edge of the road. They would pop their heads out to watch the lights of the car...I would hit the high beams and they would duck back..I’d lower the lights and they would look up again. My daughter used to feed them peanut butter..they loved it.

In the fall the deer would come out on the road to eat the mast from the oak trees. I would pull my car into the long lumber road drive and they would jump into the trees. After a week they wouldn’t jump and I would have to blow my horn to get them to scatter. By the end of October, I would practically have to bump them in their butts to get them to even move out of the way enough for me to pass. They were just beautiful...in the spring the does would bring their new born fawns to the mineral and salt links and the fresh new green grass. We would keep the predators away from them....they knew they were protected.

We had fruit trees everywhere. One cherry tree would grow up and the next year you would have five around it...the next year you would have to thin them out so the others could grow to a good size. I planted bamboo in a area that was always a wet and a muddy mess. Probably about a hundred or so feet long and 25 feet wide. In three years the bamboo was thick you couldn’t pass thru it....we used it for everything from light fence posts for wire enclosures for chickens and ducks and dog pens....to digging up the new shoots popping up in the spring to feed them to the pigs....pigs begged for them. Pigs by the way are on the top of the animal intelligence plane...might not think so looking at the ones penned up in mud and such...but the wild ones are very astute. Besides we never allowed our pigs to be in slop...or feed them garbage. We had a cat that the pigs didn’t mind coming into the pens...very unusual, this little thing was less then bright and had a littler of kittens in the pig house. And the pigs of course ate the whole litter.

It rained at least once a week...winters and the snow in the forest unbelievable, in it’s plush white beauty. I remember the first freezing rain storm we had...dangerous but the ice in layers covering everything exploded in lights and color when the sun came out....And then there were the stars...with no light pollution from cities...millions were visible like a blanket pulled over you. We would hear the owls talking to each other at night...the night birds calling to mates...the long mournful wolf like song of some dog far away singing into the night. Life was good...life was rich......it’s hard to explain, it had a flavor to living....not found in cities. In 1976 we had to leave...duty calls....I always promised I would return. We never have been able to...so I have a arrangement with the Lord, since His work here partially keeps me from earthly paradise. When he calls me home I get 100 years on my own mountain in the Kingdom...those are not old, short earth years either...they are the nice long Kingdom years.....hey and when you are around, you can even come and visit.....Call First!

PACO45@worldnet.att.net