The Lost Dogs of Abbo’s Alley: Johnny, the Female Hound

This isn’t a dead dog story, but some readers might consider it an ‘almost’ dead dog story because maybe the dog should have died but didn’t.  It’s one of those things I don’t tell people about because they don’t believe it.  Or if they do believe it, they think I’m exaggerating.  I mean, I exaggerate sometimes, so their suspicions would be plausible. 

Anyway, out of all the dogs I’ve owned, Johnny was probably my favorite (mentioned earlier here).  We adopted Johnny, a stray from Abbo’s Alley, during our first year in Sewanee, Tennessee in 1975 when I was in 5th grade. This was a weird time in my life because I had always been the youngest of four in a loud household, but during the summer between 5th and 6th grade, the last of my older siblings left for college and suddenly, everybody except for my parents was gone.  My mom got a full-time job, and my dad was always out studying for seminary classes, so when I returned from school every day, I came back to an empty house. 

It wasn’t bad.  It was just different. The house was always quiet.  Since I didn’t have anybody to talk to, I talked to Johnny.  At this point, Johnny had full run of the house.  Despite her earlier anxiety around adult men, she had gotten comfortable with everybody in my family, including my dad, who from her point of view would have been a large and threatening male. 

The only time she showed anxiety in our house was when she farted.  Her farts were noticeable, and I think a previous owner must have punished her because she’d flee the room any time passed gas.  Even when she was asleep, if she farted, she’d wake up and banish herself.  Or maybe she just didn’t like the smell of her own flatulence.  Or maybe she was gas attacking us for fun.  I’m… I’m pretty sure she’d been abused. 

 

Anyway, with Johnny around, I didn’t feel lonely being the only human in the house for a couple/few hours every day.  As soon as I stepped outside, I’d be surrounded by neighborhood kids my own age who’d want to go roaming around and do stupid stuff, like throw rocks at each other or egg houses or wander around in Abbo’s Alley or get lost in the woods surrounding Sewanee.  Wherever we went, a pack of our dogs would follow us. Remember, Sewanee didn’t have leash laws.

Every once in a while Johnny and our group of dogs would get attacked by another pack of dogs, usually of strays or aggressive domestic dogs leaving their property.  Most of the fights were quick, with just a few growls and snaps just to establish who was boss (or whatever dogs are establishing) and then all the dogs would back off and go their own ways, or they’d start sniffing each others’ butts.  Sometimes the fights got serious, and we would have to intervene by yelling and waving sticks at the aggressive dogs.

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention.  We always carried big sticks just for that possibility.  Looking back, I was probably lucky that I was never bitten by a dog.  Looking back again, I really hope Sewanee has leash laws now.  And I hope the dog owners there now take better care of their animals.  I was proud that Johnny could hold her own against bigger aggressive dogs.  She had a reputation in the neighborhood as one of the toughest dogs around, but I didn’t want her getting hurt just to prove it. 

Johnny had a brother named Red.  At least, we guessed that Red and Johnny were related, but nobody really knew.  They looked alike, except Red was a little thicker, having been well-fed his entire life.  Red’s owner was a bald middle-aged soccer player who scrimmaged with/against the college team.  Red wasn’t red, so we didn’t know why he was named Red, just like Johnny wasn’t a male but was still named Johnny.  Maybe Red’s owner was a commie.  Middle aged soccer dude in the 1970s with a dog named Red?  Yeah, definitely a commie. At least a sympathizer.

Sometimes when we left town to go to Monteagle or Chattanooga, Johnny would follow the car as far as she could, even down the highway out of town where the shoulders were littered with carcasses of dogs whose luck (if they’d ever had any) had run out.  Even when the car hit 55, we could see Johnny in the distance behind us, trying to keep up.    My friends would sometimes tell me, “I saw your dog chasing your car.”  They were impressed.  I shouldn’t have cared what they thought, but I was in 5th grade (maybe 6th). 

I had mixed feelings as I watched Johnny chasing us down the highway every time we left town.  It was funny seeing a hound dog keep up with a car, but I was always a little concerned that she’d get hit.  Plus, it was illogical for her to chase us.  If we’d stopped to let her in, she’d just get sick and want to get out.  That was really our only complaint about Johnny, besides the bad farts, which seemed to bother her more than they bothered us.  Johnny couldn’t travel without heavy sedation.  Otherwise, the back seat of the car would smell like dog barf for weeks.  We loved Johnny, but dog barf scent in the car was a non-negotiable back in the 1970s.  I know nowadays some dog owners see their pets as ‘children,’ but dog barf scent can change that really quickly.   

One day after school, Johnny ran headlong into a moving car.  I saw the whole thing happen.  Johnny was running along with me on the main street (I was riding my bike on the sidewalk), and she wasn’t paying attention. I don’t know why. She usually followed on the grassy side, but instead, she was on the street looking at me and running and plowed smack into a moving car.  It actually sounded like a simultaneous THUD, HONK, and YIPE! Johnny rolled/somersaulted a few times on the pavement, and then got up and hightailed it down the street, yowling her way against the traffic flow to Abbo’s Alley where she disappeared down the trail.   

I remember standing with my bike underneath me.  That dog should be dead, I thought. There’s no way she survived that. That dog is running off to die, my brain continued.  I thought that I’d never see Johnny again… or I’d see her corpse on our front lawn when I returned home.  Or we were going to have to take her to the emergency vet 30 minutes away… if they were even open. But she was probably dead. Or dying.

But no, Johnny was waiting for me when I got home, wagging her tail and bouncing around like she hadn’t seen me in a week.  I told my mom what had happened, and we inspected the dog, probing her legs and poking her ribs and testing her vision, and she had a great time.  Dumb dog probably had amnesia from a concussion, but this was the 1970s, and there were no concussion protocols back then, especially not for dogs.  

When my dad finished seminary school after his third year, we had to leave Johnny in Sewanee.  My family (the three of us left) would be moving to a suburb of Omaha where they had leash laws and you had to keep dogs in your yard, like most civilized places.  Johnny was used to roaming free.  Plus, she wouldn’t have lasted the three day car trip. Or maybe we wouldn’t have lasted it with the dog barf.  Maybe my parents were rationalizing everything.  Maybe we really could have taken her and they just didn’t want the hassle.  Looking back, that might have been it, and if it was, I don’t blame them, I guess.

We left Johnny with our next door neighbors, the Jones family.  Their son Gulliver was my age and knew Johnny but hadn’t built up the bond that I had with her.  I remember hugging Johnny one last time and trying not to cry.  I didn’t like showing those types of emotions around other people.  I could almost feel my family’s disapproval when I showed emotions like that because it was interpreted as a sign of weakness, but I couldn’t help it because I knew I was never going to see Johnny again. One moment I was hugging my dog. The next moment I was in a car, and my life had changed.

Gulliver and I wrote each other a couple times during that summer after I left, and he said Johnny was still doing okay, but we stopped writing once school started up in September.  I don’t know what happened to either of them. 

By all rights, Johnny should have been a dead dog story when she hit that car.  I hope she had a long life of roaming the woods during the days and sleeping under a safe roof every night.  The Jones family still had two more years in Sewanee before the dad finished seminary school, so I don’t know what they were going to do.  I hope they didn’t just abandon her like a previous owner had done. I hope Johnny didn’t have to be a Lost Dog of Abbo’s Alley a second time, but I guess I’ll never know for sure.

For more Lost Dogs of Abbo’s Alley, see…

The Lost Dogs of Abbo’s Alley |

The Lost Dogs of Abbo’s Alley: Rocks

The Lost Dogs of Abbo’s Alley: Unbelievable Truth vs. Believable Lies