Damien Galeone

It’s a Friday afternoon and I’m reading on my couch. I’ve come across a random account of a clash between some cowboys and a band of Cheyenne in 1865. Its matter-of-fact descriptions of ambush and violence are so terrifying that even now – on a couch in a locked flat in a European capital 160 years later – I still feel edgy and cast looks behind me into my recently painted wall.  

I hear the telltale signs of Burke getting the dog ready for a walk. But today she has big plans (oh, it’s not Indian ambush big, but big for 21^st century Prague). She is bringing the dog out and heading to a café to read some study materials for a course she’s doing. I admire it; and that is where my emotional involvement in this action ends, because I don’t have to go anywhere and I don’t have to do anything. She steps out with the dog and I snuggle into the couch and read about other people’s misery. Bliss.

This bliss ends about three minutes later when I hear the door unlock and Burke enter the apartment. The dog’s little shih tzu feet tip-tap the floor. Something has happened. I sit up.

“She shit all over herself,” says Burke, answering the question that my silence has asked.

“Oh man.”

Shih tzu’s have long hair, not course fur. If the dog has a particularly large and messy poop, it can at times become a fecal situation that is explosive and all-encompassing of the 12-pound dog’s lower body. She must then be sequestered into the hallway – and away from the cloth furnishings in the living room and bedroom. The problem is, shih tzus are slick, quick, savvy little dogs, whose ability to stay just out your reaching hands is unprecedented. And ours believes that every time we try to wrangle her for a walk, it’s game time.

Burke has to take off the harness and the leash because they too – like the dog – are covered in copious amounts of shit. It is cast to the hallway floor, where the cat takes an instant interest in it. The dog, usually white, is now duotone. Also, whatever consciousness my shih tzu has does not include embarrassment about being covered in shit. I – like most humans – have at least once or twice in my life been in a similar situation and I – like most humans – knew that this wasn’t a good situation for a human non-baby to be in. The dog, not so much. What the dog knows is that it’s being chased by her humans and she at first exhibits glee about this – tongue dangling, tail wagging (shit all over the place). But that elation shifts into panic, because the same consciousness that doesn’t allow my dog to understand poop on her body does allow her to understand that the only place she does not want to go in our house is the bath.

The dog ditches to the side and jumps back. The cat has off course gotten herself involved by just being a cat and therefore by nature in the wrongest fucking place at the wrongest fucking time just to see what you’ll do. The dog runs into the cat, who runs into me. We are all now covered to some degree in dog shit. Burke captures the dog and bathes her.  

When all settles, and the dog and me and Burke are clean and the cat has been wiped down with a wet wipe, I get back to the couch. My heart is still thumping. The dog lies in her bed, clean and empty, and probably not thinking much about what had just happened. She’s calm now. I shiver thinking about the shit. I read about the clash.

The Cheyenne ambushed two ranch hands on a bluff near the South Platte River – killing one and wounding the other in the leg. The wounded living man, Gus Hall, defended his position, but was in no condition to lend any help to his friends at the ranch across the river. There, a short while later, the same raiding party attacked Bill Morris, his wife and two kids, and five other cowboys. The raiding party set fire to the house, chasing out those hunkered down within, and naturally killed them all – except for one girl they kept for themselves. Hall was forced to watch the proceedings no doubt with impotent rage at being wounded and unable to help. While he was considering his predicament, a Lakota warrior snuck up behind him and shot him in the chest with an arrow. Hall shot and killed the man with a revolver. Then he let himself into the South Platte which brought him 5 miles downriver to an army base. When the army showed up, they found seven dead white people and three dead Cheyenne. The Cheyenne were around the whiskey decanter, the whiskey within having been poisoned with strychnine by Bill Morris because he knew he would be killed and that the ambush party would drink his whiskey. He rounded up some casualties from the afterlife.

I reflect on this situation and my mind boggles at the fact that it is (more or less) a fact. This wasn’t written by Cormac McCarthy or Larry McMurtry. No, it’s something that happened at a time when people put themselves into situations that were incredibly real and which had real consequences. I marvel. There was a time – not that long ago – in or near cities I have been to and even where I grew up, where being scalped or shot or murdered was all in a day’s possible course of action. There are course are times in the more recent past (or, sadly, the present) where other horrors are a possible outcome to one’s normal day.

My day, on the other hand, can be thrown into a whirlpool of frustration by a missed bus. My day can be utterly destroyed by a rude student. My heart may palpitate by chasing around a shit-covered dog. As I reflect on this perspective, I note that the dog has noted something. There’s something peculiar that happens to a person when a dog sitting upright. I suppose it is preternatural instinct that goes back to the time when dogs and humans found their symbiotic relationship in food and protection. A dog’s head rising next to a fire and glaring into the dark woods would have made the humans on edge.

As it does me. What is she doing?

It is at this time that I notice the cat running around in a low, strange way. She’s hunkered close to the floor and when she stops, she forces her butt close to the ground. As I begin to realize what has happened (because it happens occasionally), the dog does too. Or at least the dog understands that sticking out of the cat’s butt is a big piece of shit.

The cat spends an awful lot of time licking her fur. This fur – and other hair – inevitably ends up in her system, which is where her poop lives until it’s pooped out. Sometimes this hair gets tangled into the poop and connects the poop to the cat. The cat can’t figure out why it can’t get this thing off her butt that’s following her around. And she becomes very freaked out. The dog’s two favorite foods on earth are French fries and cat food and, absent that second option, will go after cat poop, which contains that option. So, as the cat runs around my house with a big piece of shit attached to her butt, the dog is following the cat around trying to eat that shit.

If you’ve made it this far, I send you my hearty congratulations. Nobody likes to read about other people’s poop let alone the poop-based shenanigans of some animals. If you have made it this far, I can only gift you the visual of me running around trying to extricate shit from a cat’s ass – a cat who is stressed out and nervous and who really doesn’t want anyone pulling anything from under their tail. And the two of us being followed closely by the dog, who, having had her own shitty adventure this day, was just hungry and couldn’t understand why both I and the cat were desperately trying to get away from her.

Though there are no winners this day, I ‘succeeded’ in my ‘goal’. The cat quieted, the dog went back to sleep, I washed my hands and then my whole upper body. I went back to my couch.

Anyway, the point of the story: I totally could have been a cowboy.