A muffled scream came from the Man of the house’s side of the bed.
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It was hard to hear, over Zylka’s snapping and growling at Zarlee. The old dog was putting the new dog in her place, which wasn’t leaping around on our doona.
I felt like screaming too; dog fights at 6am are not a good start to the day. But I knew that the Moth had an injured leg, and Zarlee had probably jumped too close to it.
On the day that we were to take possession of Zarlee, both the Moth and I were busy completing assorted tasks; his outside the house, trying to get the mowing done, and mine inside, attempting to remove temptations for a hyperactive eleven month old dog.
The sound of the ride-on ceased, and I thought the Moth must have finished mowing, when a voice from the veranda asked me, in a conversational tone, whether I was busy.
“Sort of,” I replied.
“Can you come out here for a moment?” said the Moth, in the same non-urgent, quiet tone.
I thought there was a bird or a blue-tongue lizard out there that he wanted me to look at, dropped what I was doing, and went.
The Moth was standing on one leg by the outside tap, the other leg held over the bucket and water splashing.
The veranda was liberally splattered with blood, which was streaming from a wound in his shin.
“Something shot up out of the mower,” he explained, as I raced for towels. My first instinct as we attempted to staunch the flow was to take him straight to the hospital; but by the time he had hopped indoors, and we had raised his leg on a footstool and cushions, he said that he would like a cup of tea and a sandwich.
We had those in front of an ABC drama having a re-run at lunchtime, and when that was over we both felt fortified enough to examine the wound, which had stopped gushing.
It was not one that could be stitched, being a puncture rather than a gash, and with liberal application of Dettol and a dressing, the Moth seemed to be all right.
It is an odd thing that he seems to injure himself at about the same time as we take possession of an animal, usually an animal with problems.
When our youngest daughter went off for a gap year, she left us with her nine month old Dalmatian, Myffy.
“Don’t you be too nice to that dog,” she said, as we saw her off at the airport. “I want her to still be my dog when I come home.”
The Moth had no intention of making a fuss of Myffy – he was still nursing broken ribs, an injury sustained because he fainted in the bath while he was suffering from influenza.
I was alerted to the accident by an enormous splash and an expletive, and found the Moth flat on his back in the bath with a look of intense pain on his face.
Our daughter and her new dog were at home, too; but did not put in an appearance; as she said “It sounded so awful, I didn’t want to come and look!”
I helped him out of the bath and into his pyjamas, and suggested a trip to hospital; but the FA Cup Final was on television, and he got as far as an armchair and sat up watching that until the small hours of the morning.
He spent a day and a night in hospital when he did finally let me drive him there, long enough to have an X-ray, be diagnosed with having broken all his ribs on that side, be kept awake all
night by crashing tea trolleys and bedpans (according to him) and I was summoned at dawn to bring him home before he expired completely.
The Moth has never been an easy man to look after, but I did my best, dosing him with Panadol and tucking him up that night with extra pillows.
Several days later our daughter left. It transpired that Myffy had been sleeping on her bed. Now alone in the night, she wept and cried at the bottom of the stairs, and then found her way up them.
She landed on our bed with a thump, and there was a scream from the Moth.
I hastily removed the dog, took her back downstairs, and shut her in my daughter’s room. The howls, screams, thumping and scratching were such that I had to let her out. We went back upstairs more slowly, and I allowed her to jump – carefully – onto the foot of the bed; where she slept for the rest of her life.
Dogs love the Moth, and want to be near him, in sickness or in health. Sounds a bit like a marriage.