Once again my dog, all fur and bark and bite,
Foolish creature that he was,
Quivered in pain and leaned knee-height
Against my knees, tongue and nose and paws
Quilled by an animal half his size—
What could I do? Pliers in hand, I prised
Each quill free, leaving his tongue tattered;
Held tight, poor dog, with each tug and twist
More pain, more blood. Innocent of such matters
My young daughter clenched tight her fists
And lost her small voice, the dog’s rolling eyes
Giving away her daddy’s straightforward lies.
The dog panting in pain, the dog panting in pain,
Across the floor loosened quills, sharp and hooked—
What could I do? Free-roaming, without a chain,
And now I, with my daughter’s concern, spooked
By how dangerous a summer’s night transformed
A chance encounter. We have all been warned
Of such circumstances. The quill, the dog, the child
Have all been warned. Yet there we were, finding
The late night’s alarm, the animal’s distress, a field
Of shared experience: And in such random binding
We seek to recall, exhausted, exuberant, how we all squirmed,
As father and daughter years later confirmed.
—
Anthropologist David Jenkins is the author of Nature and Bureaucracy: The Wildness of Managed Landscapes (2022). He has taught at MIT and Bates College and worked in the Bureau of Applied Research in Anthropology at the University of Arizona. For the last dozen years, he has worked in public lands management, where he tries to do some good for the planet. His essays and poems appear in Sky Island Journal, High Country News, The AutoEthnographer, and elsewhere.
