I have come to an enmitical understanding with the dog next door.
He belongs to my landlord's daughter. She's nice, but more than a bit standoffish, and her dog is ugly and mean. Having failed thrice to win him over, I decided to ignore him and let him live in his yard, while I lived peaceably next door.
The problem is, he likes to live in my yard. Either he's a Houdini escape artist, or he is allowed to run freely about the neighborhood. I came home from work on Friday to find him in my driveway, and when I got out of the car, he took issue with the fact that I was standing on my property and charged toward me barking and snarling with his hackles up.
That certain something snapped in my head -- the certain something that asserts itself forcefully in the presence of ill-mannered children and ill-mannered dogs. I stood my ground, calmly stared him down, and ordered him off my property.
Well, he stopped short (he's a scared dog, which is what makes him mean) about five feet from me, still snarling and barking, and then I, still calmly, started walking toward him. He shot off toward his yard and then turned and continued to bark. I very deliberately walked right up to the property line -- no further -- and watched him. He came no closer.
I waited about a minute, then turned to walk back to my porch (all I wanted was dinner, not to have a pissing contest with the dog who thinks he owns everything), and right away he started to follow me with his operatic solo of barking and growling. I turned to face him again. He shot back into his own yard. I turned around. He started after me.
This went on for about ten minutes, with me occasionally chasing him out of my yard. But eventually he got the message, I backed up to my porch and into my house, and that was that.
Until yesterday when I was sitting on my porch and saw him loping into my driveway.
Well, having just finished a quick reading of Julie of the Wolves, I was in a power-aggression mode anyway, and I did what the wolves did. After I leapt to my feet with a loud stomping noise, at which he raced back into his yard and turned to bark endlessly, I narrowed my eyes at him and leaned forward.
And he went away. He circled his owner's car and disappeared onto her porch. I smiled.
Sigh. I must be starving for some kind of confrontation if I enjoy having spats with the neighbor's dog. But it's all about winning, with these kinds of critters. I have been fortunate in never having had a bad experience with a ferocious dog in my childhood, so I'm pretty much completely without fear of canines, and love almost all of them -- but give me one who tries to boss me around on my territory, and I'll show him who's really in charge.
3 comments:
ha ha ha. Sarah, dogs are not critters. Your post label cracks me up.
p.s. I loved Julie of the Wolves as a kid. So good.
Where I come from, anything that has legs and isn't a person is a critter.
The term, in my area of upbringing, more specifically denotes common four-legged vermin (chipmunks, raccoons, squirrels, groundhogs, mice, rats, etc.), but can, and often does, refer to the previously referenced broader range, particularly as a derogatory term (as I'm using for this dog -- he doesn't deserve, the use of "critter" implies, the denotation of "pet") or an affectionate derogatory term (e.g. "My cat is acting up -- I don't know what's wrong with that critter").
Just a little Western PA dialect lesson for ya. :)
Oo, and interestingly, according to dictionary.com, "critter" usually references a domesticated animal, and in the old days was used particularly to refer to large domesticated animals (cows, horses, mules, etc).
I wonder where the vermin connotation came from?
Sorry, I wasn't being defensive; I'm the girl who grew up reading the dictionary for fun, whose grade school vocab homework usually took more than two hours because she would get sidetracked by the interesting words she'd stumble across just by scanning the page or in the definitions of the words she was assigned, and fell completely in love with etymologies and dialects and the derivations of regional phrases. So you got me thinking. :)
Oh, we also use it to describe various pests of the insect and bug categories.
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