“Alright son, we’ll buy you a dog but you must treat it right. That means you feed it, you bath it and you clean up after it does its business.”
“Da, I promise I’ll look after it but what will happen if I teach it something wrong by accident?”
“There is a story, about a girl. This girl had a dog and the story says she didn’t treat it right, taught it the wrong things, you know, and bad things happened to her. That’s all you need to know.”
“Da, I want to know what happened. Tell me the story.”
“So, you want to hear the story. Your mother won’t like me telling you but she isn’t here, is she? Abigail was the girl’s name and Abigail was about your age, ten I think.”
“Dad I’m eight.”
“She had nice brown hair and she loved the idea of space travel”
“Just like me!” The boy beamed.
“Everyday she would go home from school and run up to her room to look at the stars her parents had painted on the ceiling for her, she so desperately wanted night to come when she could look at the real stars.”
“What does this have to do with a dog?”
“Be patient, I’m getting to that part. The dog lived with Abigail and her parents. Les I think they called it. Well anyway, Les loved Abigail and everyday when she ran up the stairs he would run after her. Abigail was the one who took Les out for walks, she went along roads, next to rivers and into fields which made the time she spent with the dog pleasant for both of them.”
“If they were happy then how didn’t she treat it right?”
“There were some woods. Now, these woods were bright and beautiful as plant life goes but Abigail’s parents told her to never enter these woods. One day while out with Les she decided to disobey her parents and entered the woods. She walked on for a while, making sure she knew which way home was and just as she was gaining her confidence it happened.”
“What happened?”
“Abigail was set upon by a bear! It jumped from between the trees, landing right next to her. She screamed in terror and in fear. Les the trusty dog started barking to challenge the beast. All this noise frightened the bear and it ran away.”
“What happened next?”
Oh, the girl and her dog didn’t go back into the woods, they were best friends forever and lived happily ever after. The end.” The man rushed to finish the story because the boy’s mother had walked in.
But the boy was clever “No, there’s something more to it than that. Tell me the rest!” he demanded.
The mother nodded and the man continued “OK, that wasn’t the way it ended. The girl – Abigail that is – was scared of the bear and her parents had told her to face her fears. So she looked to Les for help, she knew that him being an animal would mean he had a killer instinct tucked away somewhere inside him. She stopped feeding him, made him scavenge and fight for food. She hit him at random to make him angry and on one occasion when she was bathing him, she held his head underwater to upset him. No matter what Abigail did to him, Les still loved her. Abigail also started skipping school. While her parents were at work, she’d steal her dad’s gun.”
“What type of gun was it?”
“Different accounts say different things, assault rifle, sniper, shotgun, look it doesn’t matter, the point is she took it. Abigail then spent her days being mean to the dog, teaching it to fight and getting practice with the gun. About a month went by before she entered the woods again.”
“Why was she so bothered about the bear? She shouldn’t have gone in the woods a second time.”
“I don’t know… She liked space, she wanted to be an astronaut, astronauts need to be brave. Well, she went back into the woods and this time she was hunting bear. She thought nothing could hurt her now that she had her dad’s gun and Les who she’d trained to be a deadly attack dog. Further in she went, heading for the spot she’d met the bear at before. When she got there she saw it, big, fat and scary just like she remembered. It hadn’t seen her. With this advantage, she took aim and fired the gun. BANG! The bear fell down dead. But the noise startled Les who attacked, he tore Abigail to pieces as he tried to defend her from the thing that made the noise. Once Les had calmed down he saw what he had done and laid down beside her body to wait out the rest of his days with the one he loved.”
Panting and panicking while trying to hide behind a cushion, the boy jumped up and ran upstairs shouting “I don’t want a dog.”
“You shouldn’t have frightened him like that.” The mother said.
“And you didn’t want to get him a dog, now he doesn’t want one.” The father replied.
“Well done Honey.”