A Tale of Two Saves
(Editor’s note: I’ve tried to avoid loading this site with stories about my dogs, but when I decided to add a category about Super Berners, I realized I had to start with a tribute to our first Berner, who inspired me to begin collecting Berner Tales™ through the love and laughs she gave us, as well as the two events here.)
When I retired from the Air Force in California, my wife and I stuffed two cars with belongings and Bessy, and drove to Wichita to visit our daughter and her family. After a few weeks, I left my wife and Bessy behind and drove to North Carolina to continue a job search. My son-in-law was at work and my wife had driven to school to pick up our 7-year old grandson. My daughter went grocery shopping with our second grandson, only a few months old.
When my daughter returned, she noticed a man sitting on the curb across the street and a little way down from her house. “He must be awfully hot wearing that long coat in the middle of the summer,” she said to herself, then got out of her car and retrieved the baby in his infant seat. She had barely stepped inside her house and put him down when the man opened her screen door and tried to force his way inside.
My daughter screamed and pushed back on the door. Bessy lept up and put her front paws on the door and pushed back as well – snarling and growling fiercely at the would-be intruder. As my daughter described it, Bessy said something like, “I’ve got a butt reduction plan in here, Buddy. Would you like to donate your rear-end?”
He apparently got the message; yelled, “Bear!” and left hurriedly. My daughter called 911, but Bessy was still pacing the floor when the policeman arrived. “Ma’am, I can see your dog is upset,” he said to my daughter. “If it’s okay with you, I’ll stay on the porch to take your statement.”
“It’s a good thing your dog was here,” he told my daughter. The man Bessy chased away matched the description of someone who had attacked several women in Wichita.
(They caught the man a few weeks later and he tried to file a complaint against my daughter for harboring a wild animal. He was convinced he had encountered a bear!)
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I found a job in central NC and while we house-hunted, my wife and Bessy moved in temporarily with my brother and his wife in the house where I was reared in the eastern part of the state. I worked Monday-Friday and drove “home” on the weekends. My wife’s sister had surgery and couldn’t care for herself right out of the hospital, so she moved into one of our spare bedrooms for a few days.
The second night she was there, my wife and my brother’s wife were in the front part of the house. Bessy kept going back and forth from the kitchen toward the bedrooms. “She wants you back there for some reason,” my brother’s wife said to my wife. The two of them checked on my sister-in-law and found her burning up with fever.
They took her to the emergency room where the doctor told them, “It’s a good thing you brought her in. She has a severe infection. If you had left her alone, she wouldn’t have lived through the night!”
My sister-in-law is a pristine housekeeper who never allowed animals in her house. Whenever we visited, however, Bessy was a welcome guest!
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from Jim, North Carolina