Skippy
I suppose in every lifetime there is one special animal that makes a lasting impression. In my life that animal was Skippy. We didn’t adopt him. He adopted us.
My mom was working as an accountant at the Ford Motor Company in Deer Lodge, Montana. One day, one of the company’s salesmen came in from the car lot complaining about a dog that kept getting into the cars and sleeping on the seats. Mom went to see what they were talking about. She found a black-and-white fox terrier mix right where the salesman said it would be—asleep in a car. He appeared to be healthy, friendly, and intelligent.
Mom went back inside and called my dad to see if she could bring the dog home. I think Daddy was reluctant, but he finally said yes. When Mom arrived home that evening, the dog was with her. We named him Skippy.
Skippy settled right in as if he’d always been with us, and Daddy’s reluctance about having a pet melted away immediately. Within a few days, the two became fast friends, and they stayed friends for many, many years until Skippy’s death.
Skippy was probably the most intelligent animal I had ever known. And he had soul too. If you praised him, he got it right away. If you shamed him, he got that right away as well. He knew lots of tricks, which he learned after being shown how to do them only a few times. When he arrived at our house, he was skinny, smelled bad, and was extremely tired. He was assigned a place under the kitchen counter where he could sleep. It was right in the middle of the family’s activities, yet he was out of the way. He liked his place immediately and went willingly to his rug at the end of each day.
After we’d had Skippy for a time, my brother acquired some rabbits to raise. One day, one of the expectant mother rabbits got out of the hutch and delivered her babies in some soft grass near the garage. We didn’t know she had gotten out of the hutch, but Skippy did. Fox terriers didn’t get their name by lying around on silken pillows in a king’s palace. They are hunting dogs and will go into a barking frenzy when chasing prey.
Skippy came to the house to get Daddy. The dog fussed and whined and stewed. He followed at Daddy’s heels until Daddy finally turned to him and said, “What is it? Do you want me to follow you?” Skippy jumped around, ran a few feet in the direction of the garage, and came back. “All right, I’m coming,” Daddy told the worried dog, who was already running toward the garage.
Skippy ran straight to a pile of naked baby rabbits with their eyes sealed tight and bulging in their tiny skulls. Skippy could have killed all of them at the same time with one bite. Instead, he stood whining and looking at Daddy.
“Well, I’ll be . . .” Daddy said. He took off his cap and carefully lifted the babies into it. He carried them back to the hutch. It didn’t take long to locate the mother rabbit, catch her, and return her to the safety of her cage. Skippy had denied his natural hunting instincts to rescue our baby rabbits.
That experience taught us a lot about our little dog. Later on, we understood how truly amazing it was that he had sought help for the baby bunnies. We were coming home from an outing when a huge jackrabbit dashed in front of our pickup. Jackrabbits are about a foot tall and they have ears that are about another foot tall. They look gigantic. Daddy stopped the car as the rabbit ran to the side of the road.
Skippy saw the rabbit too. He leaped out the window and chased after that jackrabbit. We got out of the truck and called and called. He either didn’t hear us or didn’t want to hear us. The last thing we saw was a jackrabbit disappearing over the hill followed closely by a frantic black-and-white fox terrier.
We kids were very upset. We figured we had seen the last of our dog. We continued calling, but there was no answer. We had just about given up when a head poked up over the horizon. It was Skippy. This time when we called him, he took one last look back to where the rabbit disappeared and then came trotting down the hill to us. He was hot and panting. He crawled into the car, lay down on the floor by an air vent, and stayed very still the rest of the way home. We knew then how strong his natural instinct was to give chase, and that made the miracle of his protecting the baby rabbits even more amazing.
Neighbors who lived two doors down the street got a collie pup. The collie’s name was . . . you guessed it . . . Lassie. We watched her grow from a roly-poly puppy to a beautiful, golden, long-haired adult. She and Skippy became fast friends. Every day she would come to the window of our dining room, stick her nose against the glass, and grin. We would let Skippy out, and they would roughhouse and tumble all over the yard with the glee of young kids let out of school.
That went on for a couple of years. Then one day, Skippy once again started bugging Daddy to get his attention. He whined and ran a few feet and came back.
By this time, Daddy was well trained. He turned to Skippy and said, “What’s wrong? Do you want me to follow you?” Skippy let him know that he did. Daddy followed Skippy to the neighbor’s yard. There lay Lassie. She had been hit by a car and was dying. Skippy had done the only thing he knew how to help his friend. He had run home to get someone he could trust and had brought him to her. Skippy grieved Lassie’s death. He never did have another friend like her.
You will always win more friends by wagging your tail than your tongue.
—Anonymous
Skippy liked to help my dad. When Daddy planted potatoes in the early spring, he dug holes in the ground and dropped in the pieces of potato that would grow into plants. One day, when he was halfway down a row, he looked behind him. There was Skippy, covering up every piece of potato and filling every hole.
Once Daddy was repairing the roof of our house. He was way out on the front eaves, twenty-five feet from the ground. He was concentrating on his work when something warm and wet touched his neck. It’s a wonder he didn’t fall off the roof. Slowly, he turned his head to see what had touched him. There stood Skippy wagging his tail. He had climbed the ladder, crawled over the ridge of the house, and now stood next to Daddy. He’d come to help. He couldn’t climb down the ladder. Daddy had to get up carefully, pick up the dog, climb back down the slope of the roof, and then climb down the ladder. In the future, he pulled the ladder up on the roof to keep Skippy from climbing it.
Perhaps one of the most poignant moments of this little dog’s amazing activities came when we were on vacation. Skippy never stayed in a kennel. He went everywhere with us. We were in Minnesota when my brother Glen became ill. He was so sick that we feared for his life. No one knew what was wrong with him. The doctors in that town suggested Mom and Dad take Glen to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester—a town that was nearby. They took him there and he was hospitalized.
My brother Ray and I stayed with my aunt. We silently prowled around her house, too afraid to talk about what was happening to our brother. Skippy was with us at my aunt’s house while we waited to hear if Glen was going to live. I moped, Ray moped, and Skippy moped with us.
When Mom and Dad came home from the hospital that first night, they needed to pray about this desperate situation. They looked for a place to pray and others who would pray with them. They found a small congregation who gladly joined them in prayer for my brother. There was no fanfare or call from the hospital with good news that my brother’s condition was improved, but when my parents came back from prayer, Mom said, “I know he will be all right.”
And he was. The next morning when Mom and Dad returned to the hospital, miraculously Glen was sitting up and working jigsaw puzzles. After a few more days in the hospital for recovery and observation, he was released. His diagnosis was mumps, meningitis, and encephalitis—all three. It would take him a long time to recover.
The doctors thought Mom and Daddy would have to get an ambulance to take Glen home to Montana—a distance of a thousand miles. It just so happened that we had a homemade camper on the back of the pickup we were traveling in. The doctors thought that as long as Glen could lie down (there was a good-sized bed in the truck), it would be all right for him to go home that way.
We loaded up the truck and headed for the hospital. Mom and Dad went in and signed Glen’s release papers, and then they brought him out in a wheelchair. When Daddy opened the door to the back of the camper, Skippy saw Glen. While Ray and I held onto his collar with all our might, Skippy strained to reach Glen. Skippy had known all along that something was wrong. He knew someone was missing. He knew that being together with his family—his whole family—was just about the best thing that could happen to a small black-and-white fox terrier.
Skippy died long after all of us kids had grown up and left home. Whenever we return to Montana, we can almost see him out chasing rabbits, helping Daddy plant potatoes, or wagging his tail furiously in absolute delight that we have come home. He will always be alive in our hearts.