After I got my divorce, in the middle eighties, he had run off from my wife (who had gotten custody of him in the divorce) and the dog was living with two women, who lived about two miles from me. He had been living there for about six months, and when I ran across him, I paid them $100.00 for the food and vet bills they had spent on him. I brought him home and kept him on my breezeway. One day, I came home from work and he had chewed through the aluminum framing on one of the screens in the window trying to get out. A few days after that I had him out in the back yard, so he could go to the bathroom and he slithered off while I was looking the other way and bang, he was gone. Three days later he jumped the fence in the two ladies back yard and they called me saying they had him. They offered me the $100.00 to buy him back and I ended up giving him to them for free and made an agreement that when I went by their house on the way to picking up my son for visitation on the weekends, I could stop and pick him up for the weekend also. About a week after that, he jumped their fence and was back down at my house, but I took him back to them. He spent his final years there and I saw less and less of him over the years. One day, I stopped in to see how he was and they told me he had died that winter. They were nurses, and since the ground was too cold to bury him, they wrapped him up in garbage bags and kept him in the freezer in their basement over the winter until the ground thawed the next spring. Then, they buried him in the back yard. They said they missed having him sleep at the foot of their bed and feeding him popcorn at night while they watched television. How sweet. While they were telling me this, I remembered the time when we first got him, when he was about 3-4 years old, I had come home from a midnight shift and went to bed and in my sleep, I could hear these loud noises. And after I woke up, I went downstairs and he had pulled the paneling off of our family room wall and chewed up half of the framing around the door. What a horendous monster. I still wake up screaming because of the mangy animal.
