Another reminder/prodder by GJ

I'd be willing to bet (a used paper clip) that most people have a "dog story" from sometime in the past. I have a couple, myself. When I was small, in the 1930's, we had a dog named "Pete." He was a mutt, of course. (Never knew a single soul who had the wherewithal to own a pedigree.) Mutts were "in," pedigrees were only in magazines and movies, etc. Pete was pretty good-sized, grayish, medium-length fur. And fairly old, I think. Anyway, it seems that a rotten neighbor had put out an animal trap to teach stray dogs a lesson. Pete got a front paw caught in the trap, and he limped home with that paw dangling by a thread. Dad consulted my brothers and they thought it might work to amputate the lower leg. I wasn't allowed to witness it, but Dad got a good, sharp saw, and did the job. After the leg healed sufficiently, Dad strapped a wooden peg onto the stump and Pete learned to get around on it quite well, and he became our "peg-legged Pete." (I must look up the origin of that title some day soon.) We had another dog at some point, a mutt with a lot of collie in him. All I know about him is that he was scared to death of thunder, and got caught outside one day, panicked, and dove through a closed basement window. He cut himself rather badly and took quite a while to heal. He didn't seem to want to go out much after that, either. I had a third dog while in high school. A mutt (of course) only medium-sized, short hair, tan and white, named "Skipper." Skipper had a hbit of lying down on the sidewalk in front of our house, facing south. He did this every afternoon just about the time I would be coming home from school. There was a slight elevation to the long sidewalk, and the first part of me he spotted was my head as I appeared over his horizon. He would run to greet me, wagging his tail in glee as we strolled home. But, there was a catch. It turns out that he was part watchdog, a steely protector of the castle, and a born barker. Trouble is, he only barked at those people who came to the house every day...the mailman, milkman, paperboy, etc. Guess what? Dad worked nights and needed his daytimes to sleep. "Gotta go," Dad said, meaning Skipper, of course. So, we took him out to brother Chick's farm. Turns out he was a natural "cow dog," and he was soon assigned to getting the cows twice a day for the milking by rounding them up and herding them to the gate, saving Chick a lot of steps. I missed Skipper, but it did make it a tad easier to go off to the Navy. (Also made it easier to think of our captain as "the skipper.") Got your own dog story? (They count as memoirs, too!) Share one---or two---or more.