Breath of Death
A beautiful, long-legged, furry, black dog that runs across fields with great athletic prowess and who lives for the promise of provoking the neighbor’s cows, surprising deer, and occasionally grabbing a snack on the run, such as a rabbit or a field mouse.
This dog, who lives indoors as well as outdoors, is maybe the happiest dog on the planet. He is named Bart, which is not a bad name for a dog—but he has one insurmountable problem: Bart has the worst breath that a dog has ever had.
I know dog breath. This isn’t dog breath. It’s different. It’s the breath of death. It can knock you down.
When we visited the farm, and I encountered Bart’s frisky, friendly self, close up and personal, nose to nose and face-to-face I nearly passed out. When I’d recovered, I asked in a faint voice, was I still alive? Was he still alive? Was Bart on-death’s-doorstep-sick?
Was the awful indescribable stench the smell of Bart’s teeth rotting?
How could something so healthy looking smell so unhealthy? Did he paralyze his hunting prey by simply breathing on them?
I asked what’s wrong with Bart, why does he have the breath of death? My in-laws just shook their heads. They didn’t have any answers. It was a mystery.
Or that’s what I thought until later when I talked to my friend Anna about Bart and she explained to me that Bart’s awful bad breath does not mean that he has stomach cancer or that he needs an $800 teeth cleaning.
Bart‘s bad breath Anna tells me is something she knows about because her dog Biff —now departed—had breath of death just like Bart has.
Her dog Biff had such bad breath that Anna tried unsuccessfully to change it with several vet dental cleanings but it was all wasted money. Her dog’s breath was awful until he died of unrelated causes.
What happens to these dogs? What gives them the breath of death?
The answer, Anna tells me, is unsurprisingly pretty stinky.
It comes in the form of a black-and-white animal with a long, cheeky tail who was once alive but who got eaten —tooth, nails and entrails along with long fluffy tail —by these unsuspecting dogs: the answer is Skunks.
The revenge of the skunk is the breath of death. The skunk has died. The skunk has been digested. Or most of it. T
he skunk has been sent out to its next incarnation and destination in its spiritual life and it will not rise again. It is all gone now, except for its smell.
The smell remains. In the breath of death of the dogs who made a snack of it, a snack that keeps giving back.
The story ends on a happy note because Bart, on his daily patrols and dogly farm adventures, is without a doubt the happiest, and also the stinkiest, dog on the planet.
I suspect Bart thinks the occasional black and white snack with a lingering aftertaste is a small price to pay for such a great life.
And I also suspect Bart believes his human service companions are all the poorer for not being just like him, a dog on a farm allowed to run loose, chase whoever he wants and, who on occasion, gets lucky and catches something really good and stinky like a skunk.
