Icarus's blog: "Just South of Blue."

Me and the little hung out Saturday night. I missed a couple phone calls, sent a couple texts, so when he asked if I was doing anything, and I wasn't, I quickly grabbed a six pack and went to his house to play Nintendo.

Well, a couple hours into cigarettes (adjacent to a pasture, miles out of town in the dead of night) and 15 minutes into my latest lecture on how to overthrow the government, his dog Apollo walks by and I give him a little scritch and notice that he's kinda ... crusty. Not dirt crusty, blood crusty.

I says "hey I think your dog has some blood on him, we should probably get a better look at him"

so we kinda poke at him in the dark, and we're feeling a ton of dried crusty patches, and Apollo just kinda wanders off into the night.

The little mentions that there was a dead cat in his driveway, and that he thinks Apollo killed said cat, and probably got a little tore up in the exchange.

I'm a little leary, but I can't exactly wander into near blackness to find a foxhound.

Another hour rolls by and it's cigarettes and music talk, but this time Apollo wanders closer to the house, and the light, and we can see rusty red all over his chest and head

I says "we better wash him off a little, maybe get him inside"

When we get him into full light we see that his ears are dripping, and his upper body is just caked with scabs and blood.

I start wandering through someone else's house for rags and rubbing alchohol, and eventually the little produces these items, and some bandaids.

Now... I tend to keep some pretty heavy duty first aid on hand in my home, and I grew up in a house where that stuff was available, accessible with one hand, next to every sink.

Let's just say the two of us were raised in different houses, with different priorities.

So the little gets Apollo on his side, and I start soaking rags in alchohol, hydrogen peroxide, and warm water.

The warm water opens up some of the crusty blood, and it starts flowing a bit more freely, but I preferred that to dirt-filled wounds.

Next was the rubbing alcohol, and yeah, for a split second it occurred to me that I was about to sting the bejesus out of a fairly familiar country dog being restrained, but Apollo is pretty god damn mellow, so the thought of getting bit was pretty far out of my mind, and besides


I've had mastiff bites.



So I managed to apply the disenfectant without incident, and his ears and head continued to bleed. I applied pressure for a few minutes, and did my dog hypnosis voice, and it did not register to me for a while that I was doing something


useful?
necessary?
kind?




When glass breaks at a party, I clean it up.
I don't do it to be nice, I do it because it needs to be done-
like pissing with a full bladder, or drinking when your mouth is dry

it just needs to be done.

So when a dog I'm friendly with, but not living with is hurt, yeah
it just made sense to clean him up and patch him up.
It wasn't even a cognitive thing.





Anyway, the bleeding wasn't stopping, so I told the little that I might have to put a cornstarch/flour poultice on the wound if hydrogen peroxide and bandaids didn't work.

Apollo got it right at the tips of his ears too... whole mouth bite prints, and with a little jerking, he could have had a big chunk of his ear ripped off in the fight.

My dog got a cut there once and it bled silly amounts.


We lucked out and Apollo clotted with the help of modern chemistry, and I folded bandaids over the ins and outs of his ears to keep the wounds snug and covered.

Then we cleaned up the floor, told Apollo he was a good boy, drank beer, and ... then it occurred to me to ask if Apollo's rabies shots were up to date.

They were not, and I had to have the frank conversation of the remote possibility that he could have been exposed to rabies, and I had NO idea how the vets in town would handle that.

The little was scared, but accepted that... dogs get rabies shots for a very good reason.

His sister cried and got somewhat hysterical when I relayed that same bit of information, but this is a girl that cries when she watches the news.










Good luck little Sun God.