Cricket-Bozo-Clipper And The Chicken Pox

 

By Diane E. Dockum

 

In the 1980s my husband and I raised Black and Tan Coonhounds.

 

Coonhounds, if you are not familiar with them, are large black long-eared, short-haired dogs with tan markings and deep bass voices. Their bark is not so much a woof, as a call to arms. It’s more like a cannon blast in slow motion.

 

Coonhounds have long legs for running down Raccoons in the dead of night, defending corn crops from the little bandits. Don’t get me wrong, I really love the little varmints, but at the time there was a market for this type of dog in our area.

 

My young brother loved this one puppy we had. Ironically, as a pup we named him Cricket, because he was black and he liked to hop around. Actually, he was more like Goofy of Disney fame. He was over enthusiastic and had that little point on the top of his head.

 

Cricket loved Jimmy too. He kept going down over the hill to my parent’s house to hang out with him, so, after a while the two got to be inseparable, and he became my brother’s dog.

 

Sometimes, when you have a large dog that wags his whole body instead of just his tail in the same room with a tiny 80 something woman – she can get a little flustered, and she will call that dog anything that pops into her head.

 

“Bozo! Clipper!” she would blurt out whacking him with her paperback Barbara Cartland romance novel.

 

When visitors came to the door, Cricket would explode into his trademark blast of sound, wag his body, lashing anything in proximity with his whip-like tail. He would run to the door to see who was coming, or better yet, hurl himself to the top of the back of the couch to see out the living room window.

 

Grandma never made it off of that couch fast enough. All 4 ft. 3 of her would rebound from the sofa as he landed, displacing a volume equal to his own mass.

 

“BOZO! Clipper! WHOA… CRICKET!!! Get down!” she would bark as she whomped him with her rolled up newspaper or her paperback romance.

 

Well, when my cousins Nate, Neil, Wayne, baby Leah and their mother Leanne came to the door this one summer afternoon it was played out all over again. Cricket just loved little boys to play with, and he saw Nate, and just started licking him all over. He got him down on the floor, and Nate, laughing and rolling around got thoroughly licked until Grandma’s shrieks of Bozo! Crapper! Clicker! Cricket! brought my brother and sister, Jimmy and Sara from upstairs to assist in the restraint.

 

Cricket had to go wait in the shed until company was gone.

 

For a few days afterward, Cricket was a quieter, gentler dog. We thought he was a remorseful dog, sorry for knocking down the company and getting so worked up. His nose did feel a little warm to the touch, but other than the sleepiness, he seemed okay.

 

After a few more days passed the family went up to camp in Colton on Higley Flow for a swim, where Cricket bolted from the back seat and ran to jump off the dock into the refreshing brown water of the Racquette River. He swam and played with Jimmy. They floated on a giant tractor inner tube, and rowed around in the row boat.

 

When supper time came, everyone was called out of the water to dry off for dinner. They toweled off Cricket. But something about his shinny coat had changed.

 

His fur had fallen out in spots, leaving tiny round bald spots over his entire body. Then my Mom discovered the Pox and they recalled that Nate had recently come down with Chicken Pox.

 

It seems that Cricket had licked the Pox right off of him.