By Pat Gibson

Sometimes a smell or a sound or the sight of something uncommon will bring back a flash of memory. I caught a whiff of a certain perfume the other day and I remembered watching my mother get ready for parties when I was small.

Every time I see a dragonfly, I think of Emmy. Emmy was a blue tick hound I got at the Humane Society in Austin. A feral house cat had left a litter of kittens in a woodpile on our place and they were getting to be a real nuisance. The Crew tried to catch them and since they were really wild, the Crew would end up scratched and crying. We trapped them in a large cardboard box and took them to the Humane Society.

Since the Crew were small, they loved to see the animals. We walked through the cages to see the dogs. I saw a beautiful blue tick hound. She was full-grown and had been trained to hunt. The staff explained she had come to them after she had gotten fouled up in a barbed wire fence. Her physical injuries were healed but she would no longer hunt.

She was a well-behaved dog and had that unusual blue gray color. I went home and talked it over with my husband. The next afternoon the Crew and I brought Emmy home. Somewhere I had read a book about keeping a dog in your yard. The book said the best way was to walk the dog around the borders and punish the dog each time it got outside the borders. We tried that. Either it was just a theory or Emmy was very uncooperative. She roamed the neighborhood. Most of the time she stayed close to the house and played with the kids. We tied her up the first few days to get her used to our place as home. It became very clear, very quickly that when God passed out intelligence to dogs, Emmy was only half way into the room. Emmy was one dumb dog.

She loved to chase things. She would smell an armadillo and immediately give chase. Her deep bell toned bark would echo off the hills in two counties. She would chase the critter until it went to ground and them sit there howling and fussing. I guess she expected one of us to come out and shoot it or at least reward her. Her biggest problem about chasing the baby tanks was she did it about one or two in the morning! Several neighbors threatened to shoot Emmy so we had to tie her up at night.

She also was very fond of the shadows of bugs, especially dragonflies. In the late summer, you will see half a dozen or so dragonflies soaring over any cleared area, such as a lawn or pasture.

Well, Emmy would see the shadows on the ground and begin hunting these elusive critters. Her bark would deepen into her hunting tone and she would coarse back and forth across the yard in hot pursuit. When the racket was as much as we could stand, my husband would swat her with a newspaper or tie her up. She never did seem to figure out that the bugs were over her head. Often you would see her grab a bunch of grass and almost imagine she thought she had finally caught that flying thing. The chasing of shadows was her down fall.

We were working on the house one night with a bare bulb lighting the area. Emmy began chasing the candle dancers shadows on the floor. We were afraid she would wake the Crew so John turned to scold her. He had a 2X4 in his hand when he turned to scold the dog. He had no intention of hitting the dog with the board, it was just in his hand, but she growled and went for him. He was afraid that one of the Crew might be holding a board and the dog might bite them so Emmy went back to the Humane Society.

Shadows make patterns and just about anything, even a cloud, can make a shadow, but that's another story.