by Wendy V. Smith (originally written Jan 2011; edited for Blog November 2019)
Our 200-acre farm was split into two 100-acre sections.
Across the road had the section with the creek and Aunt ‘Liza’s abandoned house.
The other section had our house.
To me, this seemed like an enormous playground for us.
As long as it was daylight, and I had Wayne and Buster with me, I was rarely afraid during many adventures.
Buster was the best dog in the world, a farm dog that never came into the house, surviving only on table scraps.
At night, he would make his way to the cow barn, slip in through a hole in the side and sleep with cows where it was nice and warm.
After every meal, Mom made sure there were left overs to scrape into Buster’s dish outside. This is a story of Buster and the Porcupine.
On beautiful summer days, Wayne and I would go fishing.
Wayne could always pick just the right branches that made the best fishing poles and he always knew just the right rock to turn over to find the biggest, fattest worms to put into our tin can.
With real hooks and fishing line, off we’d go with Buster bouncing ahead of us, to the Blue Sea Creek across the road.
Buster loved to go fishing because he could wade into the creek and lap up all that fresh cold water.
One of those adventures took us to the south section of our “playground”, across the yard, through the gate, down the gully, up and over the hill, through another gate and into a vast field . Wayne suddenly noticed that Buster was heading right for a moving animal.
At first he thought it was one of Buster favourite nemesis, a ground hog. As we walked closer to Buster and the animal, Wayne realized that the animal was not a ground hog after all – it was a porcupine!
We shouted for Buster to stop, but it was too late.
Buster yelped loudly as he pulled back from the expanding prickly animal, its sharp quills remaining both inside and around the outside of Buster’s mouth.
As he pawed at the quills to try and pull them out, his white paws turned red from blood.
I can remember feeling frantic to get Buster home, coaxing and crying, running and coaxing some more.
Buster had never been tied so Dad knew that could not pull the quills out himself.
So he called his childhood best friend, Melvin Sullivan, to come over and help. Wasting no time, they tied Buster and held him down while Melvin used a set of pliers to pull the quills out. It was a gruesome task to get all those quills out of the dog’s mouth.
Throughout the whole ordeal, Buster never tried to bite Melvin, Dad or Wayne and never tried to get away.
Buster knew that they were there to help him.
