Patterdale Terrier? More Like Patterdale Terror.

Hmm. You are asking yourself: What in the name of Christ is a Patterdale Terrier? Well, this is a Patterdale Terrier, named, deceivingly enough (the deceiving part will be explained later), Belle:

Belle is a Patterdale cross of some sort, we don’t really know what the cross part is, but she definitely tends to the Patterdale side of the genetic equation. She is all of twelve pounds soaking wet , and she came to us in kind of a roundabout fashion. My wife’s coworkers had brought a little puppy to town for some people, and when they showed up at the intended recipient’s door with her, the people informed them that they had changed their mind about having a puppy. The couple who were delivering her didn’t have the heart to take her to the pound, so they took her into work with them. That’s where my wife comes into the picture. She told the puppy deliverers to take the dog to our house, because I was at home and could take care of her until my wife got back from work at which time she would undertake the arduous task of finding the pup a “good home.” That afternoon, I heard a knock at the door, opened it, had a puppy, blanket, some food, and a toy put in my arms and watched my wife’s coworkers drive off. I spent the rest of the afternoon trying to keep the tiny black ball of fur from shrieking and wiping piss and shit up off of the kitchen floor. For some reason, as we drove around town with her safely ensconced in a blanketed cardboard box, none of the friends and acquaintances we showed her to were quite good enough to have her, despite their pleadings to the contrary. Wow, I thought, my wife must want to find this puppy a really super good home!

About a week later, I had to go to a logging camp for a couple of weeks, so my wife bundled up the pup and we made the 45 minute drive to the crewboat departure point. As the boat pulled away from the dock, I looked back to see my wife standing there, holding the dog and waving goodbye. Uh Oh. On one of my phone calls home about a week into my stay I inquired about how the home search for the puppy was going. “You mean Belle?” my wife replied. Christ. It had a name. I told one of the guys I worked with about it and he said: “If it’s got a name, it’s yours now!” And it was. That was a little over two years ago now. Never, ever, let a woman find a puppy a good home. No matter how much she tries to convince you she’s trying to do the right thing, she is lying. Consider yourself forewarned.

I have never had any use for small dogs. All of the small dogs I had ever known were hairball barfing, couch-pissing, growling and snapping little pieces of shit that hated everyone but their loving owner. To my way of thinking, big dogs were the way to go. They could catch frisbees and shit, eat nighttime intruders, and provide a big enough meal for a grizzly bear to give their owners time to escape. Useful qualities, to be sure. This dog however, soon began to change my mind about small dogs. Turns out Patterdales are an English breed and they are bred as working hunting dogs, used to hunt all manner of vermin from rats to nutria (whatever the hell a nutria is, they’re a hell of a lot bigger than the dogs). They are much loved for their aggressive natures and calm family temperaments. This is no lap dog. Right from the start, she was a freakin’ psycho to rough house with. No cowering, no sniveling, no hiding under mummy’s skirt, just pure unadulterated attack. Fun stuff, to be sure. The only way I can think of to describe it would be to play volleyball with a bag of razor blades or hypodermic needles for a ball. Many punctures were commonplace, and believe me, all my fault. Her aggressive drive was so strong that if you held her down for a while in the middle of a fight, and let her go, she would do ten rounds of the perimeter of the room at friggin’ Mach 1 just to burn off the frustration of not being able to kill you. The best part was that when playtime was over, I just had to say “Be nice” and she would calm right down and roll over for a belly rub.

On April 24th of this year, our realtor had scheduled a showing for our house, so I did what I usually did for the showings, loaded Belle up in the pickup and took a drive for about three quarters of an hour. This time, I decided to go and check on the progress of the snowmelt on a logging road we wanted to start using in a few weeks. As I came to the end of the clear road and encountered the snow, I made the sensible man decision to see how far I could get through it. Fifteen feet, that’s how far. I fell through the rotten snow and got the pickup stuck right in the middle of the road. As I opened the door to survey the scene, Belle, as was her norm, jumped out to have a sniff around. Unfortunately, this time she caught a whiff of something and the run was on, straight up the road in the direction we had just come from. Repeated calls couldn’t get her to even slow down, and as she approached the crest of the hill in the distance, I finally yelled at her to stop, hard. She screeched to a halt, turned around, ran back toward me fifty feet, caught the scent again, turned around and disappeared over the crest of the hill. Now I was pissed off. I trudged up the hill, steam escaping my ears, and when I got to the top I could see about another two hundred metres down the road. No Belle. I spent four hours that afternoon, calling and looking for her, and after driving back to town and getting our German Shepherd, Keiko, to take back and help me look, another three hours that evening. That was thirty kilometers east of town, on the other side of the mighty Skeena River and four kilometres up a logging road…not good. Over the next weeks we made many, many trips to the spot and spent dozens of hours looking but unfortunately, to no avail. In that split second I had lost sight of her, a predator had obviously snatched her. Needless to say, the whole family was a little upset, and I felt very guilty about it.

We posted notices around town offering a reward, in case she had made it out to the highway and been picked up, but after a few phone calls that didn’t turn out to be her, we had to start to acknowledge the reality of what was going on. When the phone rang at 10:30 in the evening on Wednesday, May 27th, my wife could be forgiven for being a little irritated. She did have to work at six the next morning and she was already in bed. Wondering who the hell could be calling from a pay phone at that time of night, she was surprised to hear the voice on the other end of the line ask if we had lost a dog recently. Yes, she said. Was it’s name Belle?, the voice asked. How do you know that? she asked. I got her name and phone number off her little red tag, the man’s voice answered. No shit. Are you freaking kidding me? She came running downstairs yelling, “Brent, someone found Belle!" We jumped in our vehicle and went to the gas station the men were parked at, and when we pulled up and they opened the door, there she was. Well, what was left of her anyway. The last time we had seen her, she was about twelve pounds, and now she was a little over seven. You could feel every bone in her body, and she was very weak. The men were a pair of hunters out on their ATVs and they had found her trotting down the road near where we had lost her, passing porcupines and bears like it was no big deal. She had been there in the bush the whole time. Thirty-four days. Our version of the wild forest is pretty serious stuff, too. As far as predators go, there are wolves, black bears, grizzly bears, wolverines, coyotes, foxes, lynx, cougars, and let’s not forget the air force, the bald and golden eagles, hawks, and falcons. All of them wouldn’t be scared to take advantage of the opportunity to grab a rabbit-sized animal like Belle. There was even still snow on the ground in parts of the timber. The hunters seemed pretty happy with the two hundred dollars they didn’t know they had coming, as they’d had no idea about the reward.

So she’s back home, and getting fattened up again, and slowly but surely her personality is making a comeback. She was pretty timid when she got home, much as anyone would be, I expect, if they had just been dumped off in the wild unexpectedly, and for over a month. My wife never gave up hope of finding her, although I had thought she was gone immediately. With a name like Belle, you wouldn’t expect her to be able to survive the gamut of teeth and claws listed off in the previous paragraph. That’s the deceiving part.

That is one tough little dog.