Not All Dogs Are Good Either.

   A young Virginia woman took her two dogs for a walk in the woods, and they ended up killing her and partially devouring her body. Some fanatically obsessive people deny this could have happened and worked to prevent the euthanization of the animals, even though respondents saw the dogs eating the flesh from the woman's chest, and the pathology report matched the woman's mutilation with the physical features of the dogs. Some people are blinded to the truth when they have made their minds up to believe otherwise. (Unfortunately, that is true in other situations as well, but this is not about that.)  I am hoping this will not sound, Heaven forbid, like a version of the Me-too stories flooding today's society:
    A long time ago, back when the world was new and I was single, I went to visit my sister on a cold and snowy evening when she lived a good distance from civilization. The trailer she and her husband lived in was located  in a remote section of Speigletown, off a dirt road, and situated amid cow pastures on top of a hillside, and accessed by a long, rather steep and winding dirt driveway. Winter brought  lots of snow back then, and nobody had plows or snowblowers, so the practice during the snowy season was to park your car at the bottom of the hill and walk up the driveway, as best you could. So that is what I did that long-ago evening .
     They owned 2 dogs at the time. One was a spaniel my mother had given  them. Ruffy was a male and rather large and burly for that breed, but I'd known him since he was a puppy. The second dog, Max, was a black Belgian or German shepherd which had been given to them not too long before, so I wasn't as familiar with him. They were young, healthy mostly outside dogs. They had a large doghouse, but they liked the freedom of being outdoors where they could roam the acreage available to them.
     It was getting dark that evening when I parked my car at the bottom of the hill. I knew my sister was home, but her husband was away on business, so no one had even attempted to shovel the deep snow. I started up the hill but the snow was  deep, over the top of my boots, and my foot slipped out with each step I took, with the boot stuck in the snow. So it was a tedious and time consuming struggle to make headway up the drive, and since it was the time before cell phones, I couldn't even let her know I was there.
   I had advanced about a third of the way up when the dogs arrived.  I welcomed the sight of them at first. I thought they were greeting me in a playful manner. They would run through the snow close to me and then would retreat and turn back, only to repeat the process.  I was young then and not really afraid of much of anything, but I remember feeling uneasy at the  kind of fierce look in their eyes, and I knew I appeared helpless, as I struggled and swayed back and forth to keep my balance in the drifted snow. Eventually, I managed to reach the door, the dogs took off, and I put the experience out of my mind.
  Later that year, both of the dogs were put down. They had killed 2 young calves that were in a neighboring pasture. Out of a feral lust for the hunt, we supposed.