My Life in Dog Years by Gary Paulsen

his head from his body. As an adult dog he became rotund and only fourteen inches tall—I think he must have been a Labrador-Norwegian elkhound cross—but his shortness did not extend to his thinking or his appetite. He was as devoted to eating as he was to finding things to destroy. This fact led to the war.
    We lived close to the land then, with four gardens and a wood-heated cabin in the forest where we canned and preserved our own food. This included raising a pig for ham and bacon. Because we didn’t wish to become too attached to the meat supply, we simply called it Pig. (This didn’t work, of course, and we wound up with a nearly quarter-ton pet named Pig who lived to be a ripe old age and died with his head in the trough, eating potato peelings.)
    Fred quickly found that he and the pig shared a basic drive—to eat—and he took tohitting the pig trough in search of goodies. This often proved marvelously fruitful. I had a friend who owned a supermarket and we obtained all his dated food for the pig. I once came home with a dozen angel food cakes, forty pints of whipping cream and fifty pints of strawberries. I dumped all this in the trough and watched Fred and the pig put their heads under, looking for berries and bits of cake and snorting bubbles of cream as they hunted.
    Soon Fred became fat and spent most of his time with Pig. He would sleep and cuddle next to Pig at night, and during the day we almost always found them together.
    The problem started when Pig looked over one day and saw the garden. Pigs are very smart—as smart as dogs and many people I have met—and no doubt deduced that if old food is good, fresh food must be better. By this time he weighed over two hundredpounds and was built like a tank, and like a tank he simply walked through the garden fence and started eating.
    He ate most of a row of new red potatoes, burrowing the plants up with his nose, before I caught him and herded him back. After that no fence could hold him. He went under, over and around whatever I tried to build and was fast wrecking the whole garden. One day I was talking to an old farmer neighbor, who thought I was crazy not to just kill Pig and eat him, but if I wasn’t going to kill the pig, he said, I should get an electric fence. I, of course, knew of electric fences—I had once talked my cousin into peeing on one— but they had slipped my mind.
    “Get the kind that burns off weeds when they touch it. They’re the strongest,” the farmer added.
    It took an afternoon to buy a fence and hook it up, during which time we lost halfa dozen tomato plants and another row of potatoes.
    The fence worked better than I had expected. I strung the wire around Pig’s pen, then stood back and watched while Pig ambled close and took a snap in his ear. He never tried it again. I remember actually thinking that my troubles were over.
    I had forgotten Fred.
    I happened to be in the yard when the battle started and saw the whole thing. Fred knew nothing of electric fences. He was out tending the boundaries and, no doubt feeling a little peckish, decided to drop in on his old friend Pig for lunch.
    The wire caught him exactly across the top of his head and dropped him as if he’d been hit by a stone. He was on his feet at once, his hair up, his teeth bared. There was no doubt who his enemy was. The wire. He shook his head, dug his feet in and lunged, grabbing at the thing with an iron-jawed death grip.
    The result was spectacular. The voltage hit his wet mouth like a sledge and stiffened him like a poker. He snarled, growling deeper, and tried to hang on, but the jolt was too powerful and slammed him back and down on his rump.
    Any other dog would have stopped. Not Fred. He shook all over, looked at the twisted and bent wire, gave a ferocious bellow and attacked again. This time he must have really been hammered. He slammed back and forth and his hair stood on end until his tail looked like a black bottle-brush, but he would not let