In a heartbeat you can lose what you love

By Ma. Eugenia Guerra

For the two minutes that I did not know where our big red dog Pancho was, the driver of an 18-wheel tanker truck barreling down our ranch road did.
My son George and his dog Duchess, a chocolate Labrador, had just left the ranch and I felt the oddity of not knowing exactly where Pancho was. I had finished repairing the latch he had pulled loose from a gate. As I called George to ask where he had last seen Pancho, I heard the air horn from the 18-wheeler sound up the road. I never heard the Key tanker truck (white Mack truck, yellow tank trailer) brake, slow down, or change gears. I only heard the horn thick on the air like bad news, the sound of it headed east toward Aguilares, the truck moving like a vapor down the road.
I threw down my tools and hopped in the truck, expecting I might find Pancho along the side of the road and cajole him to load up at the tailgate. What I found broke my heart. Despite the blood spilling from his mouth and bloody bone jutting from his front leg and other wounds on his underside, Pancho looked rather intact. He couldn't move but he had somehow gathered himself up into the familiar curl he uses in winter to conserve body heat. His eyes followed me and looked at me as though to say, "You're here now; you can help me."
I tried, but Pancho, a six-year-old Rhodesian Ridgeback, weighs over a hundred pounds. Though I had a cell phone with me and could call to make arrangements for help in Laredo, I was useless at the roadside to bring him any comfort. Until Rene Rivera from San Ygnacio and Frankie Muñoz from Border to Border Telephone Company showed up, I was helpless and pretty upset. I had made a muzzle out of a cap and some nylon cord. We pushed a towel under Pancho to use as a sling to lift him into the truck. He was in a great deal of pain and snapped at us in a pitiful and dreadful way.
I don't think my son and our friend Daniel Muñoa were prepared for what they saw as they unloaded Pancho from the truck and into the clinic in Laredo. For the last five years Pancho has been their good-natured, four-legged companion on many a hiking, biking, and canoeing adventure across Texas and across the Chihuahuan Desert. Cuatro Cienegas, Big Bend, the mountains around Candela, the caves at Bustamante, the Frio, the Pedernales, the Medina, the Guadalupe, this big hearted, all-weather campfire dog was at the ready.
For me on this ranch, Pancho has been the first alert for uninvited company, snakes, and the herds of javelina that show up from time to time to give the dogs a trot along the fenceline. He has also been an immense comfort on long walks, as much a part of this environment as I am.
While hope for his recovery etched away at the memory of the bloody, muddy moment at the roadside where he was left for dead, I believed in the week after the accident that Pancho would mend and resume his high profile role in our lives.
But he didn't make it. Something went terribly awry in the small yard behind my office where we were to have nursed him back to health.
Daniel and Chano Aldrete drove Pancho out to the ranch where I had begun to dig a grave about four feet long and two feet wide. We would bury him under the mesquite where Pancha, our other Ridgeback, is buried. The men made short work of finishing the hole, and we lowered Pancho to his grave on a blue and red sarape. Among the thoughts that ran through me in jolts of disconnected grief was that Pancho's coat was quite nearly the color of the pretty red earth that in its dampness had yielded so readily to the shovel.
Chano observed the vibrant greens of the monte and said it was hard to believe this is how the earth would look coming out of summer in South Texas. He made a small bundle of straw and weeds, which he lit, and to our amazement the drone of a cloud of thousands of bees hovered over the mesquite under which we stood, so many bees that we crouched instinctively lower to the ground. The bees flew off in the wind and into a sky that had moved quickly overhead, sometimes clear, sometimes portending yet another rain shower. Off toward Aguilares and Hebbronville, a mighty rumbling rolled the rains toward us and the afternoon ended as many of them have lately -- cool and fragrant, the sounds of the day fastened to the moment by the thick, wet atmosphere.
We spoke of Pancho, remembering his excellent companionship and the comfort of his noble mien, but also remembering the bad time that he inexplicably lunged at and bit Richard Gentry at my office and also once tore the cuff of Jesus Cantu's jeans.
There's been a great deal of remordimiento here. How could I not know for those minutes where my dog was? How could I be that irresponsible? What could I have done wrong in the 18 hours he was in my care after a week at the veterinarian's? Daniel tried to revive Pancho with CPR and will long have that memory of trying to lend in real time his own vitality to Pancho as his life ebbed in the faint beat of a dying heart.
There's been the urge to find someone in Key's management to rail at them for the unsafe practices of the men who drive those tanker trailers down Ranch Road 3169, and specifically for the one who drove the truck at around noon on September 21, 2003. They drive too fast to be pulling 40-foot tankers filled with over 40,000 pounds of salt water, oil condensate, caliche or drilling stem. At high speeds they drive unsafely down the middle of this narrow two-lane highway, as do the drivers for Med Loz, Camino Agave, Cactus, Aguero, Ace, Halliburton, Schlumberger, H&R, MoVac, and Pool, sometimes pushing those of us on four wheels off onto the rough shoulders of the blacktop.
You may say it, that Pancho was just a dog. I can only say that something precious hung in the balance to have sight of him at the gate when I came home and then to watch him move like a dolphin through tall grass.