Abby by Michelle Caillet

Please start here and read parts 1, 2, and 3

It was the first time he’d held a gun since plunking a North Vietnamese soldier in the forehead more than 30 years earlier. He took aim at the bear, yelled for Monte to “drop it and come” and when the dog reluctantly let go, Andy plucked the left eye from the bear with a single shot.

The bear was now helpless since Monte had torn into his right eye earlier in the fight.

The bear was an easy target as Andy pumped shot after shot into him until he just bled to death.

Andy Reeve looked straight into the Rev. Karl Keller’s face and simply said, “Call an ambulance you godam moron.” It took the use of the Lord’s name to stun Keller into action. He raced for the director’s cabin, but couldn’t find the key to the telephone locker. Anna had hidden it because of some unexplained charges on the previous month’s bill. When she arrived, tears streaming down her face, she got the County Sheriff’s office. “Good morning. This is Anna Keller at Moccasin Flats Lutheran Church Camp,” she sobbed, “a bear has just killed a little girl.” Then she fainted.

Karl grabbed the phone and gave the officer directions. “Turn on all the lights,” said the dispatcher, “a helicopter is on the way.”

The paramedic got little Jenny hooked up to some blood, injected a pain killer, and got her onto the gurney, into the chopper and away in five minutes. He saved her life.

Andy fell on his knees and began to sob when he took a good look at Monte. “He’s dying, he’s dying . . . Oh, my God my dog is dying . . .”

Karl ran to the nurse’s office where they had a child’s stretcher. Naturally, the door was locked, but Karl hit it with his shoulder and broke through. He grabbed Monte and rolled him as gently as he could onto the stretcher. The dog was in shock and slipping away. The riding director had the home number of the town veterinarian, a semi-retired woman who basically looked after the various camps’ animals and the town’s riding stable horses. “Dr. Reed? You know me. This is Susan Hope, the riding instructor at Moccasin Flats Lutheran Church Camp. You worked on my horse Joshua a few weeks ago? A bear attacked a girl and our camp dog saved her life. But in the fight, the bear broke about half the bones in the dog’s body . . . can you help us?”

They put Monte into the Jeep’s flatbed and Andy kneeled over and held him the entire way into town.

It was dawn when they reached the vet’s office. Her lights were already on. They wrestled the stretcher and 90 pounds of Doberman out of the pickup, into her office and onto the operating table. Tears welled in Dr. Reed’s eyes. “I might have to put him down. But please trust me. I will do everything in my power to save his life.”

It seemed like half the town came by. There was a reporter/photographer from The Moose Call, a Girl Scout troop with flowers and dog biscuits and even the guys from both the Shell and Mobil stations who had fallen in love with Monte when Andy had brought him into town.

At 10, about four hours into surgery, Jenny Luftson’s parents arrived. They had been standing watch at the hospital, of course, but wanted to pay their respects to the dog that had saved their daughter’s life. Jenny’s rear would have some scarring, but she’d be fine. “I can’t wait for her to write a ‘what I did last summer’ essay for English class,” said her dad. “Just so it isn’t Show and Tell.”

The look on Dr. Reed’s face when she emerged from the operating room was non-committal. Nobody could tell by looking at her if it was good or bad news. “Your little boy is going to be OK . . . as OK as a dog can be with cardio,” she told Andy.

“Cardio? Cardio? What the hell is cardio?”

“You mean you didn’t know he has cardiomyopathy? Cardiomyopathy is a serious disease in which the heart muscle becomes inflamed . . . it doesn’t work like it should. Very common in Doberman Pinschers. Dogs can live with it . . . or not . . .”
Andy asked about treatment, should he continue to run, was there anything he could do.

In her matter-of-fact manner distilled by 40-plus years as a veterinarian, Dr. Reed simply said, “Live and run and play every day like it will be his last . . . and one day you’ll be right.”

Andy slumped to the waiting room chair and held his face in his hands.

Jenny Luftson’s dad surveyed the scene and asked the vet for her bill. “I’d like to pay it whatever it is.”

“No charge for hero dogs,” the veterinarian said.

. . .

Monte pretty much recovered from the broken hip and other bruises at about the time winter really set in. There were various father/son and mother/daughter camp weekends so Andy kept busy; but in late November the snows came to the mountains. Andy kept the roads plowed, patched a few cabin roofs and pretty much spent his days looking after Monte. The Rev. Karl made it up from the city to check on things over the long Thanksgiving weekend and invited Andy down to a church Christmas party.

In mid-December, Andy began tearing the kitchen down, replacing the burners on the stoves and ovens and cleaning the big walk-in freezer. The project took nearly two weeks.

On New Year’s Eve, Andy had a beer and sat at the big kitchen table reading about tomorrow’s football games. When Monte began to cough and fight for breath, Andy knew it was the time he dreaded more than anything. The dog lay down, coughed one more time, and slipped away. Andy wrapped him in his blanket.

At dawn, Andy fired up the back hoe, scraped away the frozen ground and dug Monte’s grave in the shadow of the dining hall. He stared at the mound of freshly packed dirt and couldn’t find any words to say, so he just whispered, “Thank you . . .”

He sat at the big kitchen table with a sheet of paper in front of him for the longest time before he began writing –

Monte died on New Year’s Eve and I buried him behind the kitchen. You will see where the dirt has been turned. Please plant some flowers in the spring. Put some rocks around his grave. Please tell the story of Monte at campfire. I have left. He included a forwarding address in care of his sister in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Then Andy turned off the water and electricity and walked away from the damn place.

(Story graciously submitted by Bennett J. Mintz who is owned by a 6 1/2 year old AKC registered Doberman Pinscher named Ace Barkowitz. Mr. Mintz is currently the Corresponding Secretary for the Doberman Pinscher Club of Los Angeles.

(Photo is courtesy of Michelle Caillet. Abby is owned by Angy Shearer. Abby was not allowed on the couch but she looks like she belongs.)

Ace Barkowitz guards the bookshelf

Go here to read parts 1 and 2.

Andy would hit the sack right after campfire – everyone did – but he’d read for 15 or 20 minutes. Sometimes, particularly if he’d had a beer, he’d walk outside by the woodpile and both he and Monte would take a leak. It was on such a night that he saw the bear.

Andy looked at ridgelines at dusk. He had never seen anything particularly interesting, but this night something moved the way Monte moved. But Monte was at his side. It was bulky, not like a deer . . . maybe a stray dog like a big shepherd or a St. Bernard. Some of the townspeople had big dogs and this was probably a runaway. But then it stood up to scratch a tree and there was no mistaking that silhouette. No doubt it was a big black bear. No doubt.

By his best reckoning, the bear was 400 yards or so – maybe a quarter mile – from the meadow on the ridge between the stables and the lake. Not very far.

Andy erred in not telling anyone about the bear. But he figured it was a shy old thing and not likely to enter the domain of constantly screaming children.

By late-August the nights were starting earlier and growing colder. Summer camp was coming to a close in another 10 days and Andy began to worry about the winter. The Rev. Keller knocked on his door and asked to come in. “Andy, I’ve been thinking that you’re the best thing that’s happened to Camp Moccasin Flats in a long time. We’ve got a lot of weekend camps coming up – parent retreats, a bible camp, teenage opportunity camp, a couple of college recruitment camps and even winter snow camps – and you could kind of keep things humming. Are you interested?”

He grabbed it. The two shook hands and Andy became the official year-’round caretaker. It was a blessing.

On Friday nights Dolly would make a big birthday cake for all the kids who celebrated the event that week. There were generally one or two. At the Birthday Party, the celebrants would stand up and talk about God’s blessings and how they would try to be a better person in the next 12 months. Many children – mostly the girls – cried. There was lots of hugging. They took it very seriously. Any leftover cake would always go to the cabin or cabins of the birthday kids.

At 4:30 in the morning, Jenny Luftson awoke after eating too much of her 12th birthday cake. Or maybe it had nothing to do with the cake. But she had to vomit. She looked for her flashlight – all campers had flashlights – but it was nowhere to be found, so she headed to the grinder without it. There was a light on the door, so she had no trouble finding the toilet even in the pitch dark, but about halfway there she couldn’t hold it any longer. She bent over, put her hands on her knees, and vomited violently.

The bear came up behind her and peeled the skin from her right buttock into a strip in one bite.

Her scream was the scream of a dying child. It was deep and hysterical and long and pathetic.

Monte heard it and went right to it. He crossed in front of the woodshed, past the horseshoe pit and through the meadow to the girls’ side of camp. About 10 feet before he got to where the bear was tearing the flesh from Jenny, he leaped straight at its face and grabbed the beast’s muzzle, ripping and clawing. The bear shook his head and slammed Monte into the side of the cabin, but the Doberman sucked his breath and grabbed the bear’s nose again, partially ripping it off.

This time the bear broke Monte’s left hip. But he held on to that bear’s nose and mouth with a fury never before seen.

The kids from all over camp spilled out of their cabins, falling and scraping knees in the dark. One boy broke his arm. It was a dark night and the campers could barely see the dog and the great bear locked in a mortal dance. The kids’ screams and the sobbing were deafening. Cabin leaders and counselors-in-training tried to keep the campers in their cabins, but it was no use. They all formed an impromptu semi-circle of an arena only 10 or 20 feet away from the action.

The Rev. Keller stood looking at the battle in a near catatonic state. He watched little Jenny Luftson writhing in pain and fear, puddles of blood pouring from her butt and upper thigh. He watched Monte wrestling for his life and the life of the child. And he did nothing.

Andy, breathless from running the entire length of the meadow, carried two .22 caliber rifles from the firing range. A .22 was next to useless against a bear, but it was all he had. Slowly, methodically, he fingered the weapon as he fell to one knee. He screamed for the kids that had circled the fight to “get the hell out of the way” and they did.

To be continued…

(The story and photo are courtesy of Bennett Mintz.)

Photo by Chuck Danielian

Camp Dog part 1, start here.

Keller had to stop the four letter words then and there. “Don’t use that word. Don’t even say ‘hell’ or ‘damn’ or any cuss word or you’ll be out of a job faster than you can blink. Understand?”

Reeve thought for a moment and softly said he was sorry. He’d watch his mouth.

“Monte is . . . well, Monte goes where I go and I go where Monte goes. When I eat, Monte eats and when I starve, Monte starves. We’re a team. I named him ‘Monte’ for Joe Montana, who was the best quarterback I ever did see. You like football?”

Keller told Andy that he’d played some ball, but an injury cut his career.

“Where’d you play?”

“High school in Sioux Falls and then a small college in Aberdeen, I got my bell rung my freshman year.”

The last six miles into camp took about a half hour. Keller walked Andy into his wife’s office and the candidate made a great impression, calling her ma’m and thanking her for the opportunity of being a handyman doing God’s work in a Christian camp. She bought it.

Keller took Andy to the handyman’s bunk house, showed him the staff shower, laundry and other necessities. Then he walked him over the long meadow to the Camp cabins and then the Viking cabins and made it perfectly clear that if he ever caught him around any of the girls’ cabins or the girls’ shower he’d have him taken to jail “faster than you can blink.” There had been a Peeping Tom incident with a handyman six or eight years ago and Kiki never would forget it.

“Take the day off. Go over to Viking Camp and see where they have the canoes stowed, the rifle range, and archery . . . get familiar with all the grinders . . .”

“What are grinders?”

“It’s what we call the toilets. Toilets are grinders. Every blessed one of them will get clogged with toilet paper. Kids mess themselves and then throw their underwear in the toilet. Happens all the time.”

First place Andy walked was the dining hall where he introduced himself to the cook. Mary Kendrick, the real camp cook, wouldn’t be in for another week, but her assistant Dolly Hansen was doing menus, writing food orders and cooking for whatever staff and family was in camp early. “Got any hot dogs?” asked Andy. He wanted one or two for Monte who hadn’t had the pleasure of coffee and a cinnamon bun with the Rev. Karl. Dolly cracked open a 10 pound box of frozen franks and knocked off a few for the handyman. She hit “defrost” and popped them in the microwave for a few minutes. Andy bit the end off one dog and slowly fed the rest to Monte so that he wouldn’t gobble them in one bite and get sick. Then he kissed Monte’s nose and ruffled his ears. “I think we got a good gig here. Hope I don’t mess it up.”

On his first day, Andy hung all the screen doors on the cabins. He removed the entire pool pump and filter assembly, taught himself how to back-wash the pool and poured in a little too much chlorine; then flushed, checked and re-checked every toilet in every grinder. The Rev. Karl beamed. Mrs. Keller smiled at him during the blessing at dinner.

He had bathed Monte and by golly there was a dog under that grime.

Andy not only got the riding lawn mower going, he tuned it up with new plugs and points, sharpened the blades and took her for a spin over the meadow. In a couple of days the camp never looked so good.

The campers began arriving on the first Saturday after Memorial Day. That night’s campfire was always the biggest. There were blessings to the campers and to the camp, to the Lutheran churches and to the donors who made it all possible. Keller did the honors and was in great form talking about the moral responsibility each camper had to look out for all the other campers whether it was in the pool, at the lake, on a hike, in the craft lodge and on and on he went mentioning each place where campers needed to accept the moral responsibility of watching out for each other.

At the moment each camper was accepting the goodness that the Lord had bestowed, Monte stuck his freezing wet nose into a little girl’s ear. Her scream could be heard over the meadow and across the lake to camp Tu Tu Tokem, owned by the YWCA.

There was an instant of terror at the child’s scream, but as soon as everyone realized what had happened, they began laughing hysterically and nothing anyone did could stop them. The counselors-in-training and counselors and kitchen staff, stable staff, riding instructors, lifeguards – everybody – laughed and laughed. When it mercifully subsided, The Rev. Karl Keller introduced Monte as the official Camp Dog.

Monte did well on human food, but by the third week, Dolly Hansen asked Andy if he didn’t want some dog food. She said she’d add a 40 pound sack of kibble to the supplementary food order along with a couple of cases of Miller Genuine Draft beer. Andy just stared at her. “I like a beer after a day in the kitchen; what about you?” she asked.

After campfire, maybe while Dolly was mixing up some pastry dough to rise overnight, the two of them would drink a beer. Or Andy would walk over to Dolly’s quarters and grab one for later.

Monte was up at 5:30, about an hour before First Bell. He’d walk through the meadow lifting his leg on anything he could find, and then bound into the stable area where he’d relieve himself. Some mornings he’d walk all the way to the lake looking for deer and rabbits to chase. But when the first bell announced Wake-Up, he’d be at Andy’s side, pulling him from the covers. The days grew routine. Evenings, between dinner and campfire in the wonderful upper Midwestern twilight, the kids would play a special brand of soccer in the meadow involving 100 or more campers and Monte would run non-stop for an hour, jumping over fallen children and try to grab the ball. He was in the best condition of his life.

One night, the 8-year old girls were having a pajama party and Monte wandered into their cabin. The cabin leader dressed him in a striped T-shirt and red wool cap like a French sailor and everyone took his picture.

To be continued…

(Story graciously submitted by Bennett J. Mintz who is owned by a 6 1/2 year old AKC registered Doberman Pinscher named Ace Barkowitz.)

(Photo is courtesy of my friends Chuck & Mary Danielian of Naples, Florida. Their Doberman Chance went to the Rainbow Bridge earlier this year.)

By Photos8.com

The Rev. Karl Keller was pumping Shell gas into the old Jeep pickup truck. He was up to $45 and he still had the three five-gallon jugs in the bed of the truck to go, which would bring him right around $90 – or forty bucks over the monthly fuel budget.

Karl Keller – everyone called him K.K. and pronounced it more like Kiki – was the director of Moccasin Flats Lutheran Church Camp. Kiki was 6-feet, 6-inches tall and was projected to be the greatest tight end in the history of college football until he went over the middle for a pass as a college freshman and took a spleen shot from a senior linebacker at South Dakota State Teachers College that ended his career then and there. He became a Lutheran minister.

He worked first as a youth minister and did quite well. But then the head minister retired and the parish council moved Keller into the top chair, which was enough to turn most of the flock into non-believers. Keller’s sermons were simplistic; he rambled on, couldn’t remember parishioners’ names and had no verbal authority from the pulpit. When attendance at Christmas Eve services was less than half of the previous year, the church council made a move on him. He was subsequently named an area-wide “roving youth minister” for the four Lutheran churches in the county, but two of the churches were middle-of-the-road, one conservative and one liberal, so that didn’t work too well.

When the job of camp director opened up, Keller applied for it. That was 21 years ago.

Moccasin Flats was owned and operated by a consortium of the four Lutheran churches. The camp was composed of two sections – one was just called “camp” and was for boys and girls ages 8 to 12 who attended for two weeks; the other was Viking Camp for teenagers who stayed a month, six weeks or two months. The dining hall and nightly campfire were shared. Most of the other programs were conducted separately. One or two nights a week the Rev. Keller spoke at the campfire program, detailing in no uncertain terms the subject of moral responsibility.

Kiki was married to the former Anna Gott, whose late father was a strict constructionist Lutheran minister from the Wisconsin synod. Anna was the camp’s nurse, secretary, bookkeeper and personnel director. She was as unbending as a baseball bat. When something was going wrong, she expresses her displeasure by putting her hands on her hips and saying, “Well, honestly!”

Karl made the 18 mile trip into town almost weekly. It was a lousy ride, with the last six miles into camp on a dusty, rutted, unpaved road. In the winter and spring he was forced to use the Jeep’s 4-wheel drive option just to get through the snow or mud. As he topped off the tank and began to work on the five gallon jugs, he waved to Eddie Samuels across the street in the Mobil station. Keller alternated buying gas at the Shell and Mobil each week. Major food and supplies came up from the city, but sometimes he’d have to buy an extra 25 dozen eggs or 100 pounds of flour and he’d switch between the town’s markets. Just keeping the peace, he reasoned.

It was mid-May. Two weeks before the official opening of camp and there were a million things to be done, but first and foremost he had to hire a handyman that his wife would approve; he had to get the pool filter pump working and had to hang 28 screen doors on the cabins; but first he had to hire a camp handyman. He’d advertised in the town paper, The Moose Call, but there were no takers. He even swung by the YWCA, Boy Scout and Girl Scout camps seeing if they knew of a handyman, but no luck.

That’s when he spotted Andy Reeve. Or, rather, Reeve spotted him.

Andrew Reeve was a sad sight. He was obviously down on his luck, a man of about 50 years, his pants were ill-fitting hand-me-downs, his hair needed cutting and the scruffy black and tan dog he led by some knotted clothesline looked worse. “Hey, pal,” asked Reeve, “you know where a guy could get a job . . . maybe washing dishes or waxing cars in this town?”

The fact that Reeve hadn’t asked for a handout impressed Keller.

“I might. I just might.”

Keller asked Reeve if he had any skills and just as matter of fact the shaggy man replied, “Shit, mister, I can fix anything from a Benrus watch to a machine gun to an old Jeep pickup truck.”

The minister invited Reeve to have a cup of coffee.

Handy Andy Reeve had been among the last Marines out of Saigon on May 15, 1975. He had been shot in the leg and still had two large chunks of VC shrapnel in his back; he spent two weeks at a Navy hospital in Yokosuka outside Tokyo before being returned to the States. Even after returning home, his life continued skidding downhill. There were bouts of depression, bouts of alcohol, fights with strangers, bar fights, fights with friends, a year in jail, a year in and out of a VA psychiatric facility, six months in a vocational school learning to repair automatic transmissions, a job at Aamco and a fight with the idiot manager that resulted in a three year prison sentence with time off for good behavior.

Despite his faults as a minister, his cliché-filled sermons and his inattention to detail, Keller had a knack for listening and he heard Andy Reeve loud and clear.

He offered Andy the job. His budget was $650 a month for handyman services and Keller offered Reeve $500 with the promise that if he stayed the whole summer he’d “see if I can get you another hundred.”

They swung by the thrift shop and bought Andy some underwear, three shirts, three pair of work pants, a jacket, hat, shoes, work boots and socks. It was $100, but they gave the Lutheran camp a discount to $50. “If you get the job, it comes out of your salary; if my wife doesn’t like you, consider the clothes a donation to a war veteran,” said Keller.

Briefly, Keller told Andy that he’d have to pass the test of his wife, because she was actually the camp personnel director. That he should not cuss, to act respectful and be thankful for God’s blessings such as decent food and a good summer job. Andy said he understood. On the way out of the mountain town, they pulled over at a highway rest area where Andy shaved using a new disposable razor, then swished some water under his armpits and changed clothes. He looked amazingly good.

“What about that mutt of yours?” asked Keller.

“He ain’t no mutt. He might look like shit since he’s so skinny, but Monte is a full blown Doberman Pinscher with an honest pedigree.”

To be continued…

(Story graciously submitted by Bennett J. Mintz who is owned by a 6 1/2 year old AKC registered Doberman Pinscher named Ace Barkowitz. Mr. Mintz owns a small advertising & communications agency in Chatsworth, Calif. and is currently the Corresponding Secretary for the Doberman Pinscher Club of Los Angeles.