Long trails and puppy dog tales ought to be shorter. The vessel Daisy Mae was making regular runs to Guatemala with an outlaw crew. We had inherited a new captain who was a retired Marine.

When he was conned into accepting responsibility for the Daisy, her crew, and her contraband cargo, it didn’t take him long to regret his command decision.

On one memorable occasion, an indispensable crew member (engineer “with” class) brought aboard a large, ill-tempered canine beast of uncertain ancestry and claimed he wouldn’t ship on a boat that didn’t have a mascot.

“It’s damned unlucky,” he swore.

“The only trip I’ve ever made without a mascot ended in disaster.”

Seamen are a superstitious lot as Capt. Davis well knew, so he allowed it.

I was off watch and missed that part, but the next morning when we were 30 klicks out to sea I met the dog for the very first time.

The first thing I noticed about her was she had an antisocial temperament and secondly she was very much in an advanced “family way,” a fact the captain and “on deck” crew had overlooked.

I hunted up the O.O.D. and found him in the galley where he was usually parked.

“Know anything about a wolf or a bear or a panther or crossbreed of the above of some sort, being on this boat?”

He said, “The chief can’t remember her name, so we’ve just been callin’ her B.Ware,  Bee for short.”

That conversation confirmed that she wasn’t an apparition or hallucination as I’d hoped. I would have cheerfully welcomed a ghost or a good case of delerium tremons over a mean pregnant bitch dog on a sixty foot boat for the duration of a border run.

“Is she housebroke?  I questioned.

“Don’t matter, she ain’t in a house, mate, she’s on a boat and she’s boat broke. She uses the scuppers (small openings at deck level to allow water to drain from deck), my lad. She’s been on a boat before.”

She chose the evacuation locker on the fore deck for a maternity ward and afterwards for a nursery.

That was basically an open closet where we kept extra life jackets, self-inflating rafts and other emergency equipment. It didn’t appear to be a good location to us, maternally speaking, so we “bunked ‘em up” on the bridge.

She became more social in her ways after accomplishing motherhood, but insisted passively (thank God) on the locker as the nursery.

As fast as we’d take ‘em to the relative safety of the bridge, she’d sneak up and kidnap them and stash ‘em in that drafty old closet. We finally gave up. You can’t argue with the illogic of a mother.

We questioned what we were gonna do with the howlin’ hounds after they got out of the nursery. They obviously would be swept thru the scuppers if they tried that method of “boat broken” their mother would demonstrate.

The entire ship’s company consisted of eight more or less able bodied seamen. Seamen, mercenaries and pirates all are gamblers by nature, so we cut the cards of the only unmarked deck on board to see who had to adopt one of the as-yet unborn mongrels and keep it in the their respective cabins after they were weaned or at least until we could get in friendlier waters and raffle ‘em off or give them away, or use them for bait if we ever got back to red fish latitudes again.

There were only five in the litter and without question they were the ugliest and most incontinent members of their species ever produced. There were piles and puddles of this and that, stretching like potholes from the engine room to the gun deck and up the gangways to the wheel house.

The radio/radar operator was in progress of staging a mutiny to rewrite ship articles concerning mascots and their offspring. When the engineer called from shore (he’d got leave and left on a tender to purchase supplies ashore) the call was to let us know he wouldn’t be back.

That monster mama dog we think swam ashore behind him because we ain’t seen her since.

He left us one piece of advice, which was: “you notice them puppies’ sainted mother had no tail? The reason she always uses the port-stern (left-rear) scupper is because that’s where we put her tail after we whacked it off.”

Well, I didn’t have the heart to do it and I didn’t draw a puppy anyhow but that radio operator was desperate so he amputated that Baskerville’s tail about half way. If there were any positive results they were negligible.

The engineer called on the ship-to-shore phone a week later and, being told it didn’t work, said the tail was still too long and to cut it shorter.

Even old Sparky didn’t have the heart to try it again so we left it alone, but the cargo chief — a fiesty old girl from Tennessee — said, “I think he mighta had something there. If we were to cut it real short, as in right behind the ears, it will work.”

We didn’t do that either, but if you ever meet a one eyed seafarin’ man with a really ugly, mean-tempered, bob-tail dog, buy him a drink and get his side of story.

Sailing back from the sunset with sticky feet,
Ricky Harpole
(Contact Harpole at www.facebook.com/harpolive or www.colespointrecords.com)