“Oxford” got his name from Billy Marginot’s little English red and white vintage car. My younger son, Harvey, was here for a month after a work trip to Tibet, and Billy generously loaned us his car so I could teach my son how to drive a manual transmission.
Shortly after the driving lessons ended, Harvey offered to find a new kitten for my dog Ida Mae. Her closest companion, a cat that Harvey had found abandoned as a kitten in a park, had eaten some sort of poison on Martha’s Vineyard shortly before I moved to Marfa, and tragically died. They had been kitten and puppy together and shared so many of the characteristics of their respective species, I told people I don’t have a cat and dog, I have a dat and cog. That cat jumped in the car just like a dog, relaxed on the dash, and went everywhere with us.
Ida Mae had been depressed ever since his death. We found no suitable kitten that day and turned to look at the puppies. There was a tiny black puppy, just a few weeks old. Someone had stumbled across the entire litter left in the desert to die. All the other puppies had already perished, except this one little guy, hanging by a thread.
I called a medical intuitive who saved my life many years before, about the prospects for this puppy. He felt sure it would break my heart. “He doesn’t even have any life force. All his organs are shutting down.” He knows I have your number, I responded …. he relented and helped us.
Harvey carried Oxford around for that month, while I plied him with medicine to help each and every organ restart, build up his blood, get him some life force and offer this puppy, an all black, herding dog mix of uncertain heritage, as a new pal for Ida Mae.
The only real catch was Ida Mae wanted nothing to do with this puppy. She growled when he came near her. I was deeply frustrated as my instincts in these situations are often spot on, or so I thought. It was sad and frustrating, so I made another call to the medical intuitive. He said Ida Mae was still waiting for her cat “Archie” to return. She didn’t understand death and we needed to have a memorial service and explain to her that Archie would never be back, and use the language a young child could understand.
So we did that. We gathered around lit candles in the back yard, spoke to Ida Mae about how much we had loved Archie, and that he was gone forever. Harvey and I both cried. It was a solemn occasion and heartbreaking for all. The next day I blurted out, “Ida Mae, I did not get this puppy for me. This puppy is for you.” Her eyes brightened and from that moment on they were inseparable. Oxford excelled at being her sidekick.
Harvey went back east to figure out his next move after opting out of another trip to Tibet. It had been arduous and dangerous photographing sacred Tibetan murals that the Chinese government was destroying as fast as they could find them, and he wanted to go to college.
In late April, the puppy, now 12 weeks old and on his feet, so to speak, got bitten by a rattlesnake on Pinto Canyon Road. We were together, Oxford sitting at my feet, me looking off into the distance when the distinctive rattle was heard directly behind us. I froze, the puppy moved and the coiled snake struck. I flew through the air about 6 feet away. The puppy screamed. He may well have saved my life. He definitely took one for the team.
The vet greeted me as I carried the puppy into the clinic with, “He’ll never survive, he doesn’t even have an immune system yet.” She hooked him up to an IV, put him, this still tiny puppy in a cat carrier, and took him home with her for the night. To the amazement of all, he survived the night. I spent the entire next day, kneeling by his kennel at the clinic, administering homeopathic remedies when none of the staff was looking. They kindly ignored me, worked around me that entire day. At closing the vet asked if I wanted to bring him home for the night and bring him back in the morning for another IV. Yes I did.
Once home I filled his wet food with activated charcoal, an antidote to venom. He was so hungry it went right down. I put more than a little charcoal in his food. When I had lived in Marfa, all of eight days, Ida Mae was bitten by a brown recluse. A vet told me once the venom stopped eating the flesh, they would amputate her leg. Not in my house do we wait for the venom to stop eating the flesh. I called a childhood friend who was an experienced vet, he assured me that was the only way to go. Like I said, not in my house.
My internet had been hooked up earlier that day and I was hard at it looking for help. After endless nauseating photos of necrotic flesh there was a post by a pediatrician who had also been bitten by a brown recluse. She carefully described every step of mixing activated charcoal with olive oil to make a slurry, put a piece of gauze on the wound, cover with the mixture, wrap up like a poultice, and the charcoal would draw out the venom. In the morning when I removed the gauze, there was the little circle of venom, just as she had promised. Ida Mae’s hugely swollen leg was almost normal size. Ida Mae healed beautifully after one more night of treatment, with no surgery, no amputation and a taste for good Italian olive oil. So needless to say, when there’s a toxin involved I’m all over it with the activated charcoal.
When I took the puppy back to the vet the next morning, the swelling in his head was reduced by half. The receptionist was wowed as we came through the door. The vet examined my pup, cocked her head, looked up at me and said, “Do I smell charcoal?” Well yes hahaha, welcome to my world. The puppy recovered with only a scar from the bite, and although the vet told me he would have to reach his first birthday before he was entirely out of the woods, due to the venom being a hematoxin that could show up in his system somewhere down the road; we did not encounter another set back connected to that snake.
So not long after the snakebite, standing at the sink while washing the dishes, Oxford at my feet, I distinctly heard him say, “Hector.” Then nothing. He clammed right up. At the end of a phone call with the medical intuitive about other things, I asked an odd question, “Does Oxford like his name?” He sighed, and said he’d check in with him, the mysterious way an intuitive does, and returned to tell me that Oxford hated his name. Was I supposed to call him Hector? “No, he’s too little to tell you the name he wants; however you’ll figure it out.” Oh terrific.
Many friends were enlisted to help me find his proper name. We all made lists and yet nothing was right. I actually had other things I needed to do in my life and I was giving up when the intuitive said, “Just listen and one day you will hear it.” Weeks later, lo and behold, on a dusty road my thoughts elsewhere, I heard Oxford say, “Archie.”
To be continued.