Our incredible Dachshund

cometsmama · #1 03-06-2007, 11:35 AM

When I was growing up in South Africa, our family dog was a female Dachshund named Mitsu. She had amazing spirit for such a small dog, and her enthusiasm for all the new places we moved into every year or so helped us kids adjust.

One area we moved to was Nelspruit, a town about 70 miles from the Kruger National Park. It had a subtropical climate, something like Florida's I imagine. There were a lot of poisonous snakes, more than any other place we lived, including the mamba, boomslang, puffadder and king cobra.

After a year in town, we moved out onto a property that had a few extra acres. We had a large lawn and landscaping, but also some pasture areas with tall, dry grass. Mitsu loved it. She had lots of space to run in and played with our tomcat and the neighbor's puppy.

One day we heard her barking hysterically, without letup, at the edge of the lawn. On closer inspection, we could see that she was herding a three foot long puffadder (not like the North American puffadder but a viper very similar to a rattlesnake without rattles) towards the house. She would nip at the snake's tail, then jump back as it turned to strike, then be at the tail again. She was so fast she didn't get bitten. My father quickly killed the snake with a shovel.

A few weeks later, my brother was about to step out of our kitchen door, but Mitsu went ahead of him and started her crazy barking again. This time it was a baby puffadder, just as venomous as an adult, which my brother very likely would have stepped on.

Some months later, we were coming home from a shopping trip in town. The entrance to our kitchen door was lower than the surrounding lawn. As I walked down the ramp, it looked like a garden rake was starting to stand up about 10 feet away from me. Quick as a flash, Mitsu realized what was going on. It was a king cobra, about 8 feet long, rising to the occasion. Mitsu repeated her nipping at the tail routine, and again, was able to jump out of the way of the striking fangs.

After a couple of minutes of this, the snake had had enough and slithered away into a hole in the ramp's wall that we hadn't noticed before. Being concerned for his kids, my father poured gasoline in there and set fire to it, which I thought gruesome...

One thing that really intrigued us was another encounter Mitsu had, this time with a harmless snake. She pounced on its neck right away, killing it. In the middle of this, the puppy from next door thought it was a new toy and ran off with the dead snake in its mouth, no doubt to deposit it on the sofa at home!

We wondered how Mitsu seemed to know the difference between the types of snakes.

Her final adventure in that house in the country was when she woke us up with a storm of barking in the middle of the night. We rushed to the living room and found the French door wide open. Apparently she'd run off a burglar!

We had two more moves after that before we left South Africa. Unfortunately my parents chose to leave her behind with her original breeders in Johannesburg. About a year after we'd emigrated, we heard she'd died of either rat poison or a heart problem. She was only six years old. It was the one of the saddest times of my life.