Book 3 Chapter 5 Section 1: A Boy and his Dog

             Book 3, Chapter 5, Section 1 "Twin Oaks Drive"

            “Stay!”  Jeff yelled at his dog, Sonya.  “We can’t start the game until I get on the other side of this fence.”  As long as Jeff could remember, he had played “Hide and Go Seek” with his dog.  There was an estate behind the row of houses, and across the street, from where the Frazier family lived.  The owners held a huge lot of land and, while Jeff was growing up, he and Sonya would go up the woods to explore the only forested area of their neighborhood.  As he became older, Jeff explored his way to the fence that bordered the acreage that belonged to the Humphreys with the secondary streets in the suburb.  Jeff held onto Sonya’s leash until he was ready and then he yelled, “GO!”  Flinging himself over the fence, so that Sonya could not follow him, Jeff searched for a good hiding spot.  Meanwhile, since the dog couldn’t jump over the five foot fence, she had to go all of the way around the barrier.  That run only took a minute or two but it gave Jeff the lead time needed to find a suitable hiding spot.  There was a church yard across the street and the open space allowed Jeff to run from Sonya and gave him a chance to duck under a picnic table or slide into some bushes.  The best hiding spot was up an old pine tree because the dog didn’t think to look up to find Jeff.  If she didn’t find her quarry within a few minutes then she would give up and start to make her way back home.  Once he saw his dog retreating, Jeff yelled, “SONYA!” and the dog straightened up, picked up her ears, and then resume the search.  Yelling always gave away Jeff’s position so, by that point, the game was up.  If Sonya didn’t find Jeff after the first clue then he would continue to yell at her every few minutes. Finally, after a few rounds, boy and dog tired of playing “Hide and Go Seek” and they retreated into the twenty acre woods for the long walk home.             

            They spent hours alone together in the woods.  It was just a few acres of undeveloped land but they imagined themselves to be in a forest.  Sonya and Jeff roamed the woods together, wasting away the carefree days of his boyhood.  When they became tired of retracing the foot paths of the wood then they explored the creek that the Humphrey’s land bordered on.  A heavily trafficked road stood threatening on the high ridge on the far side of the creek, and beyond it the boy and dog were no longer safe, so they never ventured beyond the creek.  Jeff followed the edge of the water until he reached the viaduct, which marked the furthest point of his travels, and he searched for minnows and turned over rocks to find crawdads along the way.  Only after hours of exploring, when the boy and his best friend became tired, did they make their way back to their house on Trinity Hills Lane.  Sometimes they were both caked with muck after trudging through the knee deep mud on the banks of the creek.  It was a simple job to take the garden hose to Sonya to wash her off, but it was not so quick and easy to get the mud off of Jeff’s shoes and pants.  They were permanently stained but Jeff wore that as a badge of honor, along with the stickers and the tics that attached themselves to him, as a demonstration of his toughness and independence. 

            Over time, Jeff came to memorize all parts of the woods; the best tress to climb, the foot trails, and where to hide in case there were any shadowy figures in the distance.  Wanting to claim a small part of the woods for his very own, he dug a big hole, large enough to lay down in and no one could see him until they were right on top of the hole.  His intention was to dig out enough dirt so that he could sit in the hole without anyone seeing him and then camouflage the whole area so he could completely disappear. In his innocence, Jeff thought that the mere act of digging a hole would give him ownership of a small part of the woods, but he lost interest in the project and, over time, the hole filled in until there was no trace of it any more. 

            Jeff’s best days growing up were the days that he spent away from the house and it wasn’t because of his love of nature.  Mostly, he was doing my best to just stay out of the way.  He didn’t have any close friends even then because he was a loner and an outsider.  Defensive and thin skinned around his peers, the boy could relax and lose himself in the solitary remoteness of the woods.  It was the only place where he could find peace in his pre-adolescence years and he felt free in the midst of overgrowth in the forest.  If anyone else from the neighborhood happened into the woods, Jeff hid behind a tree or some bushes so that he didn’t have to share his space with them.