We tried making runner dogs but they ate all their skin off, you could see the muscle underneath glistening like smears of jam, but Hyah, Uncle Sandy would say and man they’d run and run. Butt muscles looking like cogs in a machine, legs like whips with all that grace and snap. Huunnnhh, they’d worry, they’d try to hold off as long as they could but that itch is a powerful thing and their teeth got to aching for it. The sound of it like a mean old man working some gristle. Then a morning came when one was born all jam. Black eyes under that film of birth. No eyelids. Uncle Sandy threw her in with the pigs. Goodbye, runner dogs.

Next came the hunting dogs. First generation perfect, Uncle Sandy so filled with triumph he’d bleat like a horn, vrrt-drr-dee-drr-dee-drr! Mingo, Uncle Sandy’s prize, trotted back with four pheasant, three in his mouth and one around his neck. Now that’s a dog. Okay, perfect save for how Mingo and the other males didn’t want to breed. Uncle Sandy even smeared the females with bacon grease, tail to belly. Nothing. Had to use the neighbor’s a-hundred-percent-guaranteed stallion of a dog. Second generation were good eaters, soft ears, but then there was the exploding fountains of wet dung. Even happened while they ate. If you put a carrot in their food you’d watch it shoot out not ten seconds later. They longed for the salt lick, a couple of them walked in circles in the afternoons until collapse. Well, shit, Uncle Sandy said. That was that.

Uncle Sandy tried the mean dogs next. All but one dead in the first litter. The one that lived had a bruise on his ribs the size and shape of one of his dead sibling’s heads, a silhouette in purple. Never went away. The momma dog nipped at him when he’d try to nurse; when he went out to pee the rooster pecked him in the thigh. He bled and bled, a little shadow of blood wherever he went. The undead, Uncle Sandy called him. One night we let him out for his business and never let him back in.