On Thursday night, interviewing Big Ron at the Raven Inn, he began discussing sparring with pit bulls in an attempt to extrapolate an attack. We have both done this and come to the same conclusion. I have also had two pits set on me and two stalk me, dealing with them variously.
Last night, my hip feeling fine, I took no cane with me when I left the slave girl’s hovel for the bus stop, a mile to the south. I did—expecting rain—borrow her large, heavy-duty umbrella, at four feet long and 2.5 pounds.
I passed four strutting hoodrats on a darkened side street and they merely posed, puffing out their chests.
I passed to good-sized Latinos and they went about their business.
I was only a block from the shopping center, across from which is the bus stop, so decided that the coast was clear and stepped out of the street. I had walked in the street most of the way to avoid ambushes.
I then heard, from the other side of a hedgerow, a storm door slam, a little terrier yip and a low growl come charging out of the darkness, materializing into a black pit bull.
Carrying the umbrella point first in the left hand—under ironically clear skies—I rotated the grip across my pelvis and passed it to my right hand as I stepped back and leveled the point at dog height, the point leveling at the short, 70-pound bundle of fury, just as he skidded to a stop.
He then snarled and lept for my chest/throat/face area and I stabbed him obliquely in the right side of his neck and weak-pivoted back to his right, as I swept the point downward like a broom, sweeping him behind me.
He landed on all fours and ran I low, coming up for my balls.
I swept him with the point downward in his shoulder as I placed my back against a tree and stepped backward, sliding my back on the trunk, spinning into the gutter and turning to face him with the point as he recovered and made to leap from the curb.
He stopped at the curb as the little dog yipped and the owner, a hunched, elderly form of undetermined race or gender, seemed frozen in fright behind them.
I back out into the service road and continued on my way, listening for paw scrapes on asphalt, but expecting none, as the dog seemed to have been protecting its owner.
That dog never barked once, just snarled.
I am so glad I borrowed that umbrella and was sorry to have to report it bent in action against another canine foe. I am so glad I didn’t have to test Ron and mine’s shared dog-fighting method, for, if it would have failed, I would have ended up having to cut this think off of my arm in front of its infirm owner.
I suppose that was a friendly fire incident in the war against the hoodrat mob.
Being a Bad Man in a Worse World
Fighting Smart: Boxing, Agonistics & Survival
