If the first step in starting a family is buying a house, the second must surely be getting a family dog. 

I knew two different dogs while I was growing up. The first died the day after Christmas and I can remember driving with my father and sister to the shelter for another the very next day. Despite my father’s protests we take home an adult female collie – completely housetrained and docile – my sister and I were enthralled with a large group of brown puppies all eager to be our new pet. 

We compromised by bringing home the laziest of the bunch.

“If we’re getting a puppy, it’s going to be that one,” my father said, pointing at a small clump of fur in the water dish, asleep.

We named the dog – a brown, midsized mutt – Hana. She was healthy, happy, well mannered and ended up playing a large role in curing my mother’s empty nest syndrome when my sister and I left for college. 

With fond memories of Hana in the back of my mind, I met Martie at the local shelter a few weeks ago. She was a mid-sized “beagle mix” who sat calm and quiet in the corner of her cage, a purple bandana tied around her shoulders. Fully grown at a year and a half, Martie was smaller than Hana, but similarly built, appeared mild mannered and her write-up read “the sweetest dog you’ll ever meet.”

I brought her home the next afternoon. 

It became immediately apparent that Martie loved to go for car rides. Her ears perk up at the slightest mention of “going for a ride,” so it only made sense that I bring her along for my hour and a half drive to the marina where my sailboat rests. The purpose of the trip was to shrinkwrap the boat, a task that required my father, uncle and I to accomplish. 

We arrived without incident and I promptly tied her lead to a wayward jackstand nearby several other boats while we got to work. 

For the first time, Martie began barking incessantly, obviously distressed by the fact she could not be within my immediate reach. I hollered at her repeatedly from the deck of the boat – some 25 feet off the ground – while we attempted to tame a massive sheet of shrinkwrap that desperately wanted to fly away in the heavy wind gusts descending on the harbor.

Between hollering at my father and uncle and the flapping of the white plastic, it took me a moment to notice that Martie was finally silent. I stuck my head from the dirty, suffocating bundle of shrinkwrap to praise her for her obedience and was witness to a scene I won’t soon forget. 

Martie was curled in a ball, seizing silently back and forth with a live extension cord clamped in her mouth. 

“My dog!” I hollered, throwing the shrinkwrap into the wind and sprinting down the deck. “My dog’s getting electrocuted!”

Feeling as if I was in that nightmare where you can barely move, I leapt to the ground and watched my uncle take hold of Martie, who managed to utter a frightened, pain-filled holler that echoed off nearby hulls. I frantically yanked on the cord with hopes of ripping it from an outlet nearly 50 feet away, but it was my father who saved Martie by striking her in the snout, breaking her jaw’s grip on the wire.

All four of us sat in the mud shaking. I held Martie’s shuddering body, watching the shiny white shrinkwrap unroll over our heads like an immense flag of surrender.

To my amazement, Martie appears fine today, but my boat is very poorly shrink-wrapped and my folks are reconsidering their idea to give my wife and I an invisible fence for Christmas.

— Nate Jones