Life Sketches by Terry Berkson

A Good Man Is Hard To Find

One fall day several years ago, two guys I’ll call Tiger Goodale and Rudy Marriott drove up to the farm to say that they had a great story for me to write. It seems this one-legged guy they knew was up in an oak, building a tree stand, when his new prosthesis, which he didn’t secure properly, fell to the ground and rolled into a ravine. The guy had a rather large dog with him—they thought it was a Rottweiler, but they weren’t sure. The dog thought the man was playing fetch and dashed down the ravine after the “big bone.” When he retrieved it, he didn’t bring it back and put it before his master. Instead, he kept it a playfully safe distance away, went to a prone position and began to gnaw at it.

“Meanwhile,” Tiger continued, “the guy climbed out of the tree and was yelling and scrambling after the dog and his lost limb.”