Hole in One Read Free

Scrap?”
    â€œCaptain Martin’s dog. A pit bull.”
    â€œWho the heck is Captain Martin, and what is he doing with a pit bull?”
    â€œRetired Air Canada pilot,” I explained. “They live right next to the golf course. That’s his daughter, Winifred, who takes the green fees.”
    â€œOh, well, just as long as the dog doesn’t bite. Hey, he does bite, doesn’t he, Carlton? You’re really scared.”
    â€œScared? The Witherses do not scare. Let us just say that I feel an onrush of prudence. I wonder how the damn dog got loose? Scrap is always kept behind wire.”
    â€œWell, never mind. We’ll just get the car and go.”
    â€œDidn’t you hear where that bark came from? He’s between us and the parking lot. We’d better go back to the clubhouse.”
    â€œHow can we? It was locked up when we came off the course.”
    True, too. After we had put our clubs away and, if you want to get nosy about it, strolled down to the dock for a little fooling around, the place was closed down, and now we were on our own, a good hundred yards from the parking lot on one side and the Martin house back in the woods on the other.
    â€œWell,” said Hanna, “we’d better call for help.”
    I grabbed her arm. “For God’s sake, don’t,” I begged her. “If Scrap is loose, he’s likely to attack at any loud noise.”
    â€œYikes,” said Hanna, but she said it quietly.
    We began to move towards the parking lot, walking on the sides of our shoes, at my suggestion, to keep the noise down. I think we’d have made it, too, except that the weird walking upset me, and I went base over apex across an empty paint drum that some idiot had left out, apparently for that express purpose, and I let out a startled bellow as I went down. I was up in a second, though, when I heard Hanna shout, “Carlton, quick! Here he comes!” followed by the fearful scrabble and throaty bellow of a charging pit-bull terrier.
    Upon which Hanna took off at a rate of, oh, call it sixty miles an hour. Do I exaggerate? Perhaps. Maybe it was only fifty-five miles an hour. She came, inevitably, to the closed gate to the parking lot, but she did not pause nor stay, no sir. She went over it in a stride that would have had any Olympic track coaches who happened to be in the neighbourhood shaking their heads as if to say, “Now, that’s how we do the high hurdle.” She pulled up on the other side, recollected, I guess, that she had left the last of the Witherses to become dog food, grabbed a chunk of a tree branch—the golf-course parking lot edges into the forest primeval—and came back over the fence to where she saw two figures tussling on the ground. Which were, reading from the bottom up: self lying on my back and howling with glee, and Scrap vigorously licking my face.
    Not every pit bull is a killer, you know. You would only be in danger from Scrap if you happened to be soluble in dog spit. The reason the Martins usually keep him penned is that he is always trying to make friends with folks in the middle of a golf game.
    Klovack didn’t get the joke. Women don’t, have you noticed?
    â€œYou realize,” is all she said, “that this means war.” I paid no attention at the time. Scrap’s intervention had somewhat restored my self-esteem by knocking that of another human, always the best way, and I went merrily along until the following Friday, when we were, once more, teeing off for a golf game.
    This was on the first tee, about a hundred feet away from the clubhouse porch, where everyone gathers to comment on the form of those about to launch themselves into a golf game. Of course, if by chance you ever hit a good one, there is no one on the porch at all, but if, as is more usually the case, your opening drive rambles forty yards across the grass, nodding to the worms, before burying itself in a gopher