Out in our overpriced yuppie farm in Tumalo, Oregon—where everyone plays cowboy but still drives a Subaru—I had two dogs: a black lab and a basset hound named Corky. Corky was stubborn and dumb as a sack of hammers, and both of them had a habit of escaping and sprinting straight toward our neighbors—two lesbian ranchers who made it very clear they’d shoot the dogs if it happened again. Ranch life. No warnings, no leashes, just bullets and boundary lines.
To keep them alive, I did what any half-sane suburban cowboy would do—I built an electric perimeter. Bought a couple thousand feet of 12-gauge wire, stapled it around the bottom rail of the entire damn fence, hooked it up to one of those frequency boxes behind the barn, and strapped shock collars on both dogs. It was a simple deal: if the dog got too close to the wire, it beeped. Closer, it zapped. Real close? It turned into a torture chamber.
And it worked—for a while. Dogs stayed put. I could leave the property and come home without finding a blood trail or a pissed-off neighbor. But winter came, the ground froze, and with it came a different kind of problem.
One morning, the kids shook me awake: “Corky’s gone.” Of course she was. Again. I rolled out of bed, threw on my North Face jacket over a pair of Dickies shorts—commando style, because that’s how broken men live—and slipped on my UGGs like some washed-up ranch yoga hybrid. Grabbed the keys to the Hector-Mobile, my beat-up, Polaris Ranger that ran on duct tape and spite, and started the search.
I hit the usual spots. Paul’s property—where anything with a heartbeat ended up smoked and hanging in his barn—and the lesbians’ place across the road, where the only thing twitchier than their trigger fingers was their patience for dumbass dogs crossing the line.
Nothing.
After about an hour, I gave up the search—officially. Defeated, I headed upstairs to take a shower, back to the bedroom that hadn’t heard the sound of marriage in years—just echoes, old arguments, and the haunting quiet that only comes with being ignored for a decade. But the view? The Cascade Range was still there, still stunning, still whispering something about peace I never quite found.
That’s when I saw it. Just beyond the frost-glazed glass—brown fur, lifeless, sprawled along the fence line like a bad ending. My heart dropped.
I marched out through the frost, my UGGs crunching over the snow as I trudged past the old tree—and there she was. Corky. Tongue dried and hanging out like a party streamer, eyes bulged like she’d stared straight into hell, her body frozen stiff in some grotesque, contorted pose. No blood. No bite marks. Just foam at the mouth and a tongue gone purple.
I figured the idiot finally lost a fight—maybe to a coyote, or worse, a mountain lion. Either way, she looked done. Dead. And I figured I’d have to dig a hole in the frozen ground and bury here before the kids got back from school. Another perfect goddamn winter day on the ranch.
But when I nudged her with my UGG to flip her stiff, lifeless body and check for wounds—just to see where the damage was—something horrifying happened.
The damn thing woke up.
She blinked, snapped her tongue back in like it had been on loan to the dead, and tore off without thinking—full sprint, wild-eyed, like the shocks were still chasing her. She plowed headfirst into the porch stairs, too rattled to remember how legs or gravity worked. I caught up, grabbed her—no blood, no gashes. Just pure panic. Full-body, fried-wire trauma.
That tongue took its sweet time slithering back in, like it wasn’t sure it still belonged. Her body was locked up, legs twitching in slow, dreamlike spasms—autopilot in a nightmare. Her eyes had that thousand-yard stare, like whatever soul she had had already disembarked for good. I’m guessing Corky heard the warning beep, got turned around, and in a panic, ran the wrong damn way—left when she should’ve gone right. Right into the belly of the beast. Dead center in the shock zone. And that fence? It lit her up like a Vegas jackpot—buzzing her again and again, locking her muscles tight until her brain couldn’t tell fight from freeze. She stood there, alone, frying in silence, paralyzed for what must’ve been hours—unable to bark, to run, to die. Just stuck. Electrified and forgotten.
When the kids came barreling through the door, they lit up like Christmas. “She’s back! She’s okay!”
But then the celebration stalled.
“Something’s wrong with her.”
No shit.
Corky wasn’t Corky anymore. Her eyes had that glassy, hollow look, like the lights were on but nobody was home—and whoever used to be there wasn’t coming back. She crept around the house slow, nervous, flinching at every gust of wind like it owed her money. Twitchy. Haunted. A shell of the mutt who used to barrel through screen doors like a wrecking ball.
PTSD? Shock trauma? Who knows. I didn’t need a vet. I could see it. That wire didn’t just teach her a lesson—it rewired her completely.
One thing’s certain: Corky never tested that fence again.
The line was drawn. She got the message. And maybe, just maybe, the damn thing worked a little too well.
