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Article: A Language of Toads
- Article from:
- River Teeth
- Article date:
- April 1, 2008
- Author:
CopyrightCopyright University of Nebraska Press Spring 2008. Provided by ProQuest LLC. (Hide copyright information)
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Our new dogs would dig up bones and then bury them again in the field, the bones, I presumed, of the old dogs we'd seen die. Pooch and Snow, husband and wife, had failed to make it through one bitterly cold winter, and my father had buried them in the same square of ditch he'd buried snakes he assassinated for me in the garden. (The sight of a snake so legless in the shade of the low leaves of the pumpkin patch would send me running, and I wouldn't return to the garden until I saw the snake hanging limp, all its mocking wiggle gone, from the end of my father's hoe.) I'd been young enough when Pooch and Snow had been old that I'd seen them as elegant somehow, dignified royalty despite their ...