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Mamafesto
Why it's time
for Mothers Who Think

The main pleasure in owning a pit bull is in

detonating a sense of fear in your neighbors.

BY ANNE LAMOTT | We were walking along a few days ago, me and my dog Sadie, who looks like a black Irish setter. She's a great dog, as feminine and dignified and gentle as a deer; a little co-dependent, a tracker by trade. It was a strange day, because the sun was shining through the drizzle. "Must be a monkey's birthday somewhere," a man from my youth used to say when the sun shone through the rain.

We passed the slightly creepy house that we pass every day on our way to town, a house where a dog barks behind the fence off and on all day. A second dog barks every so often, but mostly you hear just the one. There is something a little disconcerting about the whole feel of the house, and I don't think it's just that every time you pass it, you get barked at by an invisible dog and watched by a silent one. It's that you never have a sense of human life being lived there. Sometimes there are lights on at night, sometimes not. I don't think I've ever seen actual people there, neighbors you might wave to, people taking out the trash or bringing in the morning paper.

One very foggy spring night when we first moved to this neighborhood, we were walking with a 16-year-old friend from Hawaii. We passed the house and saw the shadows of a man and the two dogs on the porch. And our friend from Hawaii whispered, "I think it's a Nightmarcher."

This is the story she told us that night, one that I've associated with this house ever since: On the big island of Hawaii, there's an isolated piece of land between the two volcanoes, Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa. There's one rough crummy road that runs through the land, with lava fields on both sides. There's always mist along the ground, like smoke. And once a month, on the first night of the new moon, when there's no light in the sky except for the stars, spirits walk the island roads. Most are not bad unless they're interfered with on their march by ignorant or foolhardly people. They're just spirits who walk to the sea once a month, who may need to pass through your house on the way. So on that one night every month, people leave two doors of the house open for them to walk through, the mauka and makai doors -- mountain-side door and sea-side door.

But besides these good spirits, Nightmarchers pass through, too.

"What did they look like?" Sam asked.

She claimed not to know because it was too scary, but told me later, privately, that they had red eyes and soft footsteps. They were big, dark spaces, darker than the night. People-shaped patches of darkness that moved things around like little winds.

So yesterday Sadie and I were walking briskly along, across the street from the house, when I looked over and saw a pit bull standing out on the sidewalk. It was white with black spots and longish legs and that weirdly sweet look they have when they're not attacking you. I said to Sadie, like a priggish mother, "Just keep walking," and then as impossibly swift as swallows changing direction in the sky, he glided over to us and sank his fangs into Sadie's neck.

Sadie yelped and howled and I screamed and screamed and the pit bull made the evil guttural growl of a dog who is entirely in alligator brain. He did not let go, he stayed locked in the death grip I have read about, and I screamed for help and started kicking at him, which seemed to annoy him about as much as a horsefly might. I jerked on the leash and kept yelling, "Please someone, help us, help us," really afraid that it was going to turn on me and tear my leg off. I wasn't brave at all. I was frantic and too afraid to try to pull him off with my bare hands and Sadie was yelping with agony and the pit bull hung like a jagged vise, snarling in one long, long bite.

I saw a blur and terror really kicked in -- I thought it was another dog -- but a tall man with long hair and delicate features rushed over and started yanking at the pit bull's collar. Then a uniformed woman stepped forward, an Airborne Express delivery person holding a large cardboard box, who brought one corner of it crashing down on the pit bull's head. And finally the dog just let go.

NEXT+PAGE: Time to play kill the kitty?