Dogs of War

I’ll share this story, which speaks a bit of how life on the moshav was before we moved to the “big” city of Rehovot last fall:

The first week of the war (July 2006), a semi-stray dog we had befriended had puppies. Beeka had them under a house 3 doors down but would come to our house each day to be fed. We’d go check every day to see if we could see the pups. About 3 weeks later, she brought them out. There were 9 of them! Our girls loved to play with them.

One evening we went to go check on the puppies. We took a flashlight since it dusk. We rounded the corner of the house and I got down to start looking under the house, and Stevy heard a HISSSSSSS, HISSSSSS, HISSSSSSS. I started shining the light looking around for the escaping steam, ’cause that’s what it sounded like to me. I caught the sight of something patterned and moving under a sign leaning against the house.

A snake! Yikes, a big one, too!

I jumped back and Stevy got everyone else away. He told the owner of the house, who had 2 kids in diapers crawling around. The next day, they called the unwanted-animal-control, who charged them 400 shekels to climb under the house and catch the snake. It was a “tzefah”, Palestinian Viper, a rare and extremely deadly variety. I’m not sure if it’s true, but we were told you have 17 minutes to get help if you’re bitten. Also, the skin is supposed to be poisonous 6 months even after the snake dies.

More than likely, this snake had come to make a meal of the puppies in the coolness under the house.

Well, thanks to good fortune, and some help from above, all the dogs of war lived to see another day.