It was an accident, and the dog didn’t die or anything, but it was enough to throw us into a bit of a panic.

We didn’t like Joy, but her house had the best tree in its yard - the best tree for climbing and jumping out of, anyway, if you were into doing those sorts of things, which I really wasn’t. Belinda said that she had climbed the tree and jumped out and gotten a boil on her knee from it. I didn’t know what a boil was, but I imagined some sort of blister, and I didn’t really believe that you could get one from jumping out of a tree and landing on the ground. Still, the one time I did climb the tree and jump, my heart and stomach flailing somehow inside me, I thought about knee boils for a long time afterwards.

Joy wasn’t there when we hung the dog, and even if she had been, we would have ignored her.

The doghouse sat right under the tree, and the dog was kept on a leash that was attached to a pole that was pounded into the ground. The tree had one really good branch on it, one that was low down and curved a bit, so that you could sit in the curve and swing your legs and be cradled and comfortable. It was a non-threatening branch. You could jump from it and not get boils. And since we enjoyed sitting on this branch so much, we figured that the dog would get a kick out of it as well. Or maybe we just wanted to scare the dog. Or see how well dogs could walk on branches. It was an ugly dog, and it was Joy’s dog, and we didn’t feel any guilt about messing around with it a bit.

Getting the dog to the branch was easy - the leash was long enough to reach - but keeping it there was the hard part.

It seemed to have trouble getting its four stumpy legs to all fit on that one narrow branch, and its fear and confusion didn’t help it at all. The dog lasted only a split second, and then it went over, off the branch - off the other side of the branch, the side far away from the doghouse and the stake that held the leash in the ground.

When I really think about it, the dog effectively hung itself. It dangled there, its legs flailing, its leash pulled tight over the branch, its bristly fur standing on end. Its strangled yelps of terror were as hilarious to us as they were horrifying. The horror won out in the end. It didn’t take us long to toss the dog back over the branch and get him on the ground again, where he threw us a menacing snarl before racing to the relative saftey of his little house.

We felt that the entire scene had been a terrific success.