Week 9 Reading: Mans Best Friend Betrayal

There once was a middle-aged archery hunter named Scott. He and his wife Amy lived in Utah where they raised there very trustworthy Nova Scotia Duck Tolling retriever named Bell. Scott’s best friend Jimmy was the owner of a bow shop called nocked and ready. Scott and Jimmy would spend all their time together in that shop reminiscing on old stories or at the range where it was a constant competition.

Scott brought bell everywhere with him whether it be the archery shop or shooting. With this Jimmy had grown very close to bell as well. Scott would go on very long hunts sometimes for a week or two weeks and needed someone to watch over bell when he was gone and when Amy was at work. So Jimmy being the good friend he was would just bring bell to his shop to hang out. During this time bell grew very close to jimmy and without Scott even noticing bell started to favor jimmy. Scott did not notice this until he came home from a hunt and Bell would not greet him and only stayed by Jimmy’s side.  Scott did not care about this at first until it started to become annoying and Bell would not even listen to him.

Scott was very sad about his dog growing closer to his friend, eventually bell would not even come home. Scott confronted jimmy and demanded he give bell back. Jimmy said no and said that bell was the one deciding to stay with Jimmy. Scott was mad and sad but told Scott straight up that he would regret this for a very long time. At the moment Jimmy did not know what this meant but a couple moths later started to figure out what he meant. Bell was very prone to sickness and seemed to always be in the vet. Jimmy did not have as high of a paying job and Scott did so these bills started racking up. From this jimmy went under and had debt start piling up from his beloved friend bell. For the rest of his life he wished he would have never betrayed his best friend Scott and would have just kept Bell as his friends dog.

The Story that this is based off of is The Fish and the Leopard’sWife. This was a very interesting story where the main theme I got from it was do not betray those who are close to you, because they will not directly hurt you but will make you pay for a long time. In the story the leopard was friends with the fish. But the leopard would often time go out of town. Whenever the leopard was gone the fish would go make love with his wife. The leopard came home early one trip and found this. He did not want to deal with the fish directly, so he asked King Eyo to deal with it. The king made it so that fish could only live in the water and if they left the water they would die, as well on top if a fish was caught it was always eaten. This story was interesting in that the entire fish community had to pay for the wrong doing of the one fish. I tied this story to the story I created above by carrying along the theme of betraying someone close to you will bite you in the butt for a long time to come later on in life.

(Image is of a Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever, Source: Duck Toller)