How Artemis Winter overcame his fear of dogs

Artemis Winter always liked pigs.  Before he was born, his mother got him a pig named Hana Buta (that's Japanese for Flower Pig) with petal-like ears and black velvet feet and a curly squishy tail.  What he always liked about pigs was their wrinkly, grippy noses and snorty, grunty sounds, their blissful scratching and wallowing, their general spotty-bristliness, and their silly, curly tails on their huge round bottoms.  He was quite fond of cows as well for their spottiness and big slobbery noses.  He didn't like donkeys at all, with their indifference and creaky door sounds.  Sheep were OK in his book because, while they are dumb and vacant and urinate in a passive-aggressive, uselessly defiant sort of way, most of his experience of them was with baby sheep who still had their tails, all wiggly and shaky like white fuzzy worms.  He felt that he could put up with a lot of stupid for white fuzzy worms-like wiggly tails.

Birds of all sorts were fascinating to Artemis Winter.  Including chickens.  Despite their very apparent stupidity, he liked the way they walked and nestled and quietly scolded the whole world, at least the tiny part they understood of it, and he somehow tapped into their dinosaur heritage.  He wouldn't roar at them in person, but he would at pictures of them.  Artemis was usually a very sensitive boy and didn't like to scare things that couldn't take it.  He liked to hunker down and walk with them, make their little noises back at them and flap his elbows just gently since neither they nor he could fly.

Cats, of course, he liked and had spent some time as their apprentice thinking that he would like to be a cat when he grew up.  Of dogs he was unsure at first.  He liked their floppy, sloppy tongues and their utter disregard of personal space or rules of etiquette.  He liked to bark at them since, unlike chickens, it didn't seem to scare them and they tended to respond in kind.  Unfortunately, all possibility for his communion with dogs, for the next several years at least, was ruined in one fell swoop.

His mother, in an unfortunate charitable moment, volunteered to take care of a friend's dog for a few days.  It was a small dog, well behaved in a completely self-obsessed sort of way, and utterly hairless.  It was in fact a hairless dog.  Though predominantly black, you could tell by its legs and its snout that it was a white dog with black spots, one very big spot covered its entire back and most of its head. 

The first time Artemis Winter saw the dog (her name was Fluffy like the marshmallow stuff), she was playing fake-ferociously with her favorite ball: throwing it up in the air, dropping it, pretending she couldn't quite get it, and snurffling a good deal.  Artemis Winter gazed at her for several minutes with an expression of mounting horror on his face.  Finally, he turned to his mother and was moved to ask in disbelieving and undisguised dismay, "Pig?"  To which his mom replied, "No, Artemis, she's a dog.  Her name is Fluffy.  She is named after Marshmallow Fluff."  At which Artemis Winter began to bark at her in a hopeless and unending manner.

For several years thereafter, Artemis Winter would bark at pigs and run away from dogs as if they were particularly evil creatures.  He became confused in other ways too, most notably that he would meow at dinosaurs and insist that they were cats.

Now, Artemis Winter's parents responded to his fear of dogs in two very different ways.  His father, who was a famous sword master, would threaten to kill the dogs as their owners were about to let them off their leashes.  They were actually supposed to be on leashes at all times and there were orders posted to this effect throughout the city.  Artemis Winter's mom on the other hand would hold him and point out to him how small most of the dogs were, how they were barely bigger than cats and not even as smart.  At least, that is what she would do with small dogs off their leashes.  If a large dog was off his leash and came running up to jump at them she would turn it upside down, hold it that way on the ground and flick its nose if it showed any signs of objecting to such treatment.  You can imagine that dog owners who used the parks around Artemis Winter's house tended to know him and take evasive action.

One cold fall day, when he was between  four and five years old, Artemis Winter was visiting his friend Clementine Gaia Leila Moonshine Saghirah who lived in a much more rural area.  As they always did when visiting, both families went to a glorious park nearby.  It had big fields of short grass to run and roll on, it had wooded areas to dodge and trip in and it had a broad, shallow, slow-moving river.  Naturally this made it a great place for dogs as well as children.

As Clementine Gaia Leila Moonshine Saghirah and Artemis Winter were playing an elaborate game of chase, tickle, tumble, cavort, a huge dog decided that his life would be a dessert unless he knocked over a little girl and snurffled her all over.  The children were in sight of their parents but not in easy reach, so when Clementine Gaia Leila Moonshine Saghirah was knocked over there was not a readily available adult to handle the situation.  Realizing this, an important change took place in Artemis Winter.  His fear of dogs put down its head and hid and his knight-in-shining-armor self woke up and exploded.  He tackled  the dog from the side, flung it onto its back, held it down by the throat, knelt on its chest and leaning over it, bite it firmly on the nose.

Lulu, finally catching up to the all of the action, was laughing so hard she was quacking.  But after that, Artemis Winter was never afraid of dogs again.  And he stopped barking at pigs.