This story sound like fiction but it's truth. Make of it what you will.
The dog ran out of the junkyard labyrinth straight at me - a mongrel breed, with the stocky snub-nosed set of a Rottweiler, sagged tattered ears and broad scars of black skin across his short brown pelt. The sun was up by now, and felt hot, after dawn's long shadows, cool mists, and slow ascent through a low haze of clouds, that I'd watched while biking miles of roads and trails around the lake. The ground was tire ruts of gravel and hard-packed dirt, spangled with broken glass, and rusted metal scraps, labyrinth walls piled high with dead and rusted cars like I'd just entered myth.
I'd chosen this junkyard as a short-cut, had lifted my bike up over the six-foot high chain-link fence, had wedged my front tire over the top, then climbed up beside, and dropped the bike down. I'd picked a path through the curving corridors and dead-end walls of cars piled three to five high, dented battered rusting and yet lithic, textured like boulders, like cliffs, tatters of plastic and exposed foam, shatterwebs of glass and crumpled metal densed into a landscape, a coherent geology.
My path took me through to the center, and when I heard the dog barking and coming for me, I stopped in an open place, braced my bike in front of me, and waited.
It would have been safer to climb up one of the piles of cars, but then I'd just be stranded on an island, waiting for the situation to resolve, while the dog snarled below. I considered fleeing, weaving the canyons while the dog chased at my heels, leaping to bite, like a wolf chasing a deer. I knew before I saw it that this was a true junkyard dog, One that I'd better kill, than flee. Instead, I chose to stand, intended to neutralize the dog, to cushion and deflect its threat with calm and confidence, assertion and dominance. But rage suffers no such niceties.
He broke out from the maze as fearsome as I'd anticipated, and maybe that slowed his attack. He stopped a few feet from me, wild eyes, slobbering, loud coughing barks full of such rage that he choked on them, rasped and struggled and barked harder, chaotic cadences, more rage in him than his body could control. But still he stayed beyond the periphery of my stance.
I was glad that he'd stopped, just out of striking distance, respecting a perimeter, a boundary. Because my muscles held the next move, of falling on him like a wave, and breaking his neck and bones like a tree. Our eyes locked, but I shifted focus, went broad to watch his body, his actions. He followed my stare like a threat.
My mouth was parched dry, breathed the hot dust of his charge, and still he raged, long minutes, kept the same distance from me, kept the same frothing peak of anger. Until I wanted to wade out and smash him until his spinal cord broke and I could stomp across his back. We were both caught in place, each trapped by the other. Bugs trapped in anger.
If I turned my back, he'd charge me - there was no safe exit. I put up the kickstand and moved out slowly from behind the bike towards him, shifted my focus to his front shoulder, softening my threat. While anticipating his attack.
He held ground as I approached, but furied harder, standing his ground as I leaned slowly forward and reached my hand out. The mad and ravenous dog ebbed suddenly to a continuous growl, my hand a foot away from his muzzle, as if I'd broken through some barrier. I waited, offering him my scent, and then moved toward the top of his shoulder, making contact. His fur bristled electric, and I kept the arm-coil of a violent and breaking cuff retained, but he didn't tense away, he let my hand rest on his nape, skin twitching as I slowly start to stroke him.
He kept growling, but was soothed, showed a tense and strange acceptance to my affection. We shared a warm few minutes under the sun. As I pulled back my hand and started to straighten up, he flicked back into rage, snapped at my hand with a fast wet thud of his jaws, missing as I pulled back, and then crescendoed into furious barks like failed lightning.
I kept calm in my mind, in my actions, my body. There was no way out but through this dog, and if I showed fear, the dog would attack. I felt that I could stop him, but it would be painful. Likely more for him than I, but still, I bore the blame. And...rude - I was the trespasser here, the one without rights.
The dog was carrying out his duty, his mission. He'd been trained by humans into this pattern, was threatening me out of duty to his master, and out of fear. I could sense a sort of aesthetic intensity to his fury, a feral Nowness, a contentment.
But he also took pleasure in being petted, in the core forms of Love, and Respect. Maybe so also did his flawed master. I watched him rage, then reached towards him again, reached into the lee of his growls, and connected, stroked slowly his nape. His tail would to wag, awkward jerks like an unpractised instinct, and then I worked my way up, scratched behind his ears, up into the heavy crown of his skull, until his brown eyes warmed, and we were watching each other with affection.
When I pulled my hand back, he snapped at it again, and then the third time through the pattern, his blunt fang grazed across the back of my hand, drew blood. I stood up and stared coldly at the dog, adrenal thrum within me, blood trickling from me, tremor twitches in the back of my neck, across my shoulders, into my hands.
The dog's anger was both exuberant and despairing. I could flick him like a knife, like a switch, could reach in and pet him like a puppy, but each time I pulled away, he was grown and angry, and I an enemy again, a target, a focus. We were both trapped here, by whatever torque or splay of abuse this dog or man was raised in.
I prayed for them all.
And then I stepped back, took the bike, and started walking away, braced for an attack, ready for it. I was worn out from the morning's long ride, but could still anticipate the swing kick of my foot into the side of his head, the yelping snarl, a crush of teeth around my fist, around my wrist, the fill of blood and drool as I pinned a neck to the ground with my elbow, my knee, the weight of my body, crushing ribs, breaking bones.
But the dog just stood there, held his ground, barked at my retreat, long after I was out of sight, had subsumed back into the maze.
I spend the next week wondering if I'd get rabies. If I'd reported what had happened, the dog would have lost his head, at the expense of my whim to travel his territory, and maybe my life was worth much more but at the time i thought otherwise. Although I was convinced the dog held rabies and despite that I could not research the symptoms I was willing to let the situation play out, to protect the life of the dog, and trusted that what will I had would like Old Yeller demand my own incarceration and trapped death.
This was intended to be a Buddhist tale.