The screams were unbearable to hear. The dog sounded like she was dying. Was she caught in some patio furniture or railing, or was she being beaten to death? I couldn't stay sitting at my computer, I had to get up and see what was going on.
I ran to the bathroom window, my eyes searching directly downstairs, toward the facing building, to a certain first-floor apartment patio, the one that belongs to the man I had already labeled in my mind as the dog butcher. I expected to see this 70-ish year old man standing over a dead dog and blood spatter. Yes, it was quite that bad.
There he was, on the patio. I could hear the dog's screams, and I could see the man, but tall bushes obscured my view. Then I saw the man raise his arm with wire whip in hand, and continue pummeling the dog in his "care."
Fortunately, I was wearing sports shoes. I ran to my front door, flung it open, and waited for the elevator to climb eight floors to get me. I really wanted to fly down the stairs, but having timed it previously, I knew it was faster to wait for the elevator. I wondered if I would get there in time to save the dog's life.
I ran out the first floor lobby door, leaped over landscaping boulders into the dry stone creek bed and out the other side. I threw out my arms and screamed as I came up out of the creek. My neighbors had never seen me in superman mode before.
I hadn't even seen my other neighbors at first. Two Chinese neighbor ladies were standing on a bridge that spans the creek; it is the distance they felt was safest to observe the dog torture going on. They saw me with rage on my face, and they told me to stay back with them. Chinese never want to get involved. The man could have been beating his wife and they still would have stood back at a distance to watch.
I am not going to let a dog die because I am too timid to stand up to the old man. I forged ahead and went to his shrub-obscured patio. I was fully ready to wrestle him to the ground if I needed to, and was even a little disappointed that it didn't come to that.
About the same time the ladies were telling me to hang back, a 30-something Chinese man still in his pajamas at 10:00 a.m. starting shrieking at the old man from his third floor balcony of my building. Hostile words were being exchanged by the two men. I didn't catch the words, so I don't know if the young man was just bothered by the noise or the fact that an animal was being tortured. I'm pretty sure he has a dog himself, so I hope it was the latter.
I peeked through the shrubs surrounding the butcher's patio, even as the ladies back on the bridge were still whispering and telling me to come back. I noticed that the poor little dog, no blood visible, had cowered into a corner with eyes looking down, clearly scared to death of the man towering over her.
"What's going on?" I asked rather innocently in Chinese. The man left the dog alone, and came over. He was nice to me. He said his dog had nibbled someone's calf and he had no choice but to beat the dog. He assured me he liked dogs. I was pleasant, but I suggested perhaps he had beaten the dog a little too long. (That sounds awful in English, but comes across better in Chinese. Of course it is not good that he had tortured the dog at all.) He started talking to me in long sentences in an unfamiliar dialect. I told him I wasn't understanding everything he said.
Meanwhile, the two ladies on the bridge were worried the foreigner woman needed some help, and were perhaps a little ashamed that they hadn't been bold enough to intervene. One of them came over to talk with us and be the peacemaker, if that was needed. I left while she finished talking to the old guy. This particular lady is offbeat but awesome; her own dog died of natural causes recently, and she feeds and gives water to all the wild cats in the neighborhood every single day.
The torture having ceased, I returned home. On the way back, a neighbor man who owns a brown poodle walked by and gave me an approving smile. Apparently all the neighbors had been watching everything from inside their homes. I have a feeling that "the foreign woman leaping over boulders to rescue a dog" will be the conversation at many a dinner table tonight.
By the time I got back home, the third floor guy had gotten dressed, and he went over to talk to the mean guy on the patio (hopefully to talk some sense into him). Another lady walking a brown poodle -- there are lots and lots of brown poodles in this complex -- yelled a conversation with the old man from the bridge.
It was quite the neighborhood incident. The mean guy CLEARLY knows that his neighbors are very unhappy with him and his treatment of his dog. It has been a few hours, and my adrenaline still seems to be coursing through my veins.
Let not this point get lost in the story -- 99 percent of the people around me wouldn't hurt a flea. One misdirected man should not reflect on any of his countrymen.
Four or five years ago, I saw that the mean man was standing over a plywood table on his patio, and there were cuts of meat on the table. I never saw his two dogs after that, so I came up with a theory that he killed his own dogs. My Chinese friends think I am crazy; they think no one could do something like that. But I disagree. I think the man could be some kind of dog-hurting psychopath.
