Free The Happiest Refugee: A Memoir by Anh Do

in our little lives—apart from scary homeless women. As soon as we got back we told everyone about our ordeal, neglecting to mention the screaming, cowering or wailing like babies. Our fathers seemed proud that we’d survived a scare and got back safely. Later that week however, I got another scare that I wasn’t meant to see, and it would change me forever.

    Every morning at sunrise, our fathers knocked on our bedroom doors, and all six kids woke up, jumped into our gumboots lined up against the wall and went out to collect eggs. Free range, of course. Dad didn’t like the idea of battery cages so nothing was too good for our ducks. They had an acre to walk around and Dad built sheds for them to lay their eggs in. If they didn’t like it indoors, the ducks could waddle around under the trees surrounding them.
    After a year, the ducks were producing great quantities of eggs and the farm was paying its way. The only problem with free range, Dad discovered, is that foxes could get to the ducks, so we went to the local pound and bought seven dogs.
    Dad had an amazing knack of knowing which dogs were smart and could be trusted just by looking at them and playing with them for a few minutes. He really had a way with animals. He trained the dogs and they became an army of bodyguards for the ducks, and fantastic playmates for us. Not one fox got to the ducks after that, and we got to take the dogs fishing and exploring.
    One rainy night we were watching TV when I looked out the back door and saw Blackie, a young kelpie cross, throwing up froth.
    ‘Dad!’ I yelled.
    We all went out to inspect him and within minutes he was lying on his side whimpering, unable to even move. Some people had gone fishing at a local bay, caught a couple of poisonous toadfish and irresponsibly left them lying around on the shore. All the dogs knew to avoid the toadfish but Blackie was young and naive, and he’d swallowed a deadly carcass.
    Dad got me to call up the local vet, which was a good forty-minute drive away, but it was closed. Dad told Joe and me to keep the kids occupied, away from the back door. Once Joe had the others entertained, I snuck back out and saw my father tenderly carry Blackie in his arms like a small child to the side of the shed. Then he picked up a huge shovel, lifted it high above his head and…  wham!
    It was over. A single blow.
    Dad silently used the same shovel to bury the dog in the rain, like a scene in a Stephen King movie. Mum came over and put her arm around me when she saw that I was watching through tears of sadness and frustration. I was only eleven years old and I didn’t understand the idea of ‘putting it out of its misery’.
    ‘Why did he do that? What if Blackie got better in the morning?’ I argued with Mum. She gently explained that it would have been cruel to let him suffer in agony all night, that Blackie was well past gone, and what Dad did was actually the kind thing to do.
    ‘Your father loved Blackie, too, Anh. But he knows when an animal is near its end.’
    The next morning all of us kids went out and made a cross out of sticks and Tram picked some flowers that we quietly laid under the tree next to the shed where little Blackie was buried. It didn’t matter that it was only a dog, or that we had six others. We were kids who had just experienced our first death of a pet.

    I adored the farm. My favourite childhood memories are of being there and playing around, and also of how Mum and Dad were so in love with each other when we were there. Mum was so proud when Dad and his trained dogs caught the fox that was eating our ducks.
    ‘Your father’s the best when it comes to animals,’ she would say to no one in particular.
    It seemed like my parents were in their element. This rural-raised couple from a Third World country were at peace on the land.
    In the evenings we would all sit down in front of our little TV and watch MacGyver. He was awesome; he could turn a can of tuna and a