Killer Dogs on Campus!!!

We were about forty-five minutes into our run when we heard them. The barking in the distance; a sound I have learned to fear…

We had received daily warnings from our saint-like host students and the Middle Eastern Technological University’s study abroad office about the starved packs of wild dogs that roamed the several thousand acres of forests and hills that surround our campus; semi-wild beasts just waiting for a foolish student to stray into their wooded domain. Despite these warnings we had decided that this same forest was preferable to the muddy, clay road that we had started our jog on.

It began with a shrill bark that came from somewhere off to our left. It took a moment before I realized what this barking meant; like Sam Nealson in Jurassic Park, we were being tracked. It was at that instant that I saw the pack. I felt like Arrowin racing to get Frodo (in this case Eric Dunford) back to Elvin domain when she sees the ring-wraiths through the trees, the undead servants of evil that she thought she had outwitted. There were eight of them running parallel to us, out about 200 meters. The adrenaline main-lined and we decided that we could out run them if we really pushed it and we cut to our right. However, after a few second we realized the futility in this as the pack ran through the woods to circle in front of us, trying to cut off our potential escape route in classic sweeper formation.

It was then that we started to think that maybe our evolutionary advantage was not our speed but brains that were larger than the size of a walnut. When this light bulb flicked on in my head I turned to Eric, who by this point was armed with a semi-rotten stick in one hand and a large rock in the other (I had been unable to find such suitable weapons and thus stood empty handed), and told him that maybe we should try running back the way we came to confuse them. He agreed that perhaps this made more sense than trying to out run animals that could obviously outpace two out-of-shape Americans. As we ran back up the symmetrically forested hill (all the trees had been planted at the wish of Ataturk who thought that Turkey did not have enough forests) I was grateful that despite Eric’s superior weaponry he had, in the last three days, smoked 4 packs of Turkey’s strongest cigarettes, giving me a distinct advantage should the dogs catch up to us, and the old adage of not having to be faster than the bear, just your friend, come true.

Thankfully it did not come to this. After an exhausting sprint across rocky fields, down eroding sedimentary hillsides, and about six rolled ankles later we finally were able to outsmart the starving canines and make our way back to the wet clay road. From here it was an anxious half-mile down a steep hill to the border of campus, past which these feral killing machines transformed back into man’s best friend.