To meet Sam you would think he’s one of the most mild-mannered pooches around. He’s small, friendly and likes to play. But lurking behind that fuzzy face is a highly efficient fish-killing machine. I think Sam developed a deep-seated need to dispatch fish after a little mangrove snapper I caught nipped him on the nose. They aren’t called snappers for nothing, Sam!

Anyway that was the start of Sam’s rampage. The next time I saw him in action came when I caught a jack crevalle that weighed about four pounds under my friend Bill’s dock. Bill and Wanda, Sam’s owners, were away at the time and had entrusted Sam to my care. The jack had swallowed the hook, so I put it on the fish cleaning table while I went up to the house to get a knife. In the brief time I was in the house the jack flopped off the table and onto the dock. Sam pounced!

When I started back down to the dock, I saw Sam backing up and shaking his head ferociously. He had the jack by the belly and was dragging it and my rod and reel up the sidewalk, growling all the way. If you haven’t caught a jack, I can tell you they’re bloody fish. All Sam’s shaking was throwing fish blood everywhere – on the bushes, the sidewalk and, of course, all over Sam’s furry face. When I grabbed my rod and started pulling, Sam apparently thought the fish still had some life in him and became even more violent, slinging the fish from side to side. More blood.

I finally got the jack out of Sam’s teeth and threw it back in the water. Then, holding Sam far in front of me, I took him to the swimming pool and attempted to clean him up. I got most of the blood off, but not all of it. When Bill and Wanda came home that night and Sam greeted them in the dark house, they couldn’t figure out why his muzzle was so sticky. Until they turned on the light. Then they saw the blood. He got a more thorough bath that night.

Sam is also sneaky. One of the problems Bill and Wanda have with him is his wanderlust. If he has any chance at all he’ll escape from their backyard and go wandering around the neighborhood, mostly hitting up lawn and construction workers for a piece of their lunch. But his sneakiness really came through one day when Bill and I came back from a successful day of catching Spanish mackerel. I was unloading the fish box onto the dock while Bill filleted our catch at the cleaning table. Long after we had finished, Bill noticed that Sam was unusually eager to go out that night. And each time Bill let him out Sam headed straight for the same bushes. Finally Bill’s curiosity prompted him to see what was so interesting behind the bushes. There he found three Spanish mackerel that Sam had swiped off the dock when we weren’t looking.