The Dog Stopper

The Dog Stopper
Or
The Cat’s Mile Avenger
Or
The Dreaded Dog Must Surely Perish
By Xavier Barker

It has been told, it is told and it shall be told. According to the legends of my forefathers, many moons ago there was a great hero. This man was not born a hero but when, as a single father, his only son was killed he transformed and circumstance forged a new super man of him. From the town fool (in a smaller burg he would surely have been the village idiot) tragedy conjured – or perhaps inspired – great bravery and cunning. This man would become known as the Dog Stopper of Cat’s Mile and this is his story.

In the summer of a year long forgotten, in the sleepy town of Cat’s Mile there lived a happy group of people known only as the Locals. That was the way of their town and had always been until one fateful day in the aforementioned season. On this fateful day a couple arrived at the town’s gates looking to fill the advertised vacancies of immigrant farmer and his beast herding wife.

After presenting their credentials to the town’s leader and proving themselves qualified for the positions they were awarded a plot of land upon which the farmer could grow his exotic crops from lands afar and his wife could herd her beloved beasts. For two long years the Arstrami couple (for that was their foreign name) toiled on their land. During that period they grew to love the town of Cat’s Mile and the townsfolk learnt to tolerate the Arstrami’s strange customs. One night as the happy couple staggered around the kitchen of their humble cottage and finished the last skyne of honeyed mead and a flagon of their exotic liquor (which was called wodka) they began to discuss the possibility of mating.

Mr Arstrami presented a very good argument for mating and Mrs Arstrami was convinced. And so, after several drunken attempts at the mating procedure and one successful ‘go’ the couple at last had time to reflect. The Arstramis lay back on their kitchen table, where the act was performed, and inhaled the smoke of an exotic plant which they had nurtured and plucked of its leaves. The leaves they rolled up in a sheet of parchment to form a tight cylinder and then ‘toked’ at one end whilst the other end burnt. The effect was very relaxing. Mr Arstrami lay on his side and stroked his wife’s soft beard, content in his mating performance and relishing the combination of post-coital endorphins and the bitter smoke. His mind was not on his wife however. He daydreamed of squirrels that were as large as bears and ate fish which they plucked from the river mouth with their mighty paws. He chuckled gently.

Mrs Arstrami, however, was riled that she had not achieved a state of excitation equal to that of her simple-minded husband. She partook of some more smoke to ease her worn nerve. She briefly examined her person and after a thorough test (in which she disguised her digital self-gratification) she was sure that she had conceived. And according to her foreign custom she leant over to her chuckling husband and snapped his neck. You see, in the foreign land from which the Arstramis had immigrated it is the nature of the womenfolk there to consume their mates after conception has been achieved.

Mrs Arstrami sobbingly butchered her husband, laying some choice cuts aside for immediate consumption and some other less lean pieces in a tray for corning. When she was done she took the hair and bones out to the back yard and threw them over the fence into the paddock where her beasts were grazing. This was all done according to foreign custom which dictated the act be performed like this when disposing of husband remains. Mrs Arstrami returned to the kitchen and began to slow cook the neck. It was her favourite part of a beast and she hoped that her late husband was just as delicious. Whilst waiting for the neck to cook she busied herself corning what needed to be corned and freezing (though in what I do not know) what needed to be frozen, all the while picking at her husband’s delicious sweetmeats.

Nine months later, as she was finishing the last frozen breakfast of Mr Arstrami rashers, Mrs Arstrami felt a pain originating from betwixt her thighs. She reached down to determine the source of the pain and was aghast to find a horrible looking baby under her table. She lifted the unfortunate creature from the floor and placed it on her plate. Performed some foreign and exotic cleaning rituals which she hoped would reveal a more handsome baby. It was in vein. The baby was ugly to the point that she vomited up her breakfast, revolted to be eating the man which had begat this creature through her womb. She kicked the expelled food under the table and sat to think a while.

She thought and she thought. All the while the baby in front of her crying for more of mother’s milk which she reluctantly delivered. Mother Arstrami examined her child as it suckled at her hairy nipple. The baby’s head was shaped like a butternut pumpkin. The face was formed by grey coloured eyes (the size of good mandarins), an upturned nose (filled with green mucous) and great red lips (which looked like cocktail frankfurts that had been cooked to the point of splitting the skin). It had no distinct chin and its chest was concave. Its arms extended all the way down to its knees and it appeared to have the genitals of a goat. It was, she decided, a truly grotesque baby.

After her son had consumed its weight in milk, Mrs Arstrami laid it on the table and made a decision. Despite its ungodly appearance the baby was to receive the full measure of her love. And it would receive a name. She decided to call her child Hank. Hank Arstrami. It was a strong name and would offer some distraction from the boy’s physical features. Interestingly enough, discovered Mrs Arstrami, is that if she rearranged the letters of her son’s name – Hank Arstrami – she could form a lovely girl’s name. Yes, she thought, when the letters are rearranged they could spell Katrina Marsh. And in an alternate arrangement she could spell Tarnish Karma or even Rata Rink Sham – neither of which were as appealing to her as the first one. She dismissed this foolish thought and went about raising her child.

As the boy grew older, his face grew less detestable and she began to allow him out of the house to frolic with the town’s children. By about his fifth year a decent beard had grown on his face, which did much to hide his sausage lips from the public. Around this time Mrs Arstrami decided that her son needed to be educated. After deciding against sending him to the local sage she settled on sending him to the school operated by the Locals Religious Group who worshipped some kind of Mysterious Being that lived in the sky. Mrs Arstrami wasn’t interested in having Hank learn any of the religious practices but felt her son would do well to learn to read and to stand without dribbling. So she enrolled him in the Locals Religious Group School for Learning and sent him off the very next day.

Hank was rather quiet on his first day at school as he tried to fit in. He was startled to find that no girls there had similar beards to his mother’s. In fact, he was shocked to learn that he was in fact the only student with facial hair to speak of. His teacher, Religious Bob, sported a similar beard to his own but it made Hank no more comfortable. And the fact that the other children appeared to be able to somehow breathe through their noses and keep their jaws closed to prevent dribbling made him feel self-conscious about his own condition. Nonetheless, he went about his daily tasks, trying to master the art of writing and reading and understanding the interpretation of the small characters called ‘numbers’ and how they related to each other.

After a few unsuccessful years in school, Mrs Arstrami made the decision that it was best to withdraw Hank from his studies. As Religious Bob had said, it was like ‘polishing a turd’. Mrs Arstrami knew this to be true. So she set young Hank the task of tending his late (and delicious) father’s exotic crops; seeding, nurturing, harvesting and selling. This was to remain his only task until his mother died. She had been rubbing down her legs with an old steak (a foreign practice but not one uncommon to older women of her ethnicity) when a group of the beasts she doted on attacked her. She perished quickly and was stripped of her flesh by said beasts. Hank buried her bones in the garden outside the kitchen (where he was, unbeknownst to him, conceived) and took on the additional task of tending the beasts.

Hank lived a happy life; farming his exotic crops, drinking his exotic liquors, rearing his mother’s beasts. He would spend his spare time covering his toilet window with snot to achieve the ‘stained’ effect that he remembered from the school Religious Hall. He would while away hours thinking of large creatures, much like his beasts, which he could ride around the farm singing foreign songs he learnt as a child and plucking leaves from his exotic smoke bush. What glee the thought would bring him! At one stage he attempted to place a type of seat on a beast and ride it but the poor beast’s knees buckled under his weight and he was forced to destroy and consume it.

One cold winter night he was awoken by a knocking at his door. He crawled out of his straw bed near the fireplace and slipped into his sackcloth nightgown. When he opened the door he found nobody there. Nobody except a wee baby wrapped in a tea towel and attached to what appeared to be a note. Hank picked up the parcel and returned inside. He placed the baby on the kitchen table and, having removed it, sat by the fire to read the note. It read:

Bearded Sausage Lips,

This is your baby. You fell pregnant last year and this is the fruit of your efforts. Raise him in your foreign ways and love him. Give him a name if you want. Teach him to be a farmer. Never question how you were unaware of your pregnancy - Mysterious Being moves in godly ways.

Signed,

Baby Deliverer (certainly not the house-girl who lives with Religious Bob)

P.S.
Do not eat the child or draw attention to its resemblance to any persons living in Cat’s Mile. It is your son and yours alone.

After several hours Hank reached the end of the letter and sat back to ponder. He pondered the vile stench that had arisen and the awful noise that he had not hitherto noticed. He gave his attention now to the baby. It had fallen off the kitchen table and surrounded itself in a pool of green faeces. It had also apparently eaten some. This was, perhaps, why it now screamed so loudly. Hank took the child up and washed it in the sink. He then covered the faeces on the floor with a piece of cloth and lay down to sleep with his son. In the morning, he thought, he would name it and assign the child its chores.

And so it was. When he woke the next day he sat the baby on the kitchen table and fed it some sort of foreign food for breakfast – probably garlic. As he thought for a while about what to name the baby he daydreamed of squirrels that were as large as bears and ate fish which they plucked from the river mouth with their mighty paws. He chuckled gently. He did not know why he had that daydream often but it was regular. He shook the thought from his head and decided to name him Rattleback.

Hank learnt to love and feed Rattleback and after a few months he became quite fond of the little human. He would feed him exotic foods and sing him foreign songs. He would strap the baby to his plough and thus teach him the fundamentals of farming. At night he would sit him on his lap and – in front of a blazing log for warmth – would read Rattleback the letter that had been attached to his neck the night he was delivered. The relationship was really going well and Rattleback was not dying.

The first summer of Rattleback’s life brought with it a strange and deadly new force to the town of Cat’s Mile. Several beasts had run away from Hank’s farm and when he found them they were only bloody furs and bones. He wondered to himself why his beasts would do this to themselves – hadn’t he loved them right? Or often enough? Why then did his beasts strip themselves of flesh and cover their furs with blood? The question plagued him.

The answer was never going to remain unattainable however. A few weeks later the town’s leader called a town meeting in the town square to be attended by the townsfolk. Hank was also present, though he was not given seating as the others were and was required to hold onto the leader’s goat and wear a veil. Hank was distracted for much of the meeting thinking of squirrels that were as large as bears and ate fish which they plucked from the river mouth with their mighty paws. But what he did hear horrified him. Several of the Local farmers had also lost beasts. One of them had claimed however that the beasts were not running away and gutting themselves before stripping the flesh from their bones. Rather, he proffered, they were being killed by another, new type of animal. This was his claim:

‘Twas not last night but the night before that. I’d woken from my slumber in order to relieve my bladder of the strain associated with holding in too much urine. I was standing at the kitchen sink expelling the unwanted burden of fluid, when I heard something. “What’s that?” you ask? “What did I hear?” you want to know? I heard my beasts a’ braying and some of them were in a right state of confusion.
‘I’d then stepped to the porch, which is what I call the extended area of planked floor extending out the front of my farmer’s abode, and cast my gaze over the paddock, or field if you like, where my beasts graze and frolic. And what I saw took me aback and I was a’ scared. “What did I see?” I hear you ask? “What could it have been?” you inquire? I see a new kind of animal, perhaps a new creature, attacking my beasts.
‘This new animal or creature travels in packs you see. I could see the fiends – three of them – at the neck of one of my beasts. They had apparently ruptured one of the beasts’ blood circulating vessels, a vein perhaps, and it was a’ causing the beast’s blood to flow forth, true as I stand before ye and crimson as the flow from betwixt your wives’ legs. Aye, it was ghastly. I stood for a while and smoked in some leaves I had poached from the Arstrami place and watched as these animals tore my beast in twain, ripping its flesh from its bones and leaving its fur atop as if to cover the evidence.
‘These new creatures, or animals, are not new to me. I had heard of them in tales told by my father and from passing merchants. They come from beyond the range and are known to the strange and foreign folk there as ‘dogs’. I, too, will refer to them as ‘dogs’ now as it is most cumbersome to continuously repeat ‘animal or creature’ and other permutations of the two somewhat generic names.
‘And so, you see. It is the dogs which have been taking your beasts. Killing them, devouring their flesh and leaving the remains to have us believe that they have committed this act-most-foul upon themselves. But it be the dogs. Mark my words. It be the dogs and who among you is brave – or crazy – enough to stop them?’

The meeting from that point was conducted with much fear in the hearts of the townsfolk. It was resolved by the leader that extra care was to be taken with the beasts and that no children were to be allowed out after sundown – lest the dogs attack and eat them. As the meeting broke up and Hank returned the goat to the town’s leader and head for his homestead, keeping Rattleback safely tucked into his apron. He would not be letting any dog near his beloved baby.

Hank and Rattleback grew extremely fond of each other. Before too long Rattleback had grown to be a handsome toddler and was already reading at a level far beyond that of his simple-minded father. He did not possess Hank’s beard or sausage-esque lips and had mastered the ability of breathing through his nose – something for which his father was extremely proud if not somewhat envious. Rattleback was also strongly built and his father occasionally tethered the yoke of his plough to the child. The young Rattleback, not one to complain, was always happy to perform his father’s biddings and dragged the heavy plough up and down the exotic crop patch all day long when it was needed.

It was, naturally, only a matter of time before Rattleback would realise that he was not deformed (as his father was) and that he possessed a higher level of intellect than Hank. This would lead to more questions: Why are we nothing alike? Why do you crave raw meat and I only cooked or corned? Why do you never bathe yet I hate dirt to settle upon my skin? Why do you resemble a melting pan-candle and I am as handsome as the Religious Bob? These questions were led to and they were asked. Hank did not know the answers but conceded that the two-year old child was far too inquisitive and intelligent for his liking. Despite the startling line of questions and Hank’s dislike for it the boy would receive his father’s complete and unconditional love.

Only a few weeks later Hank was out tending his exotic crops, with Rattleback strapped to his plough, when just as the sun hid behind the hills he thought he heard the telephone ring. He set down his plough and ran inside his house. He reached for a blank space beside the kitchen bench and cursed aloud. What a fool he felt. He did not even have a telephone. Telephones had not even been invented yet and he was quite sure that even if he had one no-one would call him as it would be the only one in the world. And even if others had one there would be no need to call the only immigrant farmer and beast herder when there are other things to do with a telephone. He cursed again and set outside to discover that whilst he was cursing himself inside the sun had gone down.

Panic raced through Hank’s heart and he thought he would die. Instead he defecated in his pants and raced to where he had left his plough. His plough and Rattleback. He arrived at the spot amongst his exotic crops where he had left his plough, but discovered that Rattleback was gone. Rattleback! What could have become of him? Perhaps he had walked back to the house by himself, thought Hank. No, he lacked the motor skills and his muscles were not yet strong enough to support his skeleton. Hank had to concede that his beloved Rattleback had been taken by the dreaded dogs. More like dreadful dogs, he thought.

Hank searched around his exotic crop farm for some time and briefly in the beast paddock before conceding that Rattleback was gone. He went into the house to seek solace in a skyne of mead – unhoneyed. He couldn’t bear the pain of loss that he was feeling. Poor old Rattleback. He loved him so and had managed to keep him alive for quite some while. As his skyne emptied he began to replace his pain with rage. He now wanted vengeance. He would kill the dogs that took – and presumably ate – Rattleback. Hank Arstrami was now a very angry man. Thoughts of giant squirrels could not even comfort him now. He finished off his skyne and settled in his straw bed for a sleep.

Morning came and Hank roused. His mouth tasted disgusting, as though he had eaten caterpillars and thistle flowers. His head ached like the time last summer he had fallen off the roof whilst playing ‘I’m a pony’. He felt utterly awful. But through it all, rage still managed to course through his veins. He stood up from his bed and stepped to the kitchen where he prepared an exotic breakfast – beast sausage, foreign unleavened bread and the very palatable orbs that he often found were the walking birds roosted. He ate his breakfast and plotted.

Hank plotted and plotted. And he came up with a devious plan. He had devised a technique – hitherto unknown to the people of this area but destined to take the place of the ‘hunt’ in Local mythology – which would kill not only the dogs which killed and ate Rattleback but all dogs found roaming in Cat’s Mile. He set off to talk to the town’s leader to inform him of the plan.

The town’s leader was surprised to see Hank – and genuinely horrified – but invited him to sit on a log near the front door of the house. Hank proceeded to tell the town’s leader of the plan. The town’s leader listened intently and conceded to himself that in fact it might just work and that this might well be the only person stupid enough to try it. He gave Hank his blessing and instructed Hank to carry out his plan only under cover of dark. He waved Hank off and returned to the comfort of his leader’s lounge.

When Hank returned to his farmer’s house he began constructing the equipment he would need for his plan to be carried out. First he fashioned a mask of sorts. It was nothing more than a wheat bag that he cut holes in for his eyes and affixed a drawstring at the neck for tightening purposes. Next he tailored himself some nightwear; mostly dark coloured but for some patches, it was a shirt and trousers, very tight and very fearsome. Next he took himself a six cubit long length of dowel and attached a comfortable grip to one end. This would be the weapon he would use against the dogs.

Hank set his equipment down, folded his clothes and took a swig of wodka – the exotic liquor he loved so dearly. He then set out to patrol his land and uncover a nest of the last piece of his plan. He needed a long, legless, cylindrical and poisonous reptile to affix to his dowel and he knew of just such a creature. His foreign mother had called it a ‘serpent’ but to the Locals of Cat’s Mile it was known as the ‘snake’. This was the piece of his arsenal which would surely see the dreaded dogs perish.

After a fairly exhaustive search of his farm he found a nest containing about seventeen of the creatures called snakes. He threw a jute sack over them to sedate them and then stuffed them into the same sack. Happy with his collection, he returned to the house to await nightfall.

Nightfall did, inevitably, come. Hank dressed himself in his new garb and slung his sack of snakes over his shoulder. He placed some sort of foreign cheese in his pocket and, grasping his rod, he set out into the night. He walked over to where he had paddocked his beasts earlier in the week. He clucked his tongue in order to get one of the beasts to follow him. Hank led the beast over to a tree where he then lashed it to a low-hanging bough. Hank then rolled the foreign cheese over the beasts head, I suppose to enhance the flavour and appeal, and, satisfied that the beast was now irresistible to dogs, proceeded to climb the tree.

After a few minutes Hank had reached a safely high branch and shimmied out along its length until he was directly above the beast. He heard some noise from not too far away – a hideous noise. The noise was like the barking of otters in the morning, and that is what Hank first thought it was. He hurriedly pulled the jute sack from his back and hung it on a small knot on the branch in front of him. He reached in and retrieved one of the snakes. Taking his snake, he encouraged the serpentine reptile to coil itself around the rod and remain still, but for its ever-darting tongue.

Then he saw them. A group – or pack – of three dogs had appeared and were circling the cheesy beast below. Hank knew he had to time his attack perfectly. The dogs set upon the hapless beast, barking as they do all the way in and then began snarling as they bit and gnawed the terrified beast. Hank flicked his rod in an angling fashion and the snake was flung from its perch, still in its coiled pose, its tongue darting in and out of its lipless mouth. Bull’s-eye! The snake landed right on the neck of the lead dog and began biting the fiendish killer. Hank loaded up another snake and launched it at the quarry below. Another hit. Once more Hank primed his snake-hurling stick and offloaded it. And once more the projectile reptile hit its target. Hank let out a triumphant hoorah and clenched his fist, shaking it all the while at the dogs below.

The dogs began to writhe and dropped to the ground. As their bodies convulsed, white foam appeared at the dogs’ mouths and continued for a few minutes. Hank returned to the ground from his catbird seat and collected his snakes. He poked at the dogs to determine the state of their individual existences. The lack of movement confirmed that the dreaded dogs had indeed – and surely – perished. Hank waited a while to ensure that the dogs had truly expired before stringing them up to his snake rod and slinging them over his shoulder. He covered his dead beast in some leaves and headed back home.

In the morning, after a good rest, Hank took his dogs down to the town’s leader’s house to present him with the catch. The town’s leader was once again startled to see Hank but that shock was soon replaced by elation when he saw the three dead dogs at Hank’s feet. The town’s leader cheered many hoorah’s and called upon his herald and barker to run through the town to call the folk to an important meeting. Soon the area outside the front of the town’s leader’s house was filled with all of the townsfolk. And then the town’s leader began to outline the story he had just learnt from Hank. He told them of the incredible bravery that Hank had displayed, and how he had invented a new weapon specifically for the extermination of dogs. He told them how Hank had braved his fear of heights and climbed a tree, and had sacrificed his own beast to safeguard the Locals of Cat’s Mile. There were some embellishments on the town’s leader’s part, notably where he described the dogs as twelve foot tall and made of stone, but the townsfolk (glancing at the dogs’ carcasses that still lay on the ground) allowed the lie to pass. A feast was organised for that night and it was announced that Hank would be the guest of honour. That day was declared Hank the Dog Stopper Day and a public holiday for the Locals. Unfortunately Hank was the son of immigrants and had to work until sundown.

Hank finished his farm work and went to the town’s feast place. There he was afforded a seat next to the town’s leader and his wife and was permitted to eat the same food as the other townsfolk. After many a skyne of honeyed mead, the town’s leader made an announcement:

‘Locals of Cat’s Mile, thank you all for attending this most wonderful feast. And thank you for bringing me the many skynes of honeyed mead upon which I have grown merry. Let it be known that from this day forth Hank Arstrami will no longer be required to toil at his farm – I will provide three serfs to perform his exotic crop farming and another two to herd his beasts. Instead of farming, Hank will now be the official protector of this town against dogs. I hereby promote him from town fool to the newly created rank of The Cat’s Mile Avenger. His courtly title will be The Dog Stopper. All who address him will do so as Sir Dog Stopper.
‘He will patrol the town at night, climbing many trees and baiting many dogs with cheesed beasts from my private stock and cause the sure and true perishing of any dogs found to be within the town’s borders.
‘As a true show of our debt to The Cat’s Mile Avenger and my unquestioned rule over my subjects I will also arrange the marriage between Hank Arstrami and the comely young virgin Bessie Bunter Blacksmith whose flesh has not yet been ravaged by a man and who is the daughter of Mr and Mrs Blacksmith, the town’s blacksmiths. And now, three hoorahs and the drinking of a skyne of honeyed mead. Hoorah! Hoorah! Hoorah!’

The town’s leader collapsed after drinking his skyne and was rolled off by his servants. I trail of drool showed whoever might follow him where he was lying now. Nobody followed him. Instead the feast continued until almost midnight, at which point the townsfolk were well drunk – or merry – and Hank Arstrami could return at last to his home and continue the mourning of his son, his beloved Rattleback.

The years passed slowly from then for Hank Arstrami or as he was now known – The Dog Stopper. He continued to destroy the accursed dogs with his snake and rod equipment and even trained his new wife in use of the tool. Training his wife was a backup plan in case he ever fell sick or needed to venture to neighbouring towns to stop dogs there. This was often the case thanks, and curses, to the town’s leader who was always eager to show off his Dog Stopper to his other-town leading peers.

By the time of his death, at the age of sixty-three, Hank Arstrami – The Cat’s Mile Avenger had seen to the sure perishing of over five thousand dogs (or so a modest estimate suggested. Other estimates placed the figure as high at fifteen thousand; another as low as two-thousand, five hundred.) He sired twenty-seven children with his wife Bessie Bunter Arstrami The Vice Dog Stopper. Eighteen survived. Of the eighteen, he had personally trained fifteen of them in his deadly art of dog-stopping. The three remaining children had been raised to breed snakes, tend exotic crops and herd beasts. They were important skills to Hank though it was less necessary thanks to the serf labour provided by the town’s leader.

The death of The Cat’s Mile Avenger, Hank Arstrami The Dog Stopper was a shock to the townsfolk, and the folk of surrounding towns. The funeral itself was an enormous affair with thousands flocking to watch the eighteen living Arstrami children and their mother devour the flesh of their father and husband. It was not a foreign custom rather one native to the Locals of Cat’s Mile. Once his skeleton had been picked clean by his closest relatives his bones were stuffed into a jute snake sack and tossed into the Cat’s Mile Lake. His wife, Bessie Bunter, and children Rattleback II, Wonderman, Chesticles, Bessie Bunter Junior, Wartongue, Hogsodder, Fleshboy, Girlface, Rattleback III, Hank, River Bark Axe, Adolphrina, Taxbag, Leatherchops, Gafflesock, Town’s Leader II, Rattleback IV and little Mother Beast Herder stood by the side of the lake and wept. They rubbed their full bellies and cried for their lost father and husband. But the Locals of Cat’s Mile were there to comfort them and sent them out to protect the town from dogs. The dog-stoppers of the clan gathered up their snake sacks and rods and set out into the night certain that the best way to honour their father’s passing was to continue his work. And, of course, to carry on his undying hatred of dogs. The other three children took their aging mother (since retired from dog-stopping) back to the family house to rest. Their lives went on. And on. And on.

The town of Cat’s Mile no longer exists, though other towns appear to contain the same letters in their names and may have many of the same characters residing in them. But the legend of The Cat’s Mile Avenger has not died. It is still told among the direct descendants of Hank Arstrami and his spirit is revered by them. His is truly a tale of great bravery and of how one man overcame much adversity to rid the world of dogs. It is his work alone that allows us to live without the fear of dogs in our lives. And should the dreaded creatures ever return the legend tells us, above all other things, how to make them perish. And perish they will, for the legend of Hank Arstrami The Dog Stopper lives on in all of us.