An Easter Lesson: Never Take a Hungry Dog to an  Easter Egg Hunt! Anyone who has visited a store in the last month knows that Easter is just around the corner. Store shelves are loaded with plastic eggs, stuffed bunnies, and baskets of assorted sizes. Seeing all the holiday decorations reminded me of  an Easter,  long ago, when my brother was  three and I was still in pigtails.  Our plans for a normal Easter day were thrown awry that year  and I learned a valuable lesson that I've never forgotten. We had company for the weekend,  my aunt and uncle and four cousins from Florida. Momma felt the only way to have a decent  Easter egg hunt was to have at least a dozen eggs for each child.  She boiled  them and gave us the glad job of decorating all 72.   Needless to say, we spent most of the evening on our back porch  coloring and dipping egg after egg for the hunt. I can almost see us sitting there around that old red enamel and  chrome table. We had  an assortment of cups and small bowls  filled with red, blue, green and yellow liquid.  The air was thick  with the smell of vinegar. We listened to the Grand Ole Opry, singing along with each  entertainer that came on stage  A passerby would have heard  six childish voices harmonizing with Tammy and George as they  sang " We're Not the Jet Set." We sang with relish and our  exaggerated nasally twang  would have made the country duo proud. Occasionally, Momma or my aunt would come out to check on us. They  removed any badly cracked eggs,  refilled our glasses with tea and replenished the potato chip bowl. As far as we were  concerned, our creations were not to rivaled, each a precious piece of artwork. We scribbled stick figures on the delicate egg shells with crayons,  labeling them with the names of family and friends. It was easy to  identify Momma and my aunt's figures  without  names. Their brand-new Toni perms were depicted by tight coils of hair haloing their heads.  I remember drawing a picture of my daddy with his German Shepard,  King, by his side. Little did I know how King would figure into the events on the following day. By 9:00 pm we had finished our creations. We were promptly herded  to bed with a  stern warning to go to right to sleep or there be no egg  hunt the next day.  Needless to say, all little eyes were shut by 9:30. Everyone woke early the next morning. After church we drove home to where my father and uncle waited for us. While we were away at  Sunday School, they had taken our eggs to the hunting camp and  hidden them. They had the help of a an old family friend,  Mr. C.W.  Smith, who had been invited to come out and eat a picnic dinner with us. We changed out of our good clothes  and piled onto the back of  the truck. In our hands were our Easter baskets filled with green paper grass. The ride to the camp seemed to take forever. The tires had barely stopped rolling before we leapt out of the truck bed like  a pack of eager deer hounds. "Stop right there!"  My daddy's voice brought us  to a screeching halt. "Everybody is gonna start together, once we tell yall where the  boundaries are." My brother and youngest cousin were given directions to a special area with eggs hidden for them. Momma and my aunt would supervise their hunt. The four of us older kids listened impatiently while my uncle gave us detailed instructions on the boundary lines for our egg hunt. He  told us, since we were older, the eggs would be a lot harder to find. Finally, we were told the information we were all waiting for: the  prize egg was wrapped with a dollar bill (which was a LOT of money  back then for a kid) and then covered with tinfoil. We were told that  since it would be so conspicuous, it was particularly well hidden. Daddy was ready to turn us loose when his dog King emerged  from a thicket of palmetto bushes. King, who had wandered into the woods while they were hiding the eggs, hadn't come when they  got ready to go pick us up.  Daddy left him there till we returned. The  dog looked at us and seemed to slink off toward the truck. We didn't  think anything of it at the time, but later, his guilty expression would  have a wealth of meaning. "Get ready, get set, GO!" Four pairs of legs raced across the sandy  road and jumped the ditch. In a mad frenzy we pushed back palmetto  fans and dug through piles of fallen bark and straw. Being veterans of  the game, we looked first for those places that seemed the most logical  for hiding eggs. They were empty, though, and  the cries of "I found one" were few and  far between.  Only occasionally did someone find an egg slipped among  the branches of a gallberry bush or in the knot of an old oak. After about twenty minutes, the two younger kids were finished. Between  them they had found twelve eggs.We, however, were still searching without  much luck. Momma called for us to stop and do a count. The four of us had  only found about thirty eggs so far. It became apparent there were a large number of the eggs still  missing.  The grownups gathered, trying to determine what had happened. Mr. C. W.,  who had wandered off in the woods, reappeared then.  It was easy to see he was struggling to keep from laughing. He conferred with the other adults, and  then they all started to laugh and looked over  toward the truck. "What is it? Where are all the eggs?" we clamored. Daddy called King to him.The dog came slowly, his tail between his legs. It was a sure sign  he had done something wrong.  When he looked up at us the guilt  was plain to see. Tiny shards of colored eggshell were stuck to his  mouth and snout.  We finally understood what had happened: King,  while at the camp waiting for us to return, had sniffed out the eggs and  eaten them! We rushed back to the hiding area and noticed, for the first time, little  bits of pastels shell scattered in the places we had hurriedly ripped  through earlier. Daddy went to an old lighter stump and reached down  in a crevice that was partially covered with grass. The chewed remains  of the prize egg, with bits of a dollar bill and tin foil, glinted in the sunlight. We all four wailed forlornly, our Easter egg hunt was ruined! All those  beautiful eggs we had painstakingly colored and decorated were gone.  We didn't see the humor the situation at all. Only later did I come to  appreciate the absurd comedy of the whole day. It was definitely a time when I learned one of those valuable Life lessons: Never take a hungry dog on an Easter egg hunt! The guilty culprit~King Rose S. William ©Southernstoryteller~2002