Читать книгу Real Monsters, Gruesome Critters, and Beasts from the Darkside - Brad Steiger - Страница 56

Seemingly, Black Dogs as portents of evil can manifest anywhere. In 1990, Sherry and I were speaking with the actor Clint Walker about his near-death experience during a skiing accident in 1973. Walker was a large man, standing six-foot-six, a strapping leading-man who played the strong, silent hero in such motion pictures as The Dirty Dozen (1967), The White Buffalo (1977), Yellowstone Kelly (1959), and Night of the Grizzly (1966). Clint was probably best known as “Cheyenne Bodie” in the popular Cheyenne series that ran for eight years on ABC television network.

There is no love in a Black Dog’s eyes for the human race (iStock).

Walker was just learning how to ski when he fell on the sharp end of a ski pole with such force that the sharp tip pierced his breastbone and moved through his heart. Soon Clint’s true self was not merely floating above is body, he was rising outward into the universe. He saw that time was an illusion and that the body was just a vehicle, a garment that we put on for a while. The soul, however, could not be destroyed.

Two doctors had pronounced Clint dead before a third physician who just happened to be passing through the room, taking a shortcut to somewhere else, believed that he saw a flicker of life in the body lying on the gurney. Clint remembered going down a long tunnel while the doctor worked on his heart, and he recalled his recovery being pronounced a medical miracle.

When he left the hospital, Clint Walker realized that with discipline he could learn to master his thoughts and move closer to the image of true love. He knew that he had his own inner guidance, but that there would be times of testing—and sometimes the power of good could attract the counterbalance of evil.

Five years later, Clint was told that he must have surgery to remove excessive scar tissue that had grown up around the old ski pole wound. Once again, he said, he traveled down the long tunnel with the misty faces and the mumble of voices. Once again, he asked God to allow him to live.

Walker never stayed in a hospital any longer than he had to, so he was home convalescing within a few days. By his second day at home, he was out walking in his yard. By the third day, he was walking down the road toward his mailbox, weak but glad to be alive.

The rugged actor lived at that time in a remote canyon off Mulholland Drive, and he was walking on a dirt road when he saw a large black dog some fifteen feet away. Feeling full of good cheer, he said hello to the dog.

“The dog stared at me in this very eerie manner, and then, suddenly, there were three other dogs with him,” Clint recalled. “I knew that they were about to come for me. I scooped up a rock in each hand, being careful not to rip open my stitches from surgery, and I was barely standing upright again when they were on me.”

Fighting against his own weakness from the surgery, Walker managed to kick one of the dogs under its chin and send it sprawling. He pelted another with a rock. With angry growls and yelps, the vicious, growling dogs beat a retreat.

He was about three-quarters of a mile from his home, facing a walk up a long, curving driveway. “That’s when my inner voice said loud and clear: ‘Get a club. They’re waiting for you!’“ Clint found a thick branch and began to walk in anticipation of attack.

“Sure enough, when I went around a curve, they were waiting for me in the road. They were strange-looking dogs, like dogs I had never seen before.”

The brandishing of the club and a few well-aimed rocks sent the mysterious black dogs back to whatever dark den had produced them. Once he was safe again in his house, Walker felt the unpleasant memory rush of a nightmare that he had experienced the night before.

“It was a nightmare that wasn’t a nightmare,” he said. “It was a dream, I know, but it was also very real. A devilish face was grinning at me, and I knew the only way to whip it was with willpower, so I said, ‘I reject you in the name of Jesus Christ.’ I repeated that rejection and kept my will strong against it. There are evil forces, you know,” Clint Walker said. “I have learned that this is so, and we must stay strong against them and not give them power over us.”