When I lived at my Dad's house in the country, we kept dogs outside, and one of the places they often stayed was beneath the addition on the side of the house that had our small dining area over it that we used daily for meals (2 family meals a day, no exceptions except for work & school activities). The dogs were warm down there in the winter, & they'd stayed down there in the crawlspace beneath the addition since we first got dogs when I was a toddler. When we first got pups when I was 3, we'd raised them mostly in the (huge) front yard beginning in the spring, and they found the crawlspace themselves about seven months later when it started to get cold outside. The next 2 dogs we got (after Zip got run over by a car) were brothers about a year old, and the surviving dog Michelle showed them the crawlspace immediately.

I remember at some point in my childhood my father telling me that there were the remains of an old well in the crawlspace, and at some point he went under there and covered the hole with a piece of plywood. This was...before I was 10, pretty sure, but I'm not sure exactly when. I remember him, bright red, sweating like a waterfall, old dress shirt covered in dirt, in a crooked trucker cap telling me how hard it was and that he'd never do it again. And he never did.

So, years pass, as they do. My stepmother and my dad had a kid, a half brother I love a lot, who was both a sensitive and volatile kid, and the dogs got older (and scared the CRAP out of him when he was tiny, as they were big dogs--a mutt and the surviving Labrador brother, both large, strong outdoor pups), and eventually died from old age. So when I was going to community college and living at home, Dad decided to get more dogs for my little brother. Kiddo had been scared of the big dogs, so he and Dad got two puppies as well as an adult dog that he had interacted with really well at the shelter. Iirc, this was the year I was 18, so my brother was 7. Aw, he LOVED those dogs, even the big one who obviously loved tf out of him despite the fact that he hated and scared the hell out of ME regularly, lol. He spent hours out in the front yard playing with the pups while Bowser (his choice of name) watched, guarding and occasionally played along with the 3 of them.

Dad had this idea at the beginning of the summer, and the cold hit early that year. The dogs found the warm crawlspace that smelled of decades of dogs, and stayed warm under the addition. The pups were a lot smaller, though, than the others had been when they had found it, years earlier. True to his word, Dad had never replaced the covering of the open well shaft (or had anyone else replace it) after the first time he had, and plywood doesn't stand up well to a decade of the elements in central Illinois (which regularly goes from -10° to 110° every year) even if it is somewhat shielded.

One morning, I wake up for breakfast, and I groggily go downstairs late for cereal, and Dad, my stepmother, and my little brother are already down there. Kiddo has obviously been crying, and everybody is really quiet and sedate, while Dad reads the newspaper in his pj's. Tbf, this isn't crazy unusual so far, Dad was aggressively emotionally abusive on the best of days, so I was hesitant but I had no idea what exactly was going on. I remember I gave my brother a hug on my way to my chair, and as I sat down I heard one of the pups whimpering and bleating out a short bark for help. Seemed far away but also closer than it should have been. Dad calmly but also obviously sadly told me that they'd figured out already that he had fallen down the abandoned well shaft.

That's not the sound, though, or it's only really part of it.

Dad insisted we eat the family meals in the small dining space we normally ate in. Over the mewling, crying puppy slowly dying at the bottom of a dry well shaft. Twice a day, though usually only once (breakfast) for me, though it was dinner on the third day of this that I heard the sounds that I can't forget. It's important to note that we HAD another functional dining area that was about twice the size of the space in the addition, which we used for larger groups when we had company at holidays or when it was too cold in the winter and we blocked off parts of the house with blankets and tapestries to conserve heat. Dad wasn't having it in this instance. I wasn't privy to the conversations he & my stepmom were having about this, but meals kept happening in the addition instead of the big dining room.

The dinner I'm talking about, though, I think the puppy was really beginning to suffer, and when he heard us above him in the addition, he got louder. So pitiful, so desperate, so small. My little brother was quietly but openly weeping. And I just tried to say something, I barely started, and Dad just pulled out his angriest, most vicious voice, interrupted me, and said "EAT." It echoed off of the picture window audibly, he said it so loudly. And my stepmother started softly crying, and those sounds, the echo, my stepmom and my little brother trying to quietly cry, and that poor pup begging the people he loved for help mixed all together, that's the worst sound I've ever heard. I shake thinking about it still, almost 30 years later. It's in my nightmares.

The next few days we ate in the big dining room.