You know how this is going to go. I know how this is going to go. We who harness ourselves to canine love harness ourselves to bouts of deep joy occasionally sprinkled by deep grief. I’ve written this before: Dog is proof that there is either no god or that God enjoys human suffering every baker’s dozen years or so. The average American lives 76.33 years and in that time, at a clip of a 12 years per dog, you’ll be feeling this anguish about six times. More if you’re a Brit, for you get to live until you’re 80, island air apparently being favorable.
There are those among us who, of course, prefer our dogs in braces or even six packs, so the anguish of losing our pal will fall upon our hearts more often.
So I have been here before. Only this time there’s something different here, a shared experience, a solidarity. This commonality I have with my number one hunting pal, I hate to admit, are signs of my own decline, pains from a body that has fallen off mountains and horses, taken whippers on ice patches and headers on ski slopes. Survived a spinal cord fusion and bicep tendon reattachment, even a kidney cancer scare. I creak in the morning and I crater in the afternoon.
Her body is ten years old, mine sixty-plus, so we are about the same right now. I saw her struggle to get up the bank out of a mountain creek the other day. I sometimes have to find a stump to climb in order to mount my big horse for a ride. There are cataracts just starting to cloud her eyes and I’ve gone up yet another half-power in my readers just a week ago. I have to yell pretty loudly when I call her these days and sometimes, when we are in the deep woods up some mountain drainage, she gets confused and runs the wrong direction. The other day, I wrote a big check out of the wrong bank account and bounced it and my wife now answers my “Whats?” about three times before I hear her. So my gun dog and I are on a physical—and perhaps mental—plane together. That’s new. Old dogs smote us with melancholy love and a sense of pending doom and grief. But this time, well, we are in this together and there’s one more autumn coming. And maybe another and another. I feel ya, girl, but let’s go get those birds, we got it in us, right?
About the Author
Thomas Reed is the author of several books including Give Me Mountains For My Horses. He and his wife raise and sell fox-trotting horses and organic farm products from their farm and ranch outside Pony, Montana. His most recent work is as an editor of the upland hunting anthology Mouthful of Feathers, Upland in America.
