A brave dog after all: Major, the warrior, four years on.

Photo copyright Wings, 2018; all rights reserved.

That's still one of my favorite pictures of the two of them. Both have left us now, Griffin almost two years ago and Major, in the foreground, just over four years ago.

It's been a day for guilt.

I bolted awake just after five this morning, somehow realizing in my sleep that I'd missed Major's anniversary date, which was February 3rd, at around 12:30 PM. I can put it down to a whole host of reasons, most of which have to do with my health and money and stress levels right now, and also the fact that on the third, we had someone working over here, which always disrupts my day, but the fact of the matter is, I'd gotten my wires crossed and was thinking March 3rd instead. And then, by the time Wings got his own stuff under way and I remembered to check the time, it was 12:36, and so I was even late at being late. But I took some cedar and tobacco out to him, and a doggy treat, too, and I tried to make up for it in some small way.

It was my parents who named him Major; the shelter had called him Gregory, heaven knows why, and Dad wanted to name him Shep, after the old song that is, of course, nothing but heartbreak and heaven knows why that, either, but what apparently stuck was Major. If we'd had anything to do with it, we'd probably have named him Warrior, but the poor guy had had enough disruption in his life already. He was, in some ways, anything but — a survivor of severe abuse and neglect and starvation, with equally severe PTSD and afraid of so, so many things . . . and yet, when the puppies (that would be She-Wolf and Raven, who are now ten), tangled with a prairie rattler, he jumped in between them to try to kill it. He got bitten for his trouble, I did the suck-and-spit routine while waiting for Wings to come home and then applied a traditional medicine that took all the inflammation out and left him needing only a half-course of anti-venin — and he got the rattler. It was dead when we went to find it, courtesy of Major's aging teeth. And I suppose that's the essence of the warrior, at least in our way: You put aside your greatest, most fundamental fears to defend those more vulnerable.

So our Big Guy was a brave dog after all.

We love you, Major. We miss you and your great big warrior heart. 




All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2018; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.