Two years since this sweet girl left us.

Photo copyright Aji, 2020; all rights reserved.

It's been two years today — at 9:27 this morning, to be exact. After all that's happened over these two years, it seems impossible that so much time could have passed, but it's true. Two years since this sweet girl left us.

in the same way that Raven was slightly more my dog, She-Wolf was slightly more Wings's. Not unusual for female dogs to bond more, or at least differently, to male humans and male dogs to female humans, but She-Wolf was such pure love that it never felt less, only different. She tagged after Wings while he worked; when she was sick, she came to me for help. And she fought so much in her life just to live.

She showed up one day at the shop while I was there, not yet a year old, scrawny, starved, a pint-size bag of bones that would eventually grow into a 65-pound healthy dog. She was whip-smart, having absolutely no commands but nevertheless understanding instinctively what was wanted, and she would come to be fed and then lie at my feet or by the fire to escape the cold. She went home with us on the day before Thanksgiving in 2008, still more puppy than not, full of energy and mischief.

By the fall of 2013, she wasn't feeling so hot, and we suspected we knew what it was; her formative months, filled with starvation, come back to haunt her by way of a damaged metabolism. It took a few weeks to get her in to the vet; sure enough, she was diabetic, and he warned us that she had no more than two months' worth of sight left at the outside, probably less, because in retrospect we knew that she had been showing symptoms for a while. He also grilled me about whether we were prepared to take on the "burden," because apparently a lot of folks would rather put their dogs down than deal with it. But we're both intimately familiar with the disease, and we knew what to do.

She got tested twice a day, and injected twice a day. Normally, I did it at 9 AM and 9 PM, and if I got busy and too many minutes passed beyond the 9:00 mark, she would come and find me, because her internal clock was scary-accurate, and she knew it was time for her test and her shot. She never fought the needles, never whimpered; the first insulin injection in the vet's office had made her feel SO much better in the space of five minutes that she made the connection instantly and never looked back. And with a lot of work, we saved her eyesight for more than three years. Even once it was, for all practical purposes, gone, she navigated just fine in daylight, knowing her home sand land so well that she didn't need to see it.

We didn't know that something worse was on the way.

At the very end of 2017, the last day or next-to-last day of the year, we came downstairs to find what looked like a little blood on the dining room rug, with perhaps some urine. We couldn't tell whether it had come from her or Raven, or indeed what it actually was; both were perfectly capable of getting into thing outside and winding up with nicks or scratches, too. Everyone seemed fine, so we didn't worry unduly, but we kept watch.

It appeared again a few days later, and still we couldn't tell which dog was responsible. I followed them both as much as possible, and we eventually determined that it was She-Wolf. We were hoping diabetes- related UTI (and worrying about diabetes-related kidney failure). What it was was much worse.

She had interstitial carcinoma of the bladder, a very aggressive, very fast-moving, very lethal form of cancer in dogs. By the time we knew anything was wrong, it was already too late. The vet (our regular vet's partner, who treated her all the way through it, and was wonderful) warned us to expect her to have days at most.

We gave her three months. Good ones.

When the night came that she threw up blood, we knew. We called the vet at dawn, and our regular vet came out with the tech, who She-Wolf knew well and loved. Together, we held her in our arms, and through their own tears, Ted and Natalia helped us send her to the spirit world, where she would have no more pain. It was time, and it was easy, and she had no pain in the process.

And she is still in our hearts every single day. When I say She-Wolf was pure love, I mean exactly that. She just . . . LOVED. Everybody. Everything. But especially her pack and her world. And I miss her terribly. And so today I did as we always do, and I took her sweet spirit her offerings: cedar and smoke, tobacco, water. Wings left her some jerky, too.

We love you, She-Wolf. The gift you gave us, sweet girl, doesn't disappear; you and it live in our hearts.

All content, including photos and text, are copyright Aji, 2020; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.