A decade since our littlest girl left us.

Photo copyright Wings, 2021;
all rights reserved.

It can't really have been a decade since our littlest girl left us . . . can it?

But I look at the calendar, and it tells me that at 10:42 PM tonight, it'll have been exactly ten years.

Her name was Dom (Domina, for her half-mask; also Dommy, Dommers, Dom-Dom, Grubster Girl, and a few others besides), and she was the biggest combination of fragile feminine girl and wild-ass tomboy you've ever seen. She was also a former bait dog, and she came to me mostly by accident after having been so badly abused that she had permanent slashes (bite marks) in the fur on her forehead and across her little nose, on top of a broken/never healed/badly infected left foreleg.

The shelter that supposedly "rescued" her said they didn't notice anything when they sent her home with the foster who ultimately transferred her to me. Didn't notice the swelling and the blood dripping from it. They played and pleaded ignorance, and I took matters in hand myself and got the infection healed. Not the break, though; that was impossible, because it had been broken at the joint when she was young, never set, healed badly, and the shelter vet had had to rebreak it and fuse the joint. It bothered her when it was cold or damp.

It also bothered her when she didn't want to do something, like go home from the dog park, or go indoors here, and then she would pull that little stunt she's pulling in the photo up there, lift it up as though it pained her so desperately, and shake it as though afflicted by essential tremor, looking pitiful enough to need a tin cup that read "alms for the poor puppy." Until she'd tip over on her ass and scramble up as though there'd never been a thing wrong. Because, of course, there mostly wasn't; she'd run full-tilt with the rest of the pack, always on the lookout for something especially gross and rotten and so, so lovely. Like the time I saw her from a distance, diving repeatedly onto the ground on top of something, and as soon as I called her name, she jumped up, looked at me defiantly, grabbed the thing up in her mouth, and ran off with it where I couldn't catch her.

A rotted snakeskin. Oh, my god, she stank to thigh heaven, and she was so pleased with herself. Now you know why that last nickname.

She was also the kind of dog who forced herself onto your lap and literally refused to accept that anyone could not possibly love her completely . . . and so, of course, everybody did. When I had to be up in Washington for five weeks in 2011, she had taken to riding on the back of the ATV while Wings tooled around here hauling horseshit and doing other work, and he was so taken with the whole thing that she stole what little was still left of his heart.

And then promptly broke it, and mine, too. When I got back in either the last couple of days of March or first couple of days of April, I forget which, everyone seemed fine. A couple of days later, I noticed that she had developed a couple of bumps on her head at the base of her ears. They looked like giant insect bites. More worrying was what materialized within the next couple of days after that. She'd been looking slightly chubby, but she was 11-1/2 by then, as near as anyone could tell (her dentition was so bad when she came to me that my vet said it looked like she was 12, but she was actually about 2-1/2, most likely; that had been 9 years previously), so we hadn't thought much of it. But chubby is one thing; looking pregnant (in a thoroughly long since spayed dog) is something else entirely.

So I took her to our vet here.

The news was grim.

She had a tumor, a massive one, and only the placement of it had kept it from showing. She had shown no signs of anything wrong, either, no loss of appetite, no pain, no fatigue, no discomfort of any sort. But in the space of a couple of days, the tumor had hit that magic growth spurt when no amount of internal organs can hide it. A sale permitted us to pay for an ultrasound, and the worst was confirmed: The cancer had spread through her entire body, and she had weeks at the very most left to be with us. It would turn out to be fewer than two weeks.

The good news was that she was not in pain, and the vet told me that given her comfort levels and lack of pain up to that point, she might have none at all. At the point when everything failed, he said, it would probably be quick. And so I took her home, and relayed the terrible news, and we wept, and then we set about making her as happy and as comfortable as possible.

She lasted about ten days. On the morning of Wednesday, the 13th, Wings gave her a marrow bone all her own, and she was so happy with it. By evening, her body had begun the laborious process of winding itself down, and she was tired and weak, but she wanted very badly to be allowed outside. I went out with her, and she began to walk, slowly, also laboriously, and it became clear that she wanted to see all her favorite places on the land, imprint them in her mind for the journey that was to come. Eventually, she was to tired to continue, so I picked her up and through a haze of tears, I carried her around to all the places where I knew she had loved to play so that she could visit each one one last time. Then we brought her back inside, into that cold tin can of an RV where we had been living for several months and would wind up spending seven years, and set her on a dog bed at our feet with her bone and Griffin, the alpha, nearby to keep watch as he was wont to do.

Sometime before 10 PM, I saw her convulse, and I knew that it had ruptured, as I had been warned it might. I also knew that, at that hour, and in the snowy weather that year, there would be no one able or willing to come and help, that I had to do this myself. And so I got down on the floor and held her on my lap and in my arms, and I felt every twitch and tremor as her body went through all the processes of turning off the switches and turning out the lights. It took about an hour; her vision went early on, and that frightened her, and so I had to make sure that she could feel me and hear me and know that she was safe. I talked to her for forty or fifty minutes, unceasing, and slowly she relaxed, and eventually . . . stopped. Everything . . . stopped.

10:42 PM.

And it was bitterly cold outside, ice and blowing snow, and we would not be able to bury her until the next morning, so we wrapped her up carefully in a soft pink blanket that matched her favorite girly pink dog sweater and pink biker-girl-style studded collar. And we laid her to rest the following day.

And we wept.

To this day, Wings still talks about how she would ride with him on the ATV, this little scaredy-dog who was also a little tough girl, a gangster girl, one who lived entirely up to her pit bull and rat terrier ancestors. She loved to fake being "dumb," but besides being street smart, she understood everything; she just liked to be everyone's baby.

Of that group of dogs, she was the first to go, and the pack felt it intensely. We'd already lost two others in our years together, but we felt it, too. And we still feel her spirit every now and then, this happy, grinning little girl who had everyone wrapped around her little paw. And tonight, five hours early because it's too late and dark and far too cold at 10:42 PM, I took her her cedar and tobacco and water, as we always do for all of ours. Very little smoke, though; the winds have been at gale force most of the day. But she has what she needs, and mostly that's memory, knowing that she still has our hearts.

We love you, Dom. There's always space for you on the ATV, in our hearts, and everywhere else, too.

All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2021; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.