Big Guy

Photo copyright Aji, 2015; all rights reserved.

It was one year ago today that we lost our big guy.

His name was Major, not chosen by us. He'd had a very hard early life, and as is so often the case with abused spirits, that made even his later life harder than it should have had to be.

My parents adopted him from the local shelter years ago, at my suggestion. The hope was to find a dog that could help my father manage his Parkinson's (and, I hoped, the worsening depression that accompanied it). They couldn't seem to find one that they liked, and so I, living all the way across the country at that time, went online, found their local shelter's Web site, and promptly found a hound mix that needed a home. 

The shelter's vets had pegged his age at four and a half (probably accurate), and the staff had named him "Gregory" (ridiculous). My parents tried out a variety of names on him, intending initially to call him Shep (my father's choice, and a dog name I always hated because when I was a kid, he used to sing that old song about the dying dog and make me cry). Finally, somehow, they tried "Major," and he responded to the sounds (more, anyway, than to any of their other attempts), so that's what his name became. When he came to us here, we called him that mostly when we needed to get his attention; normally, he was "Big Guy" or some variant thereof.



He'd been abused and neglected, clearly. Starved, certainly; his hip bones stuck up several inches out of his back. Skittish? An understatement. After they'd had him a few months, I took him in to the vet for routine visit and his first toenail clipping, and promptly switched vets, because the one they'd been using terrorized him with the toenail clippers. Understandable; someone had ripped off his dewclaws, apparently as a puppy. Until he came up here to live with us, the only time he could get a pedicure was when I was available to visit, and help two vet techs hold him down while the vet did the clipping. A dog the size of a miniature pony, whose weight fluctuated between 80 at a low and 110 at a high, can be a deadly windmill when terrified. Once he came up here, it all changed; Wings could do his nails solo. 

Environment is a hell of a thing.

Besides the starvation, he had apparently been kept chained outside nonstop. In this state, in late summer, that means being chained up in thunder, lightning, wind, rain, and even hail. He never lost his abject terror of weather. He once ran the length of my parents house to leap onto my lap in the back room, 100+ pounds of quivering canine flop sweat. When I moved to take care of my parents, we left him (and the other dogs) in the house one night while my mother and I ran errands. We came home to find the south living room window shattered, blood on the ground, and Major outside the house with cuts on his paws. During his first year here, we had put him in the studio one day, thinking that it would be a more calming place for him should the weather turn bad. He managed to clear Wings's anvil and bust out through the window above it.

He also had a fetish for chasing squirrels, and in my parents' neighborhood they were everywhere. So were the pointy-eared squirrels — i.e., the feral cats that neighbors had abandoned to breed indiscriminately. He figured out how to leverage his enormous body over Mom's six-foot stockade fence to give chase: get a running start, head at an angle for the place where her stockade fence met the neighbor's chain-link version, spring off the chain link, and heave himself, a bit like a pole vaulter, up and over the stockade. He'd usually land atop it on his stomach, then push himself the rest of the way over. One night, when I happened to be there, he got out, and before I could get in the car to chase him, he'd chased something to the main road two blocks away. I heard a sickening thump and a squeal from that distance, and knew instantly. I managed to find him, post-SUV impact, concussed, dazed, with a dangling toe that had to be amputated.

It was clear that Mom couldn't handle him anymore.

He came up here, overweight by then (insulin resistance and metabolic disorders are common in dogs starved and/or malnourished as puppies, just as it is with people) and with hips so bad he could barely haul himself up onto the back seat of the car. For a dog of his size to reach age 10 would be an accomplishment anyway; for one with his history of starvation, abuse, neglect, and other trauma (his teeth alone were a permanent disaster), living to ten would be a miracle. We assumed that we were bringing him here to live out whatever months remained to him a safe space.

And something happened. With us controlling his diet, with 25 acres to patrol, with prairie dogs and voles to hunt, he dropped 20 pounds. His hips suddenly worked again, and with no pain. He spent his days alternating between trotting around the land's perimeter and hunting small prey and sleeping in a spot in the sun outside Wings's studio.

Back in 2009, he saved the puppies from a young prairie rattler. They were still young enough not to understand that this slithering creature was not something to toy with, but Major, older, had a better sense of threat. I was working in one of the gardens by the southeast alfalfa field, and the puppies (by then, actually two years old) were romping in the hay. Major was lying in the grass by me. The puppies had clearly found something interesting, which didn't mean anything; they were always cornering voles and prairie dogs. But then their stances changed, as though they were "playing" with something larger. Major noticed it, too: His head shot up, and he took off at a sprint, barking, and somehow I knew and took off right behind him. He was much faster, but the time I got there, the puppies were standing aside, and Major had grabbed the snake by the midsection and flung it to the ground; it lay there, seemingly dead from the bit marks in its stomach (but as we would later learn, not dead yet). I hurriedly checked the puppies and chased them off, then turned to Major, he showed no bite marks either. He was already headed for his doghouse, but his gait suddenly began to stagger a bit, so I grabbed him and checked him thoroughly. Sure enough, on the left side of his muzzle, buried amid the graying whiskers, were two parallel slashes. Wings had the car and I couldn't reach him by phone, so I started the suck and spit routine and prayed that I had no unknown dental issues. After what seemed an eternity, I applied our traditional snake medicine, kept him quiet, and kept calling Wings, who was by then on his way home. A visit to two very shocked vets and a half-course of anti-venin later, and he was fine. The on-call vet couldn't believe it; the snake medicine had taken out all the inflammation, and there was no swelling or redness. At all.

For four more years, Major thrived. Somewhere along the line, though, he developed cancer. The tumor grew slowly, and he seemed utterly unbothered by it for a couple of years. In the latter half of 2013, that changed: His weight dropped drastically as the tumor grew. Still, he was (as he'd always been) thoroughly food-motivated; he loved to eat and he loved it when Wings would let him lick out the drops in the bottom of his coffee cup. He was, for all his fears, still a happy dog, and he clearly still wanted to live. This was, after all, a dog whose nickname was Wiggle-Butt, for the happy dance he'd do whenever it was time to eat. It got to the point where I could say, "Major! Wanna do the Wiggle Butt?" And he'd begin wagging his badly-cropped tail so hard that his entire nether half would shimmy like a Supreme.

Still, I failed our big guy. I was never able to pry him loose from fear's iron grip, understandable given his formative years, yet it made his life so much harder than it should have been. He was, like some people, absolutely terrified of the prospect of death, and it made it all the harder to discern that terrible decisional line. As his condition deteriorated, clean-up became a daily event for me, and yet, once up and into his day, he still loved to eat, loved to "patrol" his boundary lines, loved to sleep in the sun outside the studio door. 

We made that decision on this day last year, and it was hard on all of us. As with the others, he's buried not far from the main garden, near the spruce trees where Dom and now Lilith also rest. He was laid there wrapped in his beloved coat and his favorite blankets, with some cedar and a little food and water for his journey. The trees, like the wild strawberries next to Major's plot, all thrive now, rich and lush and full. He lived to the ripe old age of fifteen, which, for a dog of his size, much less his history, was nothing short of a miracle in itself.

The photo above is of him in happier times. His own coat was so short that he didn't handle the brutal winter cold here well. One dear friend, his "aunt," retained another to make him a coat, the one shown in the photo. Unfortunately, I never managed to get a photo of him with it fastened properly. He was so proud of that coat that he'd take off as soon as I got it put over him, head up, knees high, trotting like a gait horse. And so there was no question that he would be laid to rest in it.

There's not a day that goes by that I don't think of him, of course, along with the others. I like to think he's romping in that coat now, with Lilith and Dommy and Animiikins and Hunter and BearGirl, leading them on a patrol of the boundaries of their spirit land: knees up, head proud and high, bright green fleece eddying in the winds. No pain, and no fear; just happiness.

We love you, Big Guy.





All content, including photos and text, are copyright Aji, 2015; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.