Two Years of Hunting in the Other World

Photo copyright Aji, 2016; all rights reserved.

Update: At the appointed time, I went to put a little cedar on his resting place . . . and was stopped in my tracks. It had snowed so much overnight that it completely covered all of the graves in that plot, so deeply and thoroughly that it was impossible to tell where they were, except from memory. I stepped into the area between spruce and fence, about where I thought it should be. It was the only area marked by tracks — recent ones, after the snow had, for all practical purposes, stopped this morning. They were nearly impossible to decipher; two roundish indented circles about the size of a very large horse's hoof, conjoined at the center. Only two tiny lines extending from their southern edge gave it away: Apparently, the conjoined circles were bunny-butt tracks. Oddly, the point where they joined appeared to be at the head of exactly the right place. I took a chance, dug down into the snow, and promptly hit the stone marking Major's grave. I don't know how the rabbit knew, but then, they're not usually around in the morning anyway. Maybe it was a spirit rabbit, one with whom he's engaged on a joyous hunt over on the other side.

It was two years ago today, just after 1:00 PM, that we said goodbye to our Big Guy. 

His name was Major (not a name we ever would have given him), also known as Big Guy and Wigglebutt. His previous abusers had cropped his tail (and mangled the job), among other things, and so when he wagged for treats, his whole butt tried to do the twist. He lived for those treats, for food, for the chance to lick the inside of Wings's coffee cup, for a soft warm place to sleep, for his coat. He loved that coat so much that he would never stand still long enough for me to fasten the velcro. He pranced in it, high-stepping like a gait horse.

He had a hard life before he came to us: abused, neglected, dew claws torn off, left chained out in monsoonal storms, starved until he was all bones. My parents adopted him, hoping for some help for Dad's Parkinson's; a few years later, he got to be too much to handle. He'd fling himself over the six-foot stockade fence by making a run at the adjoining four-foot chain-link fence on the side, springing off it, and vaulting himself onto the top of the wooden palisade, then jump off and go running. He hunted squirrels like a champ, and had an unfortunate tendency to regard the neighborhood's stray cats as simply more squirrels.

His early starvation meant metabolic problems and bad hips, and by the time we brought him up here, he couldn't even climb into the back seat of my relatively low-set car without me half-lifting him in. A few weeks here changed all that: Proper nutrition combined with 25 acres to run turned him into a much younger dog. He patrolled the perimeter every day, up to the end. He was still terrified of weather, and of too many other things, but he outlived all expectations for a dog of his enormous size, forget one with a past as bad as his. As nearly as anyone could peg his age, he was just about fifteen when he left us, and that's a good five years beyond what anyone expected. His last few months were rough; he was battling cancer, and we should have made the decision sooner than we did. It's hard to know what the appointed day is, especially when he still showed such joy in having a Milk-Bone. I failed him.

He finally has a soft place to sleep, with two of his sisters, always protected from the thunder and the storm, never cold now, no longer in pain. He's beneath the big blue spruce by the garden, where the wild strawberries grow. Now, the mighty hunter can chase the squirrels of his dreams, hunt prairie dogs, even reprise his saving of the puppies from a prairie rattler (yes, he got got, and I had to do the suck-and-spit on a dog's muzzle) — and now, nobody gets hurt.

We love you, Big Guy. Hunt well.

All content, including photos and text, are copyright Aji, 2016; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.