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| Photo copyright Wings, 2018; all rights reserved. |
We don't have the snow this year. Hunter's happy little spirit is all around us, though.
It's hard — no, impossible — to believe that it's been nine years since our baby girl came barreling across the fields to greet me every time I came home. Several years before that, she had adopted me on sight, at my very first visit here, and to this day, she has not let go her hold on my heart.
I said the other day that Valentine's Day, for us, always seems to be taken up with sick animals. That was true of Shade this year, although she's thankfully doing better. Last year, it was Cree, who we lost the following evening. On that day nine years ago, a few months before the bottom would drop out of lives completely on other fronts, we were down in Santa Fe at a vet hospital, sitting in the waiting room praying desperately for word that she could be saved. We had spent a week or so going back and forth, and by the 17th, when we were back home and she was still hospitalized, the worst became evident.
It was too late. We couldn't be there, save by phone. The vet and her techs held her on their laps for us, and wept with us, as she slipped away to join her sister. Here on our end, Harmony, the black paint horse who was still with us then, understood, and she is the one who held me upright in the moments after it was over.
We lost Hunter to a terrible, terrible pair of diseases: immune-mediated thrombocytopenia, and immune-mediate hemolytic anemia. She hemolyzed her own blood until there was nothing left to keep her body going. It was the product of malpractice, a drug that had been given too her for far too long and in far too great a dose, and we didn't know until it was too late. We saved her once, but seven months later, her little body was just too worn out to cope again. I have never forgiven the people responsible, either for her or for BearGirl. They know who they are.
In a little under an hour, I'll go out to where her ashes are scattered, in all of her favorite spots, and leave tobacco; I'll put cedar in the main spot. I'll tell her again how much we love her, the same way I do every day when her spirit burrows into my heart again by way of memory. Hunter was a perfect little round bundle of pure unbridled love; when I came here, she was the first to take me fully as her own and she never let go. I dreamed of her later, making her way along the western road by herself to go find BearGirl, trees meeting overhead in a canopy and morning light filtering through onto her beautiful coat, her head high and happy and her cow-dog grin on her face. She stopped for a moment and turned to look back at me, and I swear she smiled and told me everything was all right. Then she turned back and trotted happily along the road, her little fuzzy harem pants swaying with her gait just as they did in life.
I think she knows we finally did this thing she wanted, and is happy.
We love you, sweet Hunter girl.
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.
Her namesake is a bit over four now, happy and healthy and huge, and still thinks of himself as a lapdog. He is pure love and still has the spirit he had when he was a cuddly teddy bear of a puppy. He has not been near the drug that cost you both Hunter and BearGirl, thank Goddess.
ReplyDeleteNimisenh, on this day when you most deeply are in contact with your Hunter’s spirit, please let her know that her little brother sends his love.