Seven years since our Kachina girl left us.

Photo copyright Wings, 2021; all rights reserved.

I've been so busy all day I keep forgetting to sit down to this. But it's been seven years since our Kachina girl left us.

That was her nickname, actually; in this household, everybody gets nicknames, even those with four legs and tails. Her actual name was Lilith, no not because of the silly flowy white-girl New Age stuff, but because I knew the story of Lilith in the Gnostic tradition, and as with her, what happened with this little girl seemed like an escape from bondage of a very real sort.

She came to me by accident, having escaped from whatever, wherever, whomever and fled to the dog park. She was very much not an alpha dog, but because she was a pit, whomever had kept her on a four-foot chain, trapped in her own waste, had been beating her to try to turn her into a fight dog.

She didn't want that life. Unfortunately, a very large amount of damage had already been done by the abuse, and I spent the next thirteen years on desensitization and PTSD management with her. It was a full-time job in and of itself, on top of all my other work.

She didn't trust Wings when I brought her here; he was a man, and she hated men, save for those who got grandfathered under the "safe" clause of her first two weeks with me. Thereafter, certain people were automatically a threat to her newfound safety and that of her pack, in her mind, and men as a class were chief among them.

But she learned, and so did he, never having had to deal with a dog with such issues before, and as was always the case when she finally warmed up, even marginally, to someone, they always felt so honored that she had them wrapped around her paw for life, and he was no different. But by then she knew that she could trust him, and she did. And it was he who nicknamed her Kachina. He also took that photo of her, from, if memory serves, January of 2011: happier times for her, still healthy, no cancer to fight, looking bright-eyed and beautiful in her little bandanna.

We lost her [older] little sister to sudden cancer in April of 2011 (and her brother in April of 2016, as well as another sib in April of 2018; it's a bad month for dogs). Within a month or so, Lilith developed the same signs, and we expected to lose her in June of 2011. But she clearly wanted to fight, even though she was weakened by it, and so we started her on a regimen of intermittent regular doses of prednisone and more traditional medicine (and a lot of prayer and all the love in the world).

And she was with us very nearly three full years more.

By this day in 2014, we knew it was near, had been near for about ten days already. She had already had several miracles, and we knew there would be no more. We were wrong about that, though; we got one more, and so did she. She spent the day before with a giant rawhide bone, unutterably happy and at peace. On the 14th, she slept nearly the whole day through, on the kitchen floor of that crappy old tin can of an RV that we lived in then. And sometime around 2 or 3 PM, her breathing started to get both more even and more shallow, and she slipped into an ever-deeper sleep.

Wings came inside about 4, maybe a little after, to check on her, and her ears shifted slightly when he spoke to her and stroked her head and ears. By then, I was sitting on the floor with her full-time, so that she would have me there when the time came. it came a few minutes later: 4:16 PM, to be exact. And after so much fear in her younger life, so much pain, so many recent years of fighting to stay with us, it was the easiest, most peaceful thing it could possibly be: She took one last breath while lying against me, let it out, and let her spirit go with it. She's at rest with her sibs, under the big blue spruce, and at the appointed time, I did as we always do, taking her cedar and tobacco with a little sweetgrass in it and a little water, too.

Lilith, we love you, sweet warrior girl. You're always in our hearts.

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.