Two years now that Raven's spirit is free.

Photo copyright Aji, 2021; all rights reserved.

Two years already. Two years since my personal guard dog left us, taken too soon by the same cancer that took his sister the year before.

The photo is of Raven in his last winter with us, 2018-2019, accompanying me back to the house from a trip up to the gate to lock it for the evening, already ill and tiring easily, yet joyous enough to romp through the snow. Back when we had the gallery, he would wait faithfully every day, and every time I locked up to walk up to the restroom, he would escort me there and back. It took several months, though, to get him home and safe.

Like She-Wolf, who was either half-sister or cousin, but clearly related, he had been abandoned as a pup, left to starve. He learned to fend for himself, but it did metabolic damage. He gained weight; She-Wolf became diabetic and lost it. In his case, he gained enough that it disguised the tumor growing in his abdomen for far too long, until it was too late to do anything about it.

He came by his name honestly. I was still struggling with what to call him, some weeks after he first began visiting us on the daily; we already had one "Wolf," and "Bear" didn't seem right. One day, he was lying on the plank threshold outside the door, paws just on the sill, staring n at me. It was a cloudy, stormy day not unlike today, and when I went to the door, I noticed a raven perched on the skeletal tree outside the low wall of the building. The dog kept looking at the bird, then at me, as though trying to tell me something. I looked at the raven, and it screeched and cawed and cackled, clearly mocking me for my thick-headedness. Finally, after looking between them a few times, I said, "Is your name Raven? Is that what you're trying to tell me?"

Cue the cackling peals of laughter from the bird, haw-hawing himself nearly off the branch with mirth. Raven looked at the bird, then smiled at me, and crossed his paws with a look of pure self-satisfaction, so Raven he was, forevermore.

He was theirs and they were his, no question. he was wild, still half-feral, and he was always getting into trouble, which usually meant an injury of some sort. Twice he got out onto the highway and got hit, and survived both well enough to hide; in the first case, we found out after coaxing him out from under the deck, and in the second, I was a thousand miles away helping a friend when Wings discovered him, again hiding, and texted me frantic photos before, during, and after a rush to the vet while I, long-distance, begged all the forces and spirits for our brindle boy's life.

And every time, the ravens gathered. He had a few smaller instances, usually from getting into scraps, once or twice from having eaten something he shouldn't, and always, always, the ravens gathered round, hovering, waiting and watching until he was sufficiently recovered to suggest that he was fine; then they'd move on about their business. It was the oddest thing.

So when the tumor developed to the point that it made its presence finally known, every time the ravens appeared (which they began to do with frightening regularity), I began to worry that he would be taken from us. It seems, though, that they were here to watch over him, just as he watched over me all those years ago, to lend their support to help him stay where he so dearly wanted to be just a while longer . . . almost a year, in fact.

By the end of April in 2019, we thought it would be any day. On several occasions, his breathing had already slowed so much as to be unnoticeable, eyes open but sound asleep and perfectly still, and we thought it was done . . . only to have him awaken and smile and wonder with his eyes where the next bone was. By April's end, I had written a piece, submitted but never picked up, that is being published on my Patreon tonight, a sprawling reminiscence built around his last days lying at my feet. He would last exactly three weeks more, twenty-one days.

By the early hours of the morning of May 21st, we knew we had to call our vet. He was not able to come out until after 5, when they closed, and it was a surgery day, so we were lucky to get him at all. I held his upper body in my arms, and as the needle went in, Raven dropped his head against my chest so that he could be as close as possible in that final moment, 5:19 PM by the clock, Wings standing over us with his hands in his fur, and everybody wept.

Everybody.

The vet tech helped Wings settle him in his resting place, and the vet asked to be allowed to throw some dirt in before the closed it up. That's family, so of course the answer's always yes. And just as they shoveled the last bit of earth over and began tamping it into place, there was a flurry of movement just behind the latillas that bound the grave: out of exactly nowhere, a raven, flying straight up from the earth, cackling and laughing, soaring and swooping above us, over and over, until he finally shot westward, laughing all the way.

 When I went out in the wind this evening to take him his cedar and tobacco and water, as I always do, the raven returned to the east field, settling gently down on the ground to watch. As I finished, I heard a flurry of wings, and turned to see the raven soaring past, swooping and circling and cackling before heading back again.

No more pain. Two years now that Raven's spirit is free. I'm glad my guardian comes to visit occasionally still, that he hasn't forgotten us.

Because we love you, Raven. We're glad you're flying free now.

The raven was back today. When I went out 

ll 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.                              

It's been a year already, but it seems like only yesterday.

Photo copyright Aji, 2020; all rights reserved.

It's been a year already, but it seems like only yesterday that we had to let Raven walk (or fly) where we can't follow.

That shot was on May 10th of last year, eleven days prior. For at least a month, we had been prepared for him to leave us at any minute, and yet, even then you're still never ready. All the moreso with a dog whose fierce protectiveness hid his atavistic fear of vets and more, born of a first year of abuse and abandonment, when you have to call the vet to come out and help his body do what it can't on its own. 

The one thing we promised him is that we wouldn't let him suffer.

Raven came to us in the latter half of 2008, starved beyond what one would think would be even base survival, set upon by the local vicious dogs, generally abused and left to die. He was terrified of everything, including the prospect of getting into a vehicle, so we could only feed him on the days we were at the gallery, and every morning, he would be lying faithfully in front of the door, waiting for us. It broke our hearts to think that during closures, he would be waiting for days and weeks on end.

So before the end-of-winter full closure, we loaded him (and me) up into the bed of the truck and I held him and his leash in a death grip in the cold February dusk, wind blasting us both, him looking for any chance to jump. But he had been my guardian, even escorting me to and from the restroom, for all those months, and I wouldn't let him go.

His fear made him aggressive with other dogs, and even at the end, he was still trying to guard his pack: two sets of stitches in the two months prior. That photo, though, shows him at his most relaxed, lying in the grass with a marrow bone, tongue happy and his entire self in the doggie equivalent of pure bliss. On the last day, held fast in my arms on the grass, it took all of a few seconds: 5:19 PM was the moment when his head, instead of falling rightward as expected, fell left against my chest and I felt his spirit go. The vet tech helped Wings carry all 120 pounds of him (50 of that the inoperable tumor that took him too soon) to the grave, and the vet himself tossed in a little soil.

At the moment he was laid to rest, a raven rose seemingly out of nowhere, cawing and cackling and flapping. It looked straight at me, circled, then zoomed westward, laughing as it went.

The ravens were always his guides; they named him, watched over him, and made him their own.

At the appointed time, I did as we always do, took him some water and some cedar and some tobacco at his resting place. His spirit's long gone, of course, flown westward a year ago this night. But I feel him here occasionally, my fierce brindle guardian with the sweet eyes.

We love you, Raven. You're always in our hearts.


All content, including photos and text, are copyright Aji, 2020; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.

Raven's spirit flies free.

Photo copyright Aji, 2019; all rights reserved.

I took that photo eleven days ago: Raven, happily consumed by one of his favorite activities, chewing a bone.

Raven guards us from the spirit world now.

He'd been battling cancer for months, one massive abdominal tumor now grown to a point that it took a seventy-something-pound dog up to about 120 on the scale. In recent weeks, it was clear that his body was riddled with tumors, and yet, he was happy. Tired much of the time, sleeping more and more hours out of the day, occasionally overtaken by breathing difficulties as the tumors grew and shifted and impinged intermittently on his respiratory tract. But he was not, apparently, in any pain, and his other troubles were mostly intermittent, and he still loved his life.

We promised him that as long as he was taking joy in life, as long as he was not in pain or otherwise suffering, we would put in the work to keep him with us, comfortable and happy. All that changed overnight last night.

His breathing was always more labored at night, but it was episodic, and it would pass and allow him to rest, and he'd awaken ready to join us in the day, happy and engaged. Last night, it did not pass; the breathing difficulties persisted to a degree that they frightened him, and he was so consumed with fighting it that when I got down on the floor to try to help him, he didn't recognize me and struggled to his feet to move away, afraid. At long last, he dropped into a sleep born of pure involuntary exhaustion.

It was time.

We thought it would be done by shortly after eleven, since a vet other than his regular one was supposed to be out here for a follow-up with the horses. That person bailed at the last minute, leaving us to hope and pray that his vet could be persuaded on a surgical day (possibly complicated, it would turn out, by his status as the county's on-call vet for today and tonight for emergencies) to make an exception and come out to the house after hours. Fortunately, he knows us, knows our dogs, knows the kind of care we take of them, and he was willing to come after closing at five.

So we settled down for a six-hour-plus wait.

When he arrived, we led Raven, collarless and leashless but with the incentive of a bone, over to the area where Wings and his clan brother had spent the morning digging, in front of the dwarf blue spruce that, fed so well by Raven's siblings gone before, can no longer properly be called "dwarf." For a dog as large as he was, it was a sizeable hole, with a lot of work put into it. It had, of course, begun snowing and sleeting again shortly before, and while it had mostly stopped by then, everything was cold and wet, and I knelt down in the grass anyway and held his head and upper body in my arms. Ted, the vet, shaved a small space on his right front leg, then inserted the needle, and a moment or two later, Raven's head dropped against my heart. We set him down fully on the grass on his side, and his last breath, last movement, came at 5:19 PM.

The vet tech was a very big, burly guy, and Ted offered his services in helping us bury him. The tech and Wings lifted him down into the grave, and before leaving Ted asked whether it would be all right if he tossed a little dirt in, too.

This is why we love our vet.

A few moments before that point, as I came out with supplies and Wings and the vet tech had just laid his body in the grave, a raven rose up from the ground just beyond the fence where our boy's body lay: swooping upward, looking our way momentarily, chattering joyously; it flew into a nearby aspen, then flew off into the storm.

Raven's spirit flies free.

Earlier today, one of the guys that formerly supplied Wings with some of the cacti he planted around the land showed up out of nowhere. He left behind, free of charge, a tiny cactus budding with scarlet flowers, and instructions to put it on Raven's resting place. it's there now, in a little planter.

There is so much of Raven to tell, and I'm so very tired. It will wait for anniversaries. But our guardian boy who fought so hard for so long had, in a way, the best four or five months of his life: commanding our full attention, being at the center of everything we did or planned, always with us, always loved.

Fly to the spirit world; the others are waiting to guide you home, Gagaagishiinh. We love you, sweet Raven.



All content, including photos and text, are copyright Aji, 2019; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.