Tribute

There aren't any words, for me, that completely define my anguish over losing my friend.  Tom Reed, however, does a far better job of it than I can.  I don't know Tom, but it sure sounds like he knows me.

Tom writes for one of my favorite blogs, Mouthful Of Feathers.  And here he writes of parting with his dog pal.  Maybe your heart has to be similarly broken to fully appreciate his tribute, but I doubt it.

From The Other:

There are humans, though, who at a minimum understand Beston’s other nation. They may even live there. Perhaps. Many are my friends. Hunting men mostly, men who hunt because they have a dog and if they did not partner with a canine, they would find no pleasure in walking an autumn field with a shotgun no matter how much they enjoyed the taste of roasted pheasant. They certainly would find the cliffs and crags and rough tough of the chukar partridge much more empty. Perhaps they would draw upon the wildness and raw beauty of the desert, but without a dog pal the picture would be incomplete like Mona Lisa without her smile. Can an old woman with a Peekapoo experience the same kind of other plane, that melding of human and dog mind into a mutual understanding that transcends verbal language? Perhaps. But I think not. The reason is quarry. There is something very different about an animal that lives to hunt for you, that pursues what you pursue. You are caught up in a mutual joy of the hunt, a mutual drive that sinks deep to the soul into the core, the heart, the bone, the very cells that make up a living creature. This is in our DNA, those of us who hunt. I am sure that dogs that hunted held a different status in the ancient nomadic tribes of which we are rooted than dogs that plodded along at heel, eating food and in the end becoming food. Each type of dog—the food hunter and the food “on the hoof” certainly played a role in the survival, but it was hunting dog that actually earned its keep by living, not dying.

Much of my life has been defined by the deaths of others, and there's no getting used to it.  I'm lost and alone without my dog pal, and the world is an infinitely colder place.

For Reed, it was blistering hot in Montana while he dug the grave for his dog.  For my digging, the day after Christmas, the ground was frozen over with snow.

It's snowing again, now.