Journal

This goofy faced border collie and I had been nearly inseparable for eleven years, but I knew it wouldn't be kind to keep him here much longer when the cancer made drinking and eating painful for him.

On the day I finally decided it was time, I took Bud alone on a long slow walk through the Green Belt, a walk him and I had done several thousand times together.

We went down along the river, where a fox watched us from beneath some willow and river birch shrubs, which got Bud mildly excited. We crossed over the high road by the firefly cattail marsh, down under the eleven cottonwoods by the frog pond, through the bromegrass meadow, and up the woodland path to 38th street.

I then walked Bud the short way to the shopping center and Petsmart, another place he loved because he knew he could go in and pick out his own dog treats. Bud choose a bacon-flavored chewbone this time. I paid for it and carried it as we walked home together a last time.

At the vets office Bud’s Doctor told me I was doing the right thing for him – that he would not last much longer and I was sparing his last days being filled with pain and slow suffocation from the cancer.

I pressed my face against Bud’s nose and rubbed his ears and talked to him while she gave him the shot. He kept his loving eyes fixed on me and I could not detect when he left, until the doctor checked and told me his heart had stopped.

It was not easy to say goodbye to a dog that I was told sat at the top of our stairs for a week watching the door for my return, a dog that clearly was home wherever I was, be it our tree-shaded house in Wheat Ridge or a tent set up on an alpine plateau 1000 feet above timberline.

I wrote my daughters that I stayed with Bud and got to see him off to heaven and he knew how much I loved him till his last moment, and that the same was true for me - he never did close his eyes, just kept looking at me with devotion til he was gone.

A week later I took my two remaining Border Collies, Ben and Maggie, on a backpack trip to Lost Creek Wilderness Area and camped on a high South facing slope at the base of huge granite cliffs, a placed warmed by the Southern February Sun, and the spot where Bud and I had camped at a year ago January. On the second morning I stood on the rocks Bud liked to sit on and watch the valley from, and spread some of his ashes into the breeze, which drifted over the rock and down into the tall Ponderosa Pine.

A friend told me she had read something about shaman journey that said our beloved dogs accompany us on our remaining walk through life. That is something that is pretty tough to know much about, but her words came to my mind as I was hiking last week, and I enjoyed the thought of my Bud and old Wolf together happy and full of energy behind me on the trail through the mountains.

Of course my hope is the same of most dog lovers whose pets have gone on before them, which is when it becomes time for me to experience the mystery of my life ending, that these two guys will be waiting to greet me