Spring                                                                              Wedding Moon

Grief causes disorientation and a slowing sluggish feeling to seep into the bones, making movement lethargic, mildly chaotic. We will shed more tears for the loss of Vega, for the absence of her and they will cleanse us, help us see her again, not as a source of dread, but of joy.

For that was her essence. Joy. Her joy came from a pure delight in the world that greeted her each day. The morning! Food! Mom’s homemade treats! The couch! That squirrel! Those dogs over there! She lived her life following her own design, opening doors, declaring bedtime, rousing us by barking when we’d slept too long. In her opinion.

She had so much in her that I thought this morning of that African proverb I’ve quoted before: When an old man dies, a library burns to the ground. Just so with Vega. Her exquisite timing, her problem solving ability.

And those holes she and her sister Rigel dug co-operatively. Exasperating, yes, but magnificent in their depth. And even more magnificent in the cooperation between these littermates. One would dig, furiously moving the sand of the Great Anoka Sand plain with their front paws, the other resting nearby. Then, when the digger would tire, the resting dog would climb into the hole and begin to dig. Furiously. Repeat. Astonishing how much sand the two of them move.

They hunted together, too. Early on they dug a hole deep beneath a partially downed tree and barked up into its hollowed trunk. Barked and barked and barked. Up there, I discovered, was a tiny, frightened baby opossum. Here’s a picture.

On another day they confronted a snapping turtle making its slow way across our woods to Round Lake, quite a distance away. That didn’t go well. For Vega and Rigel. When the turtle returned after Kate had deposited it outside the fence, the sisters barked at it, but from a safe distance this time. Rigel still has a faint pink scar on her nose.

There was the land beaver, too, a woodchuck, treed high above our back lawn in the top of a sand cherry.

Vega loved the water. We had a rubber tub, one used to feed livestock, but small, maybe two feet in diameter, perhaps a little more. In the summers we would fill it with water so all the dogs could have water outside to drink. Vega, almost as soon as the cool water from our well had swirled to the top of the tub, would plunk down in it, curl herself up, fitting her large body to a too small space, and relax. Displacing over half the water, of course.

These are the moments, the daily work, of a dog. In the evenings she would claim a couch or a chair, relaxing with us as we read or watched TV. Often she would rest her head in our laps, that closeness enough for the quiet sort of joy that comes after a hard day of barking at baby opossums, digging holes, displacing water.

She is irreplaceable. Unique. A dog of story. I’ll remember her surprising me by opening the back door with only one leg after amputation. And by climbing the outside stairs to my loft, coming up to visit, even after the amputation.

Vega had, as Kate said, heart.

Spring                                                                   Wedding Moon

She died of a cardiac arrhythmia. Not uncommon after bloat, apparently. The twisting of the intestine puts out a lot of different chemicals in the blood that can stress the heart.

A sweet girl from the first time we saw her, attached to a ten foot stick with six of her siblings, racing around the breeders yard in unison, her reason for being was to love and be loved. Her gentle intelligence and stubborn determination made her a dog whose memory will last as long as we do.

We drove over to Sano and saw her, said good-bye. Necessary. Good. Sad. Unbelievably sad. Many tears.

Her sister, Rigel, Gertie our German Shorthair and Kepler, who will leave us in June or early July remain.

Spring                                                                             Wedding Moon

Over at Bergen Bark Inn in Evergreen we picked up the dogs. Gertie pulled the leash from hand she was so eager to get in the truck. Rigel bounded in. Kepler came up to me, rose up on his hind legs and greeted me with his gentle eyes.

Vega was reluctant. This didn’t surprise us. After our Latin American cruise she refused to look at us or greet us for some time. When we brought her home, she was slow getting out of the truck and only came into the house as far as the entry rug where she lay down.

I fed them, took some food over to Vega and she didn’t want it. Again, we thought she was sulking. A bit later I went back out to give her a treat. Her belly looked bigger than normal. They couldn’t have overfed that much at the Bergen Bark Inn. Could they? I felt her belly and it was distended, tight like a drumhead.

When Kate went out to check on her, she came back and said, “She’s going to need to be seen.” This is our second day back from Asia and only a half hour after we’d brought the dogs home. Kate called Sano Vet Hospital and got an appointment for after their lunch hour, which had started at 1. The appointment was at two.

April, the vet tech who was a former flight medic, called back ten minutes later and said, “Bring her in now.”

When we got to Sano, four young women dressed in blue came out, picked Vega up and swiftly carried her into the operating room. They love her after the struggle to keep her alive post amputation and spoke kindly to her. Vega weighs 100 pounds so this was not an easy task.

She had bloat. This is a canine emergency caused by a literal twist of the gut. The twisting causes blood flow to be cut off to the portions of the intestinal system below the place where the torquing occurs. The stomach and the intestines can become necrotic, their tissue can die.

Solution? Surgery. Palmini goes in, untwists the organs, then tacks the stomach to the abdominal wall so this can’t happen again. She’s resting well at Sano through the weekend, getting the sort of complex aftercare that we couldn’t provide here even with Kate’s medical skills.

Bad luck, as physicians say. Damned bad luck. But it looks like she’ll be ok.