AncienTrails

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.