A Dog's Life

Yesterday, we said good-bye to our best furry friend.  Little Bit was 13 ½ years old.  Just before Christmas she had been diagnosed with canine lymphoma and we weren’t sure she’d make it through that holiday. 

All her life she had the misconception that she was a cat.  This proved helpful in the end.  I swear she went through the majority of her nine lives in the past 3 months.  She’d start waning and we’d try to prepare for the inevitable.  Then, after a serving of Alpo and a steroid pill, she’d bounce back and be nearly her old puppy self again for a while.  (We figured out that too much Alpo was not necessarily a good thing….  For more perspective on this, backtrack to the Luau entry from late January.)

This past weekend, Little Bit accompanied us north to Fairbanks and the Chena Hot Springs.  She was great on the long van ride up there.  The reason we’d brought her was that our usual dog-sitter neighbors recently moved away and Tess was going to be out-of-state.   She seemed happy to be coming along for the ride rather than being left at home anyway. 

We drove north on Thursday, planning to return home late on Saturday.  It was midday on Saturday, when Bit abruptly went downhill.  We came out of a restaurant where we’d gotten a quick lunch to find her immobile on one of the van seats.  She did not want to budge.  We budged her finally and made her as comfy as we could for the long drive back to our house in Chugiak. 

She didn’t improve or bounce back over the course of the following day.  We decided that the time had finally come for us to make that hardest decision faced by all good pet owners.  I truly believe she was ready.  And I was really glad we’d been able to share one last hurrah with our furry friend.

We awoke Monday morning to the sight of northern lights dancing wildly overhead.  Perhaps they were calling Bit home… 

I have a friend at work who has 2 dogs.  One is big and the other is small.  He believes his dogs look at each other and think they must look the same as that other dog.  Only the big one attempts to climb up into your lap.  The smaller one is sure he’s too big for such an act.  I think this is possibly why Bit thought she might be a cat, or at least small enough to be a lap dog.  She grew up with a feline roommate for most of her life.  (Of course, the cat, being a cat, wasn’t ever fooled into believing he was anything but a superior feline species.)  She, the dog, took endless cat naps, would attempt to commune with the cat, and even bathed herself like the cat.

Sleeping was her all-time favorite past-time.  She never met a sunbeam she didn’t like.  Another favorite spot was snuggled up in front of the woodstove. 

She also enjoyed a good walk.  That’s not to say she was good at taking walks.  She was actually a pretty awful walking dog.  She’d stop to pee every 3 feet.  To the point where you’d wonder where she was retaining her reservoir of pee.  She never learned to follow commands well.  She basically did her own thing.

When we lived in New York, her “own thing” often included trotting off to the ice cream caboose down the hill from our house.  Being built like a greyhound with a slim rear quadrant, people often mistook her for being starved.  She’d sucker people out of hotdogs and ice cream cones until we could track her down.  The caboose was always the first place we’d look when we discovered she’d run off.

Bit was born a deer hunting dog in South Carolina.  Being the runt of the litter, she was taken home from the hunting club and raised as a spoiled lap dog.  She did try hunting on occasion.  But once she heard the other dogs baying at the deer in the woods, she’d make her way back to Stephen’s truck, curl up and take a nap. 

What she lacked in hunting skills, she made up for in other good dog qualities.  For instance, she was a world-class dog treat scammer.  She’d rush out of the house in the morning to go to the bathroom and then return inside to receive her dog treat.  Then, when the next person woke up, she’d pretend she hadn’t been outside yet and attempt to repeat the process.  We eventually caught on.

While it saddens us greatly that she is gone.  She truly led an adventurous life.  Starting with her hunt club origins, she went from fishing with alligators in SC, to ice cream forays in NY,  on to exploring the Blue Ridge in VA.  From there, she rode cross country via minivan and a 3-day ferry ride to move to Alaska where she’d spend the latter half of her life rolling in the snow, meeting the local moose hoof population, and snoozing by the woodstove.  She’s had a dog’s life and she made the most of it.

We will miss her.