Wild Dog (Part I: Miss Mollie)

By TAD BARTIMUS

When you lose a dog you've loved a piece of you gets buried alongside the chewed shoes, the knotted tug-of-war socks, the blanket that survived a thousand washings. You sob so much your chest hurts. You know you will never love another animal in the same way.

One cold autumn night Mollie was fine, wagging her tail and prancing off to chase whatever it was she'd smelled in the dark as we stood admiring the stars. Life was normal, we were happy. The next morning she couldn't stand.

Kneeling on the veterinarian's floor, looking into those bright brown eyes that always looked straight back into mine, I barely heard the words "stroke" "tumor" "terminal."

"Let's give it 24 hours," he said kindly.

One more day. We had just one more day with this devoted creature my husband had pulled from a box of puppies in the back of a hippie's Volkswagen as she stopped at a street light on her way to the Humane Society. What was to become Miss Mollie was a black-and-white puff ball back then, the merest hint of the queenly Border collie to come.

For 13 years she'd been a soft neck to cry into, a noble head to pet, a warm body to hold as we struggled to make sense of a lost baby, dying parents, a chronic illness. Miss Mollie of the dainty kisses, the 200-word vocabulary, the ecstatic greeting was -- without warning -- being paralyzed by something in her brain.

We stayed up together all night, the humans trying vainly to hold the dying dog on her numb feet. She stopped eating. She wouldn't drink. We dribbled water into her mouth; it dribbled out. We took her outside for one last feel of rain, one last sniff of dark. Her tail didn't move.

She began to pant, imploring us with her eyes to "Help me! Help me!" We took turns weeping and holding her. We faced reality; we had to end this suffering.

At dawn we pleaded with the vet to come to our house. A parade of friends – hers as well as ours – got down on their knees next to her pallet beside the fireplace and crooned her name. One brought a rabbit's foot to remind her of good times; another smeared mashed bits of salmon on her fingers and was rewarded with Mollie's last lick.

I turned my head away as the vet loaded the syringe. I took my beloved friend in my arms, cradling her as I would have the lost child. My husband sat an inch in front of us so Mollie could see his face, too.

"It's okay, darling girl, you're going ahead to scout the trail," I told her, feeling her full weight as she struggled to hold her head up. "We'll be along soon. You find a nice shady spot and wait for us."

Her muzzle was next to my cheek. I could feel her breath. Our eyes locked together. The needle flashed in the morning sun. We said, over and over, "We love you, Mollie, we love you, Mollie, we love you?"

The light in her eyes went out. For a few seconds I was sure I would never breathe again. My husband covered his face. The great mystery of where she'd gone overwhelmed us.

Just as the vet was closing his car door to take her away from our rented city apartment I changed my mind and removed the collar with its jingling tags. "Mollie music," we'd called it. The tinkling had heralded her constancy for as long as we could remember.

When we picked up the pretty little blue tin with her ashes in it a few days later I put it and the collar in the bottom drawer of my dresser, vowing not to bury them until we had a big tree of our own to put her under. Four years later we'd settled down for good. My husband promised, "We'll get another Border collie." I knew it wouldn't be Miss Mollie, but as long as the puppy looked like her I could pretend it was her spirit.

Then Dean found the wild dog in the dumpster ...

(TO BE CONTINUED NEXT WEEK)

© Copyright 1998-2000 The Women Syndicate. The content on these pages is the property of The Women Syndicate and may not be used without express permission. Contact friends@tadbartimus.com