Dogs are not one of my favorite creatures. They pant and drool and chase the deer from the mountain meadow behind our house and scare the wild turkeys away from the seed offerings I place on the hillside. For those reasons, we prefer to live in our cabin without one.
But, on the morning of the memorial for our oldest daughter, a mixed-breed bitch, who was predominately pit bull and belonged to a neighbor, decided to protect us. She chased something around the edge of our eight-sided home at 3 AM. Her bark could be heard bouncing between the boulders of the ravine in which we live. We hollered. We pitched stones. We cussed. She would slink away, then return to warn off invisible attackers.
During the following weeks, for some reason known only to her, she wouldn’t go away, wouldn’t release her sudden protective hold on our property. We called her owner who dragged her away, but, every day, she arrived and begged for some kind of understanding, it seemed, with her eyes. She reminded me of our oldest daughter, who had left and returned so many times in the course of her life. For this reason and more, the dog broke my heart as she whimpered when we told her to leave, only to return the next day for whatever attention we would give.
I couldn’t get over the feeling that this white and scarred dog had a purpose; one I didn’t know anything about. I wondered, because of the timing, if she might have a message for us from our daughter, one last word to pass on before her spirit loosened from this world after making sure we would be OK without her.
After two months of her staring at us through the sliding glass window and loudly chasing anything that moved near the house, I decided, one night, not to make her leave. I found comfort in her even snoring that rose from under the house. I drew around me the energy blanket of her presence and sent a grateful prayer for her existence.
In the morning, she was gone and hasn’t returned
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