Chicken Soup for the Cat and Dog Lover's Soul

  She looked about six again. I gathered her into my arms and wonderfully she didn’t resist. We stood together, looking at the tree, feeling our love for Starry and for each other.

  Our charming, nose-nipping cat was gone, but now Starry, the Christmas angel, would be a part of our family tradition for years to come.

  Sometimes you can make your own miracles.

  Pamela S. Zurer

  Shorty

  It doesn’t seem like that long ago, but it has been nineteen years since a little ball of joy (and fluff) came into my life and changed it forever. I was working for a property management firm in San Francisco and was asked to relocate to Texas to oversee an apartment complex there.

  Soon after my wife Linda and I arrived, the building maintenance man discovered a little mutt in a recently vacated apartment. The dog was in a closed closet with no food or water. The maintenance man and his wife were unable to keep her, so Linda asked me if we could do so. “Just for a little while,” I reluctantly agreed, but added, “just for a few days.”

  I nicknamed the dog Shorty. And Shorty took to me like you wouldn’t believe. She followed me everywhere. She was closer than a shadow and when she lay beside me on the couch or in bed you couldn’t get a dime between us. Both Linda and I quickly knew that a “little while” was going to become a lifetime.

  When our time in Texas came to an end, we returned to San Francisco where Shorty adjusted to being a city dog.

  We’d take her to the park and for walks around town, but it wasn’t the same as when she and I went running out in the fields together just enjoying the day and one another. That was truly our favorite time.

  In San Francisco, Shorty learned how to play baseball. She absolutely loved it. Linda pitched, I hit and Shorty fielded the ball. She would catch it in the air or at the most on one hop, trot up to Linda, give her the ball and then run back to the outfield and bark as if to let us know she was ready for more.

  As time went on, Linda wished she had a dog that was as devoted to her as Shorty was to me. So one day we went to the SPCA. Sitting in the back of a cage was a terrier-mix a little bigger than Shorty but with the same coloring. He had the biggest brown eyes and was just begging to be taken home. And he was.

  Shorty and Buddy took to each other from the beginning and people used to think they were brother and sister.

  Some years later, we rented a little house with a fence and room for Shorty and Buddy to play in. By then in her old age, Shorty started losing her teeth, and her tongue used to hang out of the side of her mouth. She also lost her sight and her hearing.

  But Buddy became her eyes and ears. He knew that when Shorty went to the front door and barked once, the way she had always done, she wanted to go outside. But now she needed assistance, and Buddy knew exactly what to do. He would take her ear in his mouth and gently guide her down the steps to the lawn where he would lie down and watch her roaming around smelling everything she could. When she was ready to come into the house, Shorty would stand motionless, bark once and again Buddy would go to her, take her ear and guide her up the stairs to her bed.

  One evening the door was open, and Shorty somehow made it down the stairs unattended but she collapsed at the bottom. I carried her to her bed and she lay there for a day whimpering, just as she had seventeen years earlier in that dark closet. I told Linda that it looked like it was about time.

  Linda knew what I meant and nodded. We took Shorty to the vet that night and as expected there wasn’t anything that she could do. She helped us feel better by asking us to think of all the positive things that Shorty had brought into our lives. I will always feel grateful for that.

  I decided to remain with Shorty. The vet left us alone in a room, and I stood just stroking her. I think we both gathered some comfort in being with each other. When it was over I cradled her, not ever wanting to let her go.

  Linda and I had Shorty cremated and today her ashes and her picture sit atop our dresser.

  When the time comes, I’ve requested that I too be cremated. And Linda has promised me that she will scatter my ashes, together with those of Shorty, in the biggest field she can find.

  Then Shorty and I will go running together once again.

  Larry Monk

  [EDITORS’ NOTE: Larry Monk passed away suddenly just three weeks after writing this story. In accordance with his wish, Linda Monk scattered Shorty’s ashes, along with her husband’s, in one of their favorite fields.]

  Prince’s Golden Season

  I first met Prince on a dark Thanksgiving Eve eight years ago when I returned from the city for the long weekend and went as always to feed my daughter’s mare. Following a few steps behind the mare came a giant face out of the darkness, a head hanging like a broken branch from a crane-like neck, a concave back and a pace so slow that each step seemed painful. I had no idea how he got there, this caricature of a horse, nor where he should have been.

  “It must be Prince,” my daughter Jeremy said as we left him with a wafer of hay at his feet, his great neck lowering slowly. “My riding teacher told me about him. His owners are going to sell him at next week’s auction. They’ve already stopped feeding him.”

  At sunrise on Thanksgiving I went to the corral to look at Prince. There, between me and the rising sun, he was even more incongruous. His color was orange, his winter coat long and standing out from his body, his sagging back holding the ball of the new sun. His face was camel-like below a straw-colored forelock, and his eyes, even as I approached, were tightly closed, as if another morning was too much to face. Tear streaks marked crooked paths along his nose. He walked only when absolutely necessary with an arthritic stiffness, and his conformation by any human measure of horse beauty was hopelessly wrong.

  Over the long weekend, Jeremy and I fed and groomed Prince with gentle hands he seemed to enjoy. He accepted his first carrot, his private pile of hay with cautious disbelief. We called our blacksmith who put shoes on his front hooves to even out his sloping posture and to relieve the painful tilt caused by too much weight in front.

  Of course, we could not just keep the horse. Nor could we return him to owners so utterly uninterested in his welfare. I called to find out what price he would have brought from bidders at the auction. The answer came quickly; Prince’s price was $112. At the end of Jeremy’s Saturday riding lesson I gave a check to her teacher. (I never knew nor wanted to know the identity of Prince’s owners.)

  As the winter weeks passed, Prince began to change. Doggedly he followed Jeremy’s mare up and down the pasture, deeply in love. Now his eyes were open, russet pools in his barren homely face, and he stepped a little faster to keep up. He still looked like a huge, shaggy toy; a horse exaggerated for a laugh, but he held his head higher, he swished his tail as if it mattered, and the rows of his ribs, which once had corduroyed his flanks, began to disappear.

  In March our mare gave birth to a pure white colt in a drenching rain. It was our firstborn horse, a memorable event for my daughter and me, but a much more satisfying one for Prince. Although gelded, Prince was certain the colt was his, and fatherhood became the final miracle. Now he led the mare, guided the wobbling colt and walked tall. It was he who chose their path, the patch of shade at noon, the green puddle of burr clover. He also found his voice, a deep ahem, and at mealtimes he rattled the aluminum gate with one shoe, impatient if we were late.

  As his adopted son grew strong and challenging, Prince took over his discipline, never bothering to chase him, for nothing was worth the hurry, but administering necessary nips along the way. There was no longer any doubt that he had been properly named long ago when someone’s hopes for him were high.

  As the days of spring warmed, his winter coat fell away in tufts, each to be carried off to line the nests of larks and red-wing blackbirds. He put up with little girls straddling his scooped-out back and now and then would carry them a few steps before stopping to close his eyes.

  And so he lived, a once-again Prince, his self-respect
restored, his days of ignominy long forgotten. He suffered Saturday shampoos, standing in a cloud of suds, feeling the squirt of the hose, drying off by noon. He stood long hours at the fence corner gazing off toward the mountains, then resting his chin on a fence post to nap. Caught for a moment each evening between me and the setting sun, he seemed a golden horse, a misshapen Pegasus pausing between heavenly adventures.

  I returned early from a trip last summer to find Prince noticeably thinner. Tests revealed the presence of worms, which were quickly eliminated, but his weight continued to drop. A rich diet of mixed grains and molasses was added, served three times a day in a bread pan to fit his jaws. Still he shrunk before my eyes, his ribs reappearing, the sag of his back emphasizing the emerging crags of his quarters. He still walked toward me, but he allowed me to do most of the walking, and he chewed each mouthful with less and less enthusiasm. The pill he now took once a day, powdered and mixed with his grain, had no effect. He spent his days in deep grass seldom reaching down to graze, and more and more I saw his eyes turned toward the mountains far away. I spoke quietly at such times, reminding him how fortunate we both were, reassuring him that all would be well. He, as I, knew better.

  The great orange horse was fading before my eyes, and nothing I did made any difference. His mare and colt stayed near, but they seemed forgotten. He seemed already to have left them. His tear streaks lengthened, and as I dried them with my sleeve to keep the flies away, he bowed his head to allow me to scratch his forelock.

  On a morning in mid-October, Prince returned to the corral and lay down at last. By then he was the shadow horse I had seen long ago. He could not raise his head to nibble at the sweet-smelling breakfast I brought, and I called John, my friend and veterinarian, who skipped his own breakfast to come to us. There in the corral Prince went to sleep. It was all we could do for him, a gentle push toward the mountains he now could climb.

  We who choose to surround ourselves with lives even more temporary than our own live within a fragile circle, easily and often breached. Yet, we still would live no other way. The life of a horse, often half our own, seems endless until one day. That day has come and gone for me, and I am once again within a smaller circle, still unable to believe that this evening I will not see Prince against the setting sun, head lowered, eyes half closed, tail a golden fall. He was, and is again, a prince to us.

  Irving Townsend

  Hondo

  The one best place to bury a good dog is in the heart of his master.

  Ben Hur Lampman

  The years have aged Hondo; the winter has taken its toll. Spring snows thaw and summer flowers bloom, but for Hondo, only one season remains.

  Our old black Lab has been unable to climb the deck for three days. He sleeps in the shady grass beneath a tree. We have carried his rug onto the grass, and he rests there. The cast-iron skillet that has been his food dish for more years than I can remember is next to him. But this morning he no longer tries to lift his head. He will not drink; he cannot eat.

  I bring a currycomb up from the barn and sit on the grass next to Hondo. He has not completely shed his winter coat. Clumps of dusty gray fur come loose. We talk. I pretend he hears me, holding his head in my hands and kissing his forehead. I lift a paw and gently touch the cracked, hard pads of his feet.

  Our lives revolve around his dying. We are given the weekend, days we can be home together. I pull a clump of Hondo’s hair from the comb and toss it into the breeze. The wind snatches the hair, carrying the clump away, past the driveway and into the tall grass.

  Vivid scenes of Hondo over the years come to mind— Hondo sitting sentry in the front yard for two days, waiting for my husband Mark to return from fighting forest fires; Hondo and my daughter, Sarah, lying curled up together, like two leaves from a single tree; Hondo and Matt, my son, splashing together in the shallow stock pond, lunging at slick tadpoles.

  And the two of us? The puppy I once cradled in my arms taught me to follow the deer trails, to listen to the call of the red-tailed hawk, to catch the smell of sage in the moaning wind. I learned to appreciate the smell of freshly turned earth, of damp fibrous roots, of sodden wood alive with insects.

  The rain comes, large single drops that splash against the windows and the leaves of the trees. They fall on Hondo but he does not move, only blinks his eyes. I go down to the barn again and find an old horse blanket and lay it on top of him. He wags his tail and blinks again.

  Mark helps me carry the picnic table to the lawn. We carefully set it over Hondo, making a shelter for him.

  “Should we carry him inside?” I ask Mark.

  “I think he is where he wants to be.”

  Later, looking through the window, the rain has stopped and I see Mark sitting on the grass next to Hondo. The horse blanket moves slightly as Hondo lifts his tail. Mark rests his hand on Hondo’s head. He rubs behind the ears. They sit, man and dog, best of friends, constant companions.

  During the course of the day Matt and Sarah stop to sit beside Hondo, each in turn, in their own time. Matt lies down next to him. Sarah lifts the blanket and strokes him.

  By bedtime Hondo is sleeping quietly beneath the horse blanket, which covers all but his head. Our private good-byes have been spoken, our private tears shed.

  Twinges of guilt tug at me, thinking maybe we should bring Hondo inside to sleep by our bed. But somehow we cannot confine him to four walls. We cannot bring ourselves to hide the stars from his eyes. We want the moonbeams to guide him to the heavens and the night crickets to lull him to sleep.

  Dawn comes. Light pink colors the eastern sky. Dewdrops perch upon the grass blades. I sit on the wet grass in my nightgown. Hondo has just taken his last breath. I lay my head upon his massive chest, where his devoted heart now lies still, and I breathe his familiar dog-scent one last time.

  When the sun has risen, and the early-morning songs of the chickadees and the robins and the bluebirds have quieted, I pull the old horse blanket completely over Hondo and go in the house.

  Later, we carry Hondo to the grave.

  “Mom, I want to pick some flowers for him,” Sarah says. She scoots away in search of anything wild and pretty.

  Matt wants to find a stick. “Would that be a good thing to bury with him?” he asks.

  “Yes, Matt,” Mark answers with a quavering voice, “a very good thing.”

  Sarah returns with wild dandelions, a few long purple asters, lots of white yarrow, two bluebell stalks and red clover blossoms.

  “How are these, Mom? They’re the prettiest I could find.”

  Matt returns with a smooth weathered stick about twelve inches long.

  “It’s perfect,” Mark nods his head.

  The four of us circle Hondo’s grave and hold hands. Out loud, we take turns saying a short prayer.

  “Dear God,” Matt asks simply, “please take Hondo to heaven and make him young again.”

  We place a large heavy stone on top of the mound of dirt, and Sarah tucks her remaining flowers under the rim of the rock.

  It is done.

  We turn to go, walking shoulder to shoulder, lost in our own memories. As we pass the corner of the barnyard, Mark slows his pace and turns away. I hear a gut-deep, heartrending sob escape his tough exterior. Mark is leaning on the corner post of the fence that surrounds the barnyard, great sobs shaking his manly frame, and though I have seen tears discreetly spill from Mark’s eyes before, this is only the second time I have ever seen such anguish escape him.

  The next few days were as illusive as shadows. Then one late afternoon, fog enveloped the ranch. Mark and the kids were gone, so it was my night to do chores. I went to bring in the sheep and followed the fence, eventually coming to where they grazed. Like a shepherd’s staff, my voice reached through the fog and urged them on until finally the grayness of the barn emerged—a port in the storm.

  Once the sheep were safely corralled, I eased my way up the path. I searched the fog, wanting Hondo to glide through it and stand by m
y side. My hand reached out instinctively to pet his glossy blackness but found nothing to cling to—only the whiteness, and my grief.

  Then, very quietly at first, I heard myself call him—a thin, high-pitched wail floated across the field, lengthening and thickening in the fog.

  Hooonnndooo.

  The ridge caught my cry, held it for a moment, then returned it to me—softer, partly absorbed, not totally mine any longer. And from somewhere in the white, colorless distance, a coyote answered.

  Page Lambert

  A Gentle Good-Bye

  She was, if possible, dearer in her decrepit old

  age than in her radiant youth. . . . Calmly she

  accepted her infirmities, depending upon me with implicit faith.

  Eileen Gardner Galer

  Several years after my mother was widowed, she decided a cat would be the perfect companion. Since I shared my home with two cats, I was considered the feline expert. When my veterinarian told me about a litter of six-week-old kittens that had been dropped off on his clinic steps, I helped my mother pick out the perfect kitten, whom she named Cameo. From that point on, the sun rose and set on this black and white cat, who, unlike my cats, could do no wrong. Cameo quickly became my mother’s pride and joy.

  For the next eight years, Cameo lived as an only cat. Since Mommala and I lived near each other, we frequently exchanged visits and cat-sitting chores. When I visited Mommala accompanied by my golden retriever guide dog Ivy, Cameo would go into hiding as soon as we entered the apartment. After being unharnessed and unleashed, Ivy would go looking for a playmate, but Cameo would retreat further under the bed.

  During my frequent travels, my two cats stayed at Mommala’s house, and the three cats established a comfortable relationship. However, when Mommala traveled and Cameo came to stay with us, her shyness caused her to spend much of the time behind the stove or on the closet shelf. Frequently, the only sign of her presence was the emptied food bowl I set out for her at night while keeping the other cats enclosed in my bedroom. Although Ivy was gentle with cats, Cameo never learned to be comfortable around her.