Call Me E.

Call Me E.
all stories and essays by Sean Rein

Every Boy Should Have a Dog

I got my dog on February 1, 1997. She was a Chesapeake Bay Retriever that I rescued from the Humane Society.

She was actually my second choice that day. They had a Black Labrador / Great Dane mix that seemed very friendly and unique looking. I walked up to his cage to let him out for a walk and he jumped higher than my head in all of the excitement. I quickly shut the cage on him and began looking for someone else.

Then I found her. All of the other dogs in the kennel were going nuts. They were all barking and bouncing off the walls when I walked by, except for her. Sammy was her name back then and she just sat there next to the cage door and stared up at me with those sad, yellow puppy eyes. With as calm as she was, I figured that she was the right dog for me.

When my daughter and I got her home, she needed two things—a bath and a new name. Sammy wasn't going to cut it. I could not have a dog named Sammy.

This was the cause for much debate in my household and none of us could agree. I liked Chewbacca and my wife liked Snake because of how sneaky she was.

Did I mention that she was a sneaky little shit. She slept through the first night and then turned our house upside down the next day. An eight-month old dog is still very much a puppy. Mine was a sixty-pound puppy that chewed on everything and inhaled her food like she hadn't eaten in a week. Two cups of dog chow would be consumed in 15 seconds. Then, you better get her ass outside. It was like my father always says, "Big dog, big piles."

After two weeks of name debate my wife finally settled on a name. The dog watched every move that I made and if I got up to do something, she would follow me throughout the house. If I went to use the bathroom, she would wait outside the door until I was done and then follow me back to the living room.

My wife named her Shadow.

I loved this dog. I had never seen one so loyal to its owner. This wasn't a family dog, this was my dog, and I knew that her loyalty was due to the fact that I was the one who opened the cage and sprung her.

She turned out to be such a good dog in her later years that I almost don't remember what a little shit she was for that first year. If she didn't get a walk that day, she would run around the house and jump up on your lap while you tried to watch TV.

We had an old loveseat that we put on the porch for her to sleep on while we were gone, and it only took two weeks for her to strip it down to the bare springs. In the middle of the night, she would jump up on the bed and drop a half eaten loaf of Wonder Bread on your head.

We had an old kitchen chair on the porch and I came home to find one corner of the back chewed up. I can only assume that she sat on the seat and chewed on the back while she waited for me to come home from work.

She did mellow with time and turned out to be a natural for upland game hunting (which is the main reason that I got a hunting dog). If she got too far out in front of you, one whistle stopped her in her tracks and she wouldn't move until you told her it was okay. In fact, she turned out to be a better sniff hound than her owner was at shooting. Several times she'd kick up a pheasant, I'd miss, and she would just give me a look as if to say, "What the hell am I working this hard for if you're going to fucking miss."

We had her for a little more than three years when we noticed that her left eye didn't look right. It was caved-in looking and it didn't seem like she could see out of it. The veterinarian at the University of Minnesota told us that she had ocular scleritis. The retina had detached and if the eye wasn't removed soon it would spread to her brain and kill her. Seven hundred dollars later, I had a one-eyed dog.

The surgery was in September of that year, and I waited until the stitches came out four weeks later to take her out for a day of hunting. She was as excited about it as ever. I don't know what she enjoyed more: the smells and running around in fields and woods or the stop at Hardee's where she got the egg off of my sausage and egg biscuits.

As she got older, she slept more. Nothing beats an older dog; they eat, sleep, and fart. She also became less of a daddy's girl and started obeying my wife more. This was fine with me, and from her perspective, we should have always had a "family" dog.

Shadow was very good in her middle age. Aside from the occasional eye problem that we were always quick to catch, she was a model dog. My brothers would bring their small children over and Shadow was always tolerant of them. In fact, the smaller the child, the gentler she was.

Old age snuck up on her pretty fast, and by the fall of 2004, her muzzle was graying and while she still got excited for a hunting trip, she did not have the stamina. On one trip, I brought Shadow and my father. My dog was 8 and my father was 71. Every ten minutes, I had to stop while my old father and my old dog caught their breath. When we got home, I told my dog that if she could not go hunting anymore, then I wouldn't either.

Two weeks ago, my dog wasn't acting normal. She wasn't eating and when you were in the kitchen, rustling potato chip bags, she would not come running to demand her share of the snack.

My wife took her to the vet to get her checked out. It was kidney failure and her condition got worse every day.

On March 21st, she could hardly walk and couldn't keep food down, so we did the right thing and put her down.

She was the perfect dog.

I miss my best friend.