TWINKLE'S CHRISTMAS - A Rescue Story
New
Year’s Eve 1999: The sun was just
going down, and the moon, half full, was well above the horizon.
There was enough snow on the ground to render it uniformly white, and the
cold was bitter. Bundled in many layers, I walked to the back of our seven
acres, to the remains of an old stone wall that I had tried to rebuild somewhat
when we first moved here. She used
to lie there and watch me work, her expression saying that while I might be her
goddess, my ways were certainly unfathomable at times.
True
twilight had arrived, and the sky had a pale, pearl-pastel quality.
For some reason, there was no traffic noise, and the cold air had a
still, expectant, almost breathless feel.
Two
years ago tonight, I had extended her the final kindness, and sent her on, past
her losing battle with cancer. She
was almost twelve, a decent age for a dog, but I
sometimes felt we’d been cheated of our final years together.
I paused for a moment, feeling like an utter idiot, then called softly
(too softly for our neighbors , or anyone in the house to hear), “Isabeau?”
There
was only silence for a moment. Then
off in the distance, very faint, I heard a bark.
One single bark. I pondered
for a moment on all the dogs in the area-the two Jack Russells next door, the
Labs, the Chow , the Goldens, the Shepherds, all on the road to Keene.
It was probably one of them. Though....it
certainly hadn’t sounded like a Jack Russell, or any kind of big dog at
all......I shook myself, smiled a little at a foolish fancy, and took my frozen
fingers and toes, and newly warmed heart back into the house.
October
2000-Karen had caught up with me the night before. “You’ve got three instead of two to pick up
tomorrow-someone brought another one in. This
one’s a ten-year-old. Owner turn-in. Said
that she’d scratched their child.”
Not
words to make a rescue person’s day glad.
While in a perfect world, we would never have to take a dog at all,
let’s face it, some are just easier to deal with than others.
The
Ideal Rescue Dog- “Oh dear me, I
just don’t know what to do-I can’t keep my beautiful, six-month-old,
housebroken, neutered, obedience trained, sable bitch with the full white
collar. Can you help me?”
The
Typical Rescue Dog-”Well, he jumps on people, and he bit little Tommy once.
And we keep him outside now because he pees in the house, and you have to
keep him tied up because he gets out of any fence you put him in.
He barks all the time. And he’s got these funny looking, scabby bare
patches on his skin. The vet told us he needs to be on some kind of fancy
medicine, but we never bothered with that. Oh, I think he’s seven or eight.
No, we never got around to neutering him.
And by the way, he hasn’t had shots in a couple of years.
Can you come get him right now?”
I
was on my way down to Elizabethtown to pick up a couple of Shelties who’d been
turned into the Owensboro Humane Society by their owner. Tri bitch, sable dog,
five or six years old. They did not
have to be placed together, as we usually try to do with dogs from the same
home, because the male bossed the bitch horribly, and the general feeling was
that she’d be happier in a home of her own without him. An all-breed rescue organization in the area had heard of us,
bailed them out and one of their members was driving more than halfway to meet
me. I was to reimburse them for the
adoption fees, and bring them home. Karen
was going to come to my place to pick them up.
Now apparently a third dog had been added to the mix, an older dog.
It is always hardest with the older dogs; they are usually very
traumatized, they often have health problems which affect their adoptability,
and if they get adopted at all, it usually takes longer, during which time they
get accustomed to their foster home and are traumatized all over again when they
go to their new homes.
I
drove to Elizabethtown with my friend Hope for company,
two crates in the back of my pickup’s topper for the first two, and a
crate in the cab for the oldster. The
weather was typical autumn misery-cold, wet and rainy.
At the Cracker Barrel that was our rendevous point, I waited a little
while in the front parking lot before venturing into the back-and finding Molly,
who’d been waiting there for us about the same length of time!
Money and shot records exchanged hands (the shelter had only charged
one-third their usual adoption fee for the old girl-generous, but it didn’t
fill me with confidence about her state of health!), we pottied the dogs, and
then loaded them into the truck.
“They
said her name is Twinkle,” Molly
said, handing me the old dog. I
took her, feeling her thin frailty, and knew that this was not a ten-year-old
dog-she was twelve if she was a day. Shaded
sable, plain brown wrapper-only a small white patch on the back of her neck.
She regarded her surroundings with quiet dignity, and no fear.
Her expression was extremely watchful and intent. Good ears, insize,
lovely bone, exquisite Sheltie eyes-there was some breeding somewhere back of
this dog. My hands could feel scabs
underneath the sparse and ratty looking coat-and two large lumps over her
kidneys. My heart sank. Tumors? Some
sort of kidney disease? Lymphoma? I
didn’t think there were lymph nodes there, but I’d been twitchy since
Isabeau died. I began to get an
idea of why this dog was where she was-and feared that I might be taking her
into rescue only to ultimately euthanize her.
On
the way back home, Hope and I discussed possibilities.
I was pretty sure the “scratched child” didn’t exist-this dog
didn’t look able to scratch her own tummy, let alone a child.
But people who didn’t want to spend money on medical bills for an old
dog, or didn’t have the courage to euthanize her, who made up a story at the
pound and turned her in, knowing that no ome would adopt a dog so old, and that
the shelter would ultimately put her down – that I could believe. The kindest
thing I could think about them was that they couldn’t bear to euthanize her,
and that they hadn’t realized how horribly tramatic it was to uproot a dog
from the home she’d known all her life, and set her in a cold concrete and
confusion of an animal shelter.
I
took the dogs home, and waited for Karen to arrive. Twinkle lay in the middle of
the kitchen floor and very calmly surveyed everything about her. In fact, she
was so incredibly calm that I had a sudden suspicison, and walking around behind
her back, I called to her. Her ears didn’t even twitch. Great, on top
of everything else, she was deaf.
She
had that watchful expression I had seen before, the one that said she was sure
there was a dreadful mistake and her people would be walking in the door any
time now. She didn’t move particularly well, and I was afraid there was
something seriously wrong with her hips. My 13 year old son Gareth, who is
always very gentle with the dogs, was stroking and scratching her, and she did
not respond with so much as a tiny thump of the tail .
Karen
came to pick the dogs up, and we went over her again. She seemed quite
comfortable in the kitchen, and Karen works longer hours than I do and has more
dogs. I was taken by a sudden impulse.
“Karen,
take Chia home and leave this one with me.” Chia was a year old blue bitch I
had grown out for Karen. It was apparent now that she was not show quality, and
Karen had her for sale. I have a husband imposed limit on the number of dogs I
can have, and someone had to go if Twinkle was to stay.
Since Karen was selling her, Chia was the logical choice.
Karen
agreed this was for the best, particularly since Twinkle had to go to the vet
and I live closer to our vet than she does, and so she departed with Chia
instead of Twinkle. We settled in to get to know her.
I
tried to feed her in a crate, and she would have none of it, barking a
steady and monotonous bark until she was released. She was not totally deaf –
she could hear very loud noises -
and she was not obviously deaf to people who did not know her because she
would watch your face and expression if you were speaking to her, and respond.
She would bark that persistant bark when she needed to be let out, and again to
be let back in, and when she needed to be let out, she was serious about it,
having an very active bladder! She
was good on the leash, and good in the car, and except for the one time I
ignored her wishes about going out, good in the house.
She was quiet for the most part, except when she wanted to be let out.
I
took her to the vet, fearing the worst, and told him her story.
My vet concurred with me about her age.
“Oh yes, she’s twelve at least....or thirteen or fourteen.”
He checked her over, and to my surprise, her general state of health was
actually very good for her age, aside from a bunch of staph infections on her
skin. When the question of the
lumps arose, he did a needle biopsy on the spot.
The diagnosis? “They’re
fatty lipomas, Brenda, they’re not malignant.”
She did have some bad arthritis in her right hip, and he gave me some
Rimadyl samples for her to try, and antibiotics for the staph infections.
I went home feeling much more optimistic about her chances.
Things
started happening quickly after that. Two
days after her arrival, Gareth told me, “Mom, she gave me a Twinkle kiss.”
The day after that, I was fixing sandwiches, and turned around to find
her sitting up on her arthritic old haunches, begging.
I gave her a ham bite, and she snapped it down, her tail wagging.
As the days went by, I became aware that
somewhere along the way, I had acquired a shadow, a somewhat moth eaten shadow
that would limp after me through the house, and lay close to my feet.
And as the weeks passed, she picked up weight, her skin condition began
to clear up (I think the skin was due to food allergies, or bad dog food, on a
good senior diet her improvement was amazing), her hip to feel better, and her
personality asserted itself. Twinkle
was an apt name, she is a sparkly sort of dog, but Twinkle the Tyrant would be a
more accurate one! If she wants
something, she looks at you and starts making huffing noises.
If her demands are not met, then the persistent arfing begins.
She responds to hand signals to go in or out, but refuses to acknowledge
anything meaning to be quiet!
And she has a lot of demands!
To be let in, to be let out, to be up in your lap, to be fed RIGHT NOW,
to have the small water dish in the bathroom filled because that’s the one she
prefers, though there’s always a full one in the kitchen.
To go to bed, and that means that I have to go to bed - putting her
in the bedroom is not enough. This
last has endeared her somewhat to my husband-I’m a bit of a night owl.
The First Law of Rescue is-Love Them, And Let
Them Go. When did I realize that
I’d become a lawbreaker? I’m
not sure. Was it the day that my
husband came in and found us napping together on the bed and commented, “She
looks like she belongs there.”? Was
it the day Gareth told me she’d been lying by the door I’d left out of
several hours before, just waiting for me to return?
Or was there just a quiet
moment one evening when I looked down and she was looking up with a look that
I’d only seen in the eyes of one other dog?
(“You’ve acquired an attachment,” my husband noted, “or is it an
appendage?”)
Whenever it was, she’s here to stay.
I will not displace her from this home, now that she’s come to know it.
And if the time comes that it is necessary, I will do for her what her
former owners would not, and give her peace and freedom from pain.
She is admittedly a demanding dog, now that she’s feeling better, and
this may be, along with her medical problems, the reason she ended up in the
humane society. But she is also an
extremely nifty dog, and a pretty one with healthy new coat growing in, and I
keep discovering new things about her, like the other day when I took her to get
her picture taken with Santa. Afterwards,
we were given a succulent lamb treat, and on impulse, I baited her.
Her ears went up, she came to attention, her old feet shuffled square.
At some point, I suspect she was shown, or at least trained to be shown
as a puppy. How did she come to
such a dreadful pass? Were the
people who turned her in people who’d bought her as a puppy, or young adult? Was she stolen or lost?
Did they perhaps inherit her from some older relative who died?
I will never know the answer to any of these questions-she is not
tattooed, and I don’t believe she’s chipped. (Though I need to check on
that!) I like to think that
somewhere out there is a breeder or owner who misses her and would be glad to
know she’s come to a safe harbor.
As for the people who sent her off to be
killed, in my less charitable moments I wish on them what they did to her-May
you be abandoned and despised in your old age.
May someone drop you off in a nursing home and forget you ever existed,
may they wash their hands of you and walk away.
Christmas 2000:
It’s twilight, snow is on the ground and that hushed, breathless
quality is there again, though there’s no moon up, and the colors of the
sunset are flame, not pastel. It is
bitterly cold, and I’m bundled up. I’ve
been haying and feeding the horses and sheep, and now I’ve come inside to
start filling the first of many buckets of warm water I’m going to put in the
horse trough-it’s been too cold to use the hose for days.
Twinkle, rousing from sleep, sees the bucket, and follows me into the
bathroom where I’m filling it.
“Arf.”
She says. I ignore her and
continue to fill the bucket. “Arf.”
“What is it now?”, I ask, rather uselessly since she’s deaf, but I
tend to talk to her anyway. “You went out half an hour ago, it’s not supper time,
what is your problem now?” She
continues to bark until the bucket is full, then preceeds me to the door, where
I suddenly realize that she’s acting in a supervisory capacity. Sure enough, she simply accompanies me on the first of
several trips to the horse trough, alternately bouncing and gimping in the
deepening dusk, tail wagging; a dog paying due to her unfathomable goddess.
Was it chance that brought us together? Or is there some other Power (beyond a Rainbow Bridge
perhaps?) that found a unloved dog with some twilight time left, and a woman
who’d been cheated of that time with a dog she loved, and brought them
together? I don’t know, but I
suspect that somewhere Isabeau is smiling, as Shelties are wont to do.
Brenda Evans
Greenlea Shelties
Heart of Kentucky Sheltie Rescue