A DOG’S PRAYER - #3
If a Dog Be Well Remembered
We are thinking now of a
Golden, whose coat was flame in the sunshine and who, so far as we
are aware, never entertained a mean or an unworthy thought.
This Golden is buried
beneath a cherry tree, under four feet of garden loam, and at its
proper season the cherry strews petals on the green lawn of her
grave. Beneath a cherry tree or an apple or any flowering shrub of
the garden is an excellent place to bury a good dog.
Beneath such trees, such shrubs, she slept in the drowsy summer or
gnawed at a flavorous bone or lifted head to challenge some strange
intruder.
These are good places, in life or in death. Yet it is a small
matter. For if the dog be well-remembered, if sometimes she leaps
through your dreams actual as in life, eyes kindling, laughing,
begging, it matters not at all where the dog sleeps.
On a hill where the wind is
unrebuked and the trees are roaring, or beside a stream she knew in
puppyhood, or somewhere in the flatness of a pastureland, where most
exhilarating cattle graze. It is all one to the dog and all one to
you, and nothing is gained and nothing is lost --if memory lives.
But there is one best place to bury a dog. If you bury her in this
spot, she will come to you when you call--come to you over the grim,
dim frontiers of death, and down the well-remembered path, and to
your side again.
And though you call a dozen living dogs to heel they shall not
growl at her, nor resent her coming, for she belongs there.
People may scoff at you,
who see no lightest blade of grass bent by her footfall, who hear no
whimper, people who may never really have had a dog. Smile at them,
for you shall know something that is hidden from them, and which is
well worth the knowing.
The one best place to bury a good dog is in the heart of her
master. |
