In Memory: Caber Feidh Scottish Deerhounds

"There is one best place to bury a good dog. If you bury him in this spot, he 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 him nor resent his coming, for he belongs there. People may scoff at you, who see no lightest blade of grass bent by his 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 his master." (B.H. Campman)

Gone Ahead

Fergus' grave at Caber Feidh I'd like to offer some profound reflections here on the loss of an animal to death, but I truly think it's all been said. They come into our lives, they love us, we love them, and one day, too soon or at the end of a long life, after a long illness or without warning, with our loving assistance or in the course of nature, they die.

Maybe part of the wonder of the relationship between people and animals is this impermanence. Maybe they truly are waiting for us at the Rainbow Bridge of legend. I know that when one of mine goes, I cling to that belief. I don't know. I only know that when I close my eyes, each of them is still here at my side, called to me as easily as in the famous words I quoted above. Each of them left this world with a piece of my heart, but in exchange, made my heart so much bigger than it was before I knew them.

Here on these pages, you can come to know them, too.

"We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mythical concept of animals.... We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and the travail of the earth." (Henry Beston)