It comes to us all in the end - and it came for Toby my Springer Spaniel this evening, at sunset. Sixteen years old, he had been getting weaker over the last few days, panting all the time whenever he walked more than ten yards, and I realised the time had come yesterday, when I saw that his gums were almost bone white - and not the deep salmon pink they had been throughout his life.
I tried to hang onto him one more day but I could see that it was time to go. He was still eating two days ago, but yesterday was not even tempted by fresh-cooked liver from my hand; it was hard to persuade him to drink, and he just lay sleeping in the kneehole of my desk all day.
Toby came from a farmer at Hundleshope, in a lovely valley called Glen Sax, near Peebles on the river Tweed. I had been out hiking there in 1995 when I came across an isolated 16th Century farmhouse in this remote valley, which posed a landscape puzzle: endless, steep hills, all around, but where was the river?
I stopped to chat with the elderly farmer, leaning on his gate, and asked him why this valley had no river? His face lit up - as if he had been waiting for someone to ask such a question; he said “that's a very interesting question, and you're the first person to ask it in 30 years!”
He explained, that 10,000 years ago, the mighty River Tweed had run through this valley, but some earthquake or glacier had changed the course of the river, and Hundleshope was left as a deep valley with a floor as flat and featureless as a billiard table, without any trace of a river, not even a vestige of a stream. The name was thought to derive from 'Hound's Well Hope' - Hope being a Saxon word for 'farm'.
While we smiled together over this forgotten mystery of geology and glaciers, he suddenly said "D'ye fancy one o' these pups here ?" waving his arm to a wicker basket behind, in which eight liver-and-white Springer spaniel pups were squirming and wriggling with delight at my appearance. "The old bitch has had enough o' them", he said; she was tired of feeding such a large litter. I had no thought whatever of getting a dog! But the farmer said, “Go on, ye can have one for fifty pounds, it's a bargain!" .
This was true - the asking-price was less than half 'the going rate'. He wouldn't sell me a bitch though they were wanted by local gamekeepers, but he would let me have a dog for this knock-down price.
He explained: "you'll never see a day's illness with any of these dogs; they are all from 'working stock'; not a drop of pedigree blood in them"; generations of careful selection had gone into choosing only the strongest dogs and healthiest bitches to breed from. Toby's mother was a farm dog while his father was a 'keeper's’ gun-dog.
The farmer spoke the truth; the only occasion on which Toby ever saw a vet, apart from his first vaccination, was the day he made his final exit at 16 years of age.
But which dog to choose? All eight pups were wriggling towards the edge of their basket like a herd of inquisitive heifers. One in particular was bolder than the others - his eyes gleamed with curiosity and he sported a white blaze on his nose and a creamy chest.
“That one will do,” I said, and after a brief exchange of paper, off we went down Glen Sax - to sixteen years of comradeship and mountain adventure.
I called the vet this lunchtime and made arrangements. Hoping against hope that when we arrived the vet would say - "oh no, you've mis-diagnosed him, it's not heart failure, he'll live a few months yet."
But even as I put the phone down, I knew that there would be no reprieve; white-gums means low blood pressure; cold paws and endless-panting means the heart is fading.
'Just in case'. I dug a deep grave out back, beneath the giant Mountain Redwood that I planted as a seed 16 years ago when I got him as a pup. I had collected the seed from the General Sherman Tree, 6,000 ft up in California's Sequoia National Park; I had to use a pick and a sharp edged shovel to hack through the giant redwood's fibrous root to dig the grave; and the idea still intruded, that this was 'just a precaution'.
So, as the sun was sinking in the West, I coaxed him into the car and we went to meet the vet who was going to assess him and, if necessary, do him this final service.
Of course, in my heart of hearts, I knew full well what the vet would say. He didn't even need to touch or examine him; just watched me lift the dog out of the car and walk a few steps with him. Toby staggered a little, as if the pavement was at sea, and looked about him, as if lost. I looked at the vet, hoping for some sign of reprieve, but he just shook his head and said “Bring him in”.
I have never taken a dog to the vet to be put to sleep before. No matter how stoic you think you are, I guarantee you will be skating on jelly for the entire experience.
It was a long, long process; it took over thirty minutes to kill him; but the vet, who ushered him into the next world, was kind and efficient; he made it as painless as he could - though I was a wreck. It took three syringes of poison to put my boy down: the first was to relax him - with a tiny needle in the scruff of the neck- and we waited 20 minutes for that to take effect. Then, the vet injected a large syringe of blue liquid - barbiturates- into the side of his abdomen, and we waited another ten minutes for that to take effect. But still the old bugger wouldn't quit; he kept fighting it, gasping away like a wheezing steam engine, glancing at me as if to say “we could still beat this thing”.
Gradually, the drug robbed him of his strength, his body relaxed and the vet said he was fully sedated, but the brown eyes still stared ahead, unflinching. The vet shaved a foreleg, felt for a vein and slid the final needle in. He injected a second huge dose of blue-barbiturate and finally, very slowly, the broad-ribbed chest took fewer and fewer breaths, shallower and shallower - and his brave heart stopped beating.
Dogs are not supposed to climb mountains, but this was a heart that conquered most of the great mountain ridges of Scotland: An Teallach, Ben More, Liathach, Ben Eighe, Stac Polly, Arkle, Foinaven and Suilven. He had trailed my boot-heels up The Cheviot a dozen times, and splashed in the waterfalls of The Henhole more times than I could count. He never tired, never baulked, no matter what near-vertical scree-slope I launched him at. He seemed to know that if I could manage the danger, so could he. I never actually asked him to rock climb, but we came close to it at times. This was a dog that loved to body-surf in the waves of Dunbar on January 1st, with frost on the sand; cold mattered not a jot. You had to beg him to come in out of the freezing waves.
The lasting impression I have of him, at all times, was his sheer immeasurable joy and exultation in every aspect of life; the endless, boundless adventure.
Stuart the vet waited a full minute 'till after the breathing stopped, and then applied the stethoscope to the white curls of his chest.
“He's gone”, said the vet, and we shook hands, in tears, across the quiet form.
I carried him home and laid him in his grave as the sun scattered a few rags of gold in the far west, towards America.
I shovelled the dark soil back under the giant redwood, stamped the earth down hard above his head and laid a stone slab to keep the fox away.
Toby the Springer from Hundleshope is finally, finally gone and will be missed as much as he was loved. The world is smaller tonight.
Graham White
