Fox Hound Quasimodo came to live with me a little over six years ago. He was the third in a succession of Fox Hounds that I have been blessed to steward in their honorable retirement from hunting packs. Ariel was the first; she came into my life in 1987. Tonight is the first night in 23 years I have not had a Fox Hound in my home. Quazi, crossed the Bridge earlier this evening resting his head on my knee. When I first brought him home from the hunt kennel he would not let me touch him. I had to keep about 20 feet of lunge line attached to his collar so that I could reel him in when I needed to. Tonight, those days seem another world. I wrote the following earlier today while Quazi slept beside me for the last time.
I am sitting here with Basset Hound Claire on the couch, Foxhound Quasimodo, is asleep next to us on the floor. In a little less than two hours we will drive, with the windows down so Quazi can ride with his head out the way he likes best, to the Riding Center where there is quite a bit of good covert within easy walking distance of the car park and go for a walk. In my private mind, at least, Quazi will get to draw those woods one last time. I will bring hamburger in a plastic bowl and when we are done, he will share tailgate with Claire the way we do when we go out with the Bassets. Then we will ride in the car again, windows down, to McDonald’s drive through to get a vanilla ice cream cone in a cup. When we get to the vet we will take it in with us because there is nothing Quazi likes better on a hot summer’s evening than vanilla ice cream in a cup.
It is a trip that I don’t want to make, but one I have been planning for quite a while. Quazi was diagnosed with lymphoma on July 5th. We were offered chemo and prednisone and a variety of life extending treatments by our very good veterinarian. I decided “not to treat” but to offer aggressive palliative care—pain relief and excessive pampering. We have been living “Dog Hospice” ever since.
Despite the just shy of two months we have been at this, I am not ready for today. Quazi is, he told me so last night. Good Huntsmen talk about the “Golden Thread” of communication they have with their pack of hounds in the hunting in the field. I have, I believe, been blessed by something very real and of that sort with each of the individual hounds I have had privilege of stewarding in their retirements. They each in their own particular way have found a particular place inside of me, a feeling as unique to each as their markings and their voice. I have known them each, intimately, by ways of knowing that come about not unlike the things of truth or faith or hope.
So when Quasi came next to me last night and lay, slowly down by my side, looking well into me with those eyes that harbor ancient, esoteric truths of scent and chase, in which I could see and feel, as well, their hope in recognizing from those depths the eternal notes of Dianna’s horn, when they spoke into the depths of me, “It is time, it is over,” I knew it to be so.
So, quasi modo, began the liminality of my privilege of our time together; the beginning of the deeper mysteries sounding “Going Home.”
Quasi modo, Latin, literally, “as if in [this] manner.
From Latin as well, limen, literally, “the time in between.” Liminal time, existentially, psychologically, a time in between., transitional stage.
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