We are thinking now of a setter, whose coat was
flame in the sunshine and who, so far as we are aware, never entertained a mean
or unworthy thought. This setter is buried beneath a cherry tree, under four
feet of garden loam, and at its proper season the cherry tree strews petals on
the green lawn of his grave. Beneath a cherry tree, or an apple, or any
flowering shrub of the garden, is an excellent place to bury a dog. Beneath
such trees, such shrubs, he slept in the drowsy summer, or gnawed at a flavored
bone, or lifted his head to challenge some strange intruder. These are good
places, in life or in death. Yet it is a small matter, and it touches sentiment
more than anything else. For if the dog be well remembered, if sometimes he
leaps through your dreams actual as in life, eyes kindling, questing, asking,
laughing, begging, it matters not at all where that dog sleeps and at last. On
a hill where the wind is unrebuked, and the trees are roaring, or beside a
stream he knew in puppyhood, or somewhere in the flatness of a pasture land,
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. One place that is best of all.
If you bury him in this spot, the secret of
which you must already have, 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 should
not growl at him, nor resent his coming, for he is yours and he belongs here. People
may scoff at you, who see no lightest blade of grass bent by his foot, who hear
no whimper pitched too fine for mere audition, people who may never really have
had a dog. Smile at them then, for you shall know something that is hidden from
them, and which is well worth knowing. The one best place to bury a good dog is
in the heart of his master.
(Ben Hur Lampman (1886-1954))
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