Thanks Melissa...

Obviously, some of you need to wander around in my archives.

'Course, that could take some time... there's over 2,000 entries in there. But feel free. I could use the pagehits (since most the entries this month are hidden in draft form, and may never see the light of day).

But, yeah, I've mentioned this before. Just don't ask me when, 'cause I have no idea.

Just over nine years ago, the heeler Mom went into labor with her first and only litter of pups. And after many hours of getting nowhere, we ended up with a late night weekend visit to the Vet's. Where we helped him and his wife deliver ten puppies by caesarian. I remember his words at the end of extracting the pups.

"You want me to put all this back in there?" Pointing to the mass of guts laying outside the heeler Mom's belly. Much more than she had left on the inside.

Uhh, no. She barely survived this litter. We won't be putting her through this again.

We set the new family up in a cardboard box in the middle of the living room. And after listening to the squeals of pain as the new mother both stomped and laid on her puppies, I spent the next three nights sleeping on the floor next to them. Extracting puppies getting squished, returning wayward wanderers who used their sharp puppy claws to climb the towel out of the box in the middle of the night.

Very little sleep. So, the fourth night, the wife took a turn.

And in the morning we awoke to nine live puppies, and one dead one.

Brown Eyes, my favorite. Yet another masked heeler. Which we both seem to recall was the one puppy who didn't breath when extracted from the uterus, and had to have her mouth and throat suctioned clear, and air blown into her muzzle.

Either that, or she was simply crushed by her Mom. But either way, she was gone.

Now, how do you bury a tiny little puppy alone in the cold, dark earth?

Easy.

You don't.

And for the past almost exactly nine years, Brown Eyes has been waiting. Waiting in a freezer filled with raspberries, elk meat, frozen rattlesnakes and bullsnakes, and something with feathers that I no longer recognize.

And when her Mom finally goes, and is buried under the ground...

Brown Eyes will be with her, nestled safely against her mother's chest.