Goodbye to a Good Friend

This week I will be going to say goodbye to Saskia.

She has been living in Washington DC for the past few years, and she is very old for a wolf (14) and no longer thriving. She has had an excellent life, has loved well and been well loved, and my life is richer for having known her.

When I first got to know her, I thought of her as an extremely large dog. It took several weeks of casual interaction before I began to realize the subtle, important ways in which she was not-dog. Things like awareness of space--how to place herself inside your sphere of personal comfort WITHOUT initiating contact, as a wolfish way to invite contact; or how to interrupt your boring conversation by physically interposing her body directly in the sight line of two people speaking while assertively refusing to make eye contact with either. When something clicked in my mind and I stopped thinking of her as "dog-large," it was as though some threshold was crossed in our relationship and we became closer.

For a little more than a month, I had the enormous privilege of sharing my house with her. And I still enjoy vividly the memory of the experience of her in this house. She was already arthritic then, and her size, combined with the steepness of my staircase and the slipperiness of hardwood floors made it difficult for her to go upstairs. So every evening I would bring books down to the living room and read with her curled at my feet.

There are coyotes who roam the fields outside, and sometimes at night they get a rabbit. A rabbit being killed by coyotes makes a pitiful sound. And a pack of coyotes, in the frenzy of the chase and kill, yip shrill and sharp and incessantly. This disturbs the dogs of the neighborhood (all my neighbors had dogs) and they bark loudly and repeatedly. And one young dog next door, in particular, sought to sound bolder than all the others by howling. So there we were one night, when the stillness was broken by coyote yipping. This triggered dog barking. Saskia opened an eye, but nothing more. But the yipping got more insistent, and then the rabbit screamed, the yipping went wild, and the dogs exploded. Saskia looked up. And the neighbor dog took the noise to a new level with his howl.

Saskia rose and walked to the window. The dog howled again, atop all the other noise. Saskia turned to me, head cocked, and whimpered. I said, "it's okay; do you want to howl?" The noise grew outside. Very softly, I offered an encouraging "owwooo." That was all Saskia needed. As the noise grew outside from all quarters, she tilted back her head, and offered one definitive comment: "owwwWWWOOOOOOHHHHhhh."

It was as though someone in charge of the world had thrown a switch. Everything was still. No rabbit. No coyote. No dogs. No sound.

Saskia turned from the window, walked back across the hardwood floor, curled up at my feet, went back to sleep.

She is one of the quietest, calmest, sweetest and most personable animals I have ever known. I will miss her, and I am extremely grateful that I had a chance to know her.