ANOTHER dog done gone. Not Crumpet the cocker but Mango, the amiable, affectionate and slightly batty golden (almost red really) retriever whose main trick was not retrieving.
Then she’d suddenly surprise us all and come lolloping back from the undergrowth with a bird in her mouth. She was only nine, but she’d had a rather faraway look for over a year which we put down to old age, along with a patch of white hair that suddenly appeared on top of her head.
I always suspect her lack of prowess in the retrieving line was really my fault for taking her out shooting too early as a puppy. It was meant to be a walk with a gun. But as we crossed a field a wayward pigeon hurtled overhead and my son instinctively had a crack at it and Mango shot off back to the car. She was coaxed and stroked and improved but I don’t think she ever recovered. I suspect she wasn’t very bright either. She just didn’t get the point of shooting. On the other hand, she was a great companion and the only dog we’ve ever had who walked religiously to heel.
The difficulty was making her hunt through undergrowth. But as a retriever she was, I suppose, a ‘peg dog’ by instinct, designed to sit beside her master at a numbered peg in a driven shoot, mark where the birds fell and retrieve them. Anyway, she started peeing in the kitchen at night, which was unusual because of all the dogs we have ever had, Mango was the one with a cast-iron bladder. She was diagnosed with Cushing’s, a fairly common disease manageable with drugs for life. There was also something wrong with her liver which I think is what did for her. And in the mornings, oddly, she took to lying beside the cattle trough, under a tree, across the road in the sheep field. Just lying there for hours on end, head up, ears back, eyes half-closed, snuffing the breeze.
She stopped eating but wagged her tail, and wanted to go for walks even the day before she died. But her shoulders now swayed like an old lion’s. Her beautiful thoroughbred trot had gone. She was lying in the playroom on a favourite spot where hot water pipes run, being stroked by our daughter and told everything would be alright, when she stretched out, shuddered and died.
We buried her at the end of the garden that gets all the sun, near the other dogs, cats, gerbils, ferrets and a goldfish. Crumpet, I’m sorry to say, showed no emotion, sniffed the corpse of her lifetime companion and went off to dig a hole in which someone will probably break an ankle.