I know that this is not jewelry related, but it is Wink related and I feel like sharing.
I had to put down my old black lab, Flusher, this morning. I have known for months that our last hunting season was going to be the last for us. He was fourteen or so years old, which is pretty old for a lab and although we walk him a couple of miles or so every day he has been slowing down more and more.
Last year when coming out of the cattails with a duck you would have thought a train was coming through, his breathing was so loud. Still, he taught the new pup how to find a bird that went down in the thick brush, which might have taken her another year or two to figure out by herself.
My wife always worried that he would die in the swamp where we hunt, I always secretly wished he would so I could just bury him there where he spent the happiest hours of his life. Alas, it was not to be. This morning he could not even walk all the way back to his pen to eat breakfast after his walk and my wife called to tell me it was time.
I left work, came home to find him again ambulatory, threw the bumper for him a few more times. He would hustle to it in his awkward semi-rigid hobbling gate, winded after even the five yard tosses I made, stand over it for ten to twenty seconds then pick it up and slowly walk back to me with his last retrieves.
This once proud and commanding speciman of all that is good about a labrador was all done on this plane and I shall miss him. I have many wonderful memories though.
One year for Thanksgiving I went alone with him to the swamp where we sat and waited paitently for hours for a duck or two to come by. Nothing. Nada. Suddenly he stood up and looked behind me. A lone mallard had set its wings and was coming in. It was the only duck we saw all day, and without Flusher I would not have seen it until long too late.
Another year we were sitting quietly with my wife and a friend looking out in front of us to a beautiful empty blue sky. He started looking around, first one direction, then another, and acting very strange. At first we saw nothing, then a few specks here and another few there and suddenly the sky was full of thousands of ducks, two, maybe three or even four thousand ducks decending towards the large swamp that we were in. As they came lower and lower the sound of their feathers whistling in the wind became first a distant whisper then an almost tumultous vocal singing. The song would change, raising and falling in tempo and in sound depending on whether they were decending, turning, circling for one more look, or raising to look here and there over the swamp for that perfect landing place. Birds were landing all around us, and eventually on us. Swoosh, near silence, shish, sigh, swoosh, swoosh, sigh, splish as they finally settled into the water in a short skid to sitting from flying.
When the birds took flight and dissapeared we sat and talked long after the retrieves were made about what an incredible experience it was to have seen so many birds all at one time and in one place. What an exciting moment, and what a treasure that I have this memory of my friend to warm my heart as I think of him now that he is gone...
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