Speaking of carrying dogs. We had to carry our biggest basset hound down from a hike one day because the pads on his feet tore open. That is quite possibly the hardest thing to do, carry a long, very heavy dog that is straining against you the whole time.
There was a time I had a beautiful golden retriever puppy named Ruby. My brother lived in Belchertown, MA (yes, there IS such an oddly named town) in western Massachusetts, and one fall I took her out there hiking with my older brother. Little Ruby was probably 8-10 weeks old, and she had a pink little bare belly. We walked that poor puppy raw, and my mother said that her cute little belly was never the same after that. She said we stained it with dirt, and it never came out...:)
She made the last leg home in my brother’s backpack.
When we took her back at five months she was still very puppyish (obviously) and we were walking along a trail that had a very steep drop off on one side that went down perhaps five feet and terminated in a 40 foot cliff.
As we walked along, my brother’s shoe dislodged a rock that rolled down the hill towards the cliff. Ruby saw it go, and ran over to snap at it. She realized immediately (as did we) that it was too steep for her to stop, and her momentum carried her, forelegs straining straight out in front of her to stop, back legs involuntarily peddling as she careened towards the cliff, and then she disappeared over the edge from our sight.
There was a long, sickening pause as we gaped in shock, followed after an interminable interval of silence, by a solid “thump”. And then the dog began to shriek that horrible sound that dogs can emit when they are physically hurt and terrified.
My brother and I had to run about fifty yards back the way we came, take a trail down and run back to her, hearing her horrible yelping the whole time.
As we ran, I remember shouting her name over and over again “Ruby! Ruby!” with my heart in my throat. I vividly remember contemplating how terrible it was going to be when we saw her, because the whole time we ran, she was hidden from our sight. I wondered if I was going to see her back broken at some sad angle, or worse.
As we broke around an outcrop of rocks she had fallen between, we saw her, standing up, her mouth open, yelping. When she saw us, she simply stopped and plopped over on her side.
I carried her in my arms the journey back to the car, and I remember laying her in the backseat of my brother’s Volkswagon bug on top of a blanket. She wasn’t yelping, and as we drove away, she lifted her head and was looking around.
Then she is up, looking out the windows and up between us. It was unbelievable. She had, somehow, miraculously, escaped even minor injury. The height she fell from certainly would have severely injured a human, most likely fatally, it was that high. and the fact that she fell onto the leaf covered forest floor between two parallel rock outcroppings that were probably thirty feet apart, was even more amazing.
We didn’t even take her to the vet. But I remember vividly, the horrible anticipation in my mind, of what I was going to see when I got past that rock outcropping.
Ruby lived many, happy years after that. She was a frisbee dog of a some decent ability, swam in anything wet she could find, ate dirty athletic socks in preference to nearly any other disgusting thing she could have found, and when prompted, could hold so many clean athletic socks in her soft mouth that the protruding clumps of socks that stuck out symmetrically on both sides of her muzzle seemed to be nearly the size of her actual head.
Above all, she loved swimming in the family pool. She knew she couldn’t just go in on her own, and would lie down on the edge of the pool, her paws draped over the lip of the edge while looking up at you for permission.
All you had to do was nod your head or even a motion of your eyes, and she would fly into the pool. I got her to swim underwater by progressively taking a frisbee deeper and deeper under. But her favorite thing of all was jumping off the diving board. She would stand on the beginning of the board, waiting for someone to throw a frisbee or a ball into the pool, and with a flurry of motion would gather up a head of steam to go sailing off the board. Her body would be extended, and her paws would sometimes be curled up in front of her in mid-flight, other times extended out.
Ah. The joy of life, the essence refined, is a Golden Retriever in a body of water.
There was a flame war on here a while back about a guy who left his GSD on a barren mountain top because her pads got sore and even though there were people willing to help get her down, he ‘assumed she was dead’ and didn’t accept.
Some great people went and got her themselves and *then* the moron wanted her back.
People were actually *for* him getting her.
It was crazy.
Bless you for doing what you needed to, no matter what.