Picture taken about 3 weeks previously.

Jj is for Jottings 24. Vale Sam, the Toenail-Eating Dog.

We are very sad to report that Sam had to be put to sleep on Sunday 5th June at the ripe old age of nearly 18 years. On a more cheerful note, on the Saturday morning he came for his usual walk – well, more of a stroll lately (I called it reading the newspaper, because he was catching up on all the latest news via his sense of smell) – very eagerly and happily and with a spring in his step.  Later that morning he had a little stroke (my diagnosis), and this time he didn’t make the recovery that he did the last time it had happened a few months ago. So on Sunday we had to make The Decision. He is now lying peacefully in the garden where he has spent the majority of the last 16 years.
Sam came to us as a stray. We had lost our beloved kelpie when she was 16, and Kieran badgered me for another dog – “A boy has to have a dog.” Before we had time to do anything about it, I looked up one morning from where I was giving our lame silver-lace Wyandotte, Leticia Lacewing, a bit of time in the garden away from the other hens – and there was Sam. I have absolutely no idea from which direction he had come, he was just suddenly there – so skinny he looked like he’d swallowed a toast rack. He seemed like a nice little dog, but I wasn’t taking any chances. We had to go to work and school, so we tied him up in the garden with food and water, crossed our fingers that he’d be alright and left him to it. (The neighbours told me later that he’d barked all day.) We did all the usual things – put up notices, took him to the vet to see if he was micro-chipped, but could find no owner. The vet estimated that he was 18 months old at the time. He had obviously lived inside, judging by his behaviour when invited inside – he went straight for a comfy chair and curled up in it. Having established no ownership, the next potential barrier to Sam being the answer to Kieran’s prayer for a dog was whether he would be trustworthy around the cats and chooks. I refuse to live a life of anxiety that one of my animals may harm another. So we chook-proofed him: I took him into the orchard and gave him a tap any time he looked sideways at a chook. He was quickly deemed chook-proof and, since he hadn’t shown any inclination to be nasty to the cats, he became Kieran’s dog, although guess who took him for his daily walk for the next 15 years? (Didn’t matter, I was going anyway.) Of course the usual thing happened, and Kier went off to university and left home not many years after Sam arrived, but the bond between Sam and his master remained strong right to the end. Kier came down from Canberra to be with Sam on his last journey.
Sam adored his morning walks. Since we live on the edge of town he was off-lead most of the time, unless we met anybody, so he went about three times as far as I did – chasing rabbits, following up wonderful smells. He didn’t seem to really want to catch a rabbit – I’d watch him slow down if he got too close. However, his morning walk was nearly his undoing when he was 10 years old. We were walking past the cemetery and he suddenly came running up to me in a very peculiar fashion. Fearing snake-bite, I scooped him up and carried him home, thanking goodness he wasn’t a larger dog. The vet did blood tests to determine the type of snake and therefore which antivenene to administer – it was a black snake. After several days in hospital we were allowed to bring him home on the day he began to eat by himself. He was incontinent and couldn’t walk at first, so David did daily physio and I would use a towel as a sling to support his weight to help him walk, and eventually we got there. For the rest of his life he had an inconsistent tremor of one or both of his back legs, but it never seemed to worry him. Kieran was visiting one time and came for the walk. Suddenly he said to Sam, “What’s with the Elvis leg, Dude?” Apparently in rock-climbing circles the shaky leg one gets from muscle fatigue is called an Elvis leg, for obvious reasons.
Throughout Sam’s long recuperation from the snake-bite he had a constant companion in Marshmallow, the little white bantam. You can see her in Jottings 12, 13, 16 and 17. I’ll post a close-up photo of her next time and tell you a little about her then. Marshmallow was usually hanging about the verandah, which is where Sam’s basket and kennel were. But after the snake-bite she moved in closer, sitting beside his basket for hours on end, sometimes even perched on the side of the basket. Once he had recovered, things went back to normal.
Sam was very territorial with other people about the verandah and his basket, and we were never quite sure what reception other people would get. He was a nightmare to medicate, until I discovered that you could secrete a tablet in a sausage and he would scoff it. Nothing else worked. But generally to us he was what David called a “dear little doggy” and we loved him and miss him.