I spent much of early Wednesday on the floor with Lefty which seemed to ease his sleep until together we watched the approaching of the light, then the sun…

After breakfast Linda called Alturas to see if we could come in early which they said was fine and although by the time we were ready it ended up only being half an hour sooner the little

dog was calmly almost gone and limp as a noodle.  Had I remembered how comfortable he was in the truck – the same one that carried him away him from that Owyhee coyote trap in 2002 when both he and it were new – I’d have turned right in Cedarville and driven east towards the Sheldon; long before Long Valley he might well have left us, but…

in Alturas, thin from days without sustenance, he seemed peaceful on the table, ready and in a reverie. I pinched some Wall Spring sage under his nose saying “remember this.”  He’d been to the mountains and seen the sea, even, but was ever a creature of the sagebrush ocean, born

and now dying there.  The vet, as empathetic as a mechanic, took three stabs into two legs to find a vein for the pink fluid and then, with some small shudders, Lefty left us.  We stayed on a little while, not long enough in retrospect, then drifted dazedly through errands in town,

dropping 1,660 pounds of batteries at the recycle [probably wouldn’t have been such a good idea to head east into the Sheldon with that weight], picking up a few dumb things at the

Holiday and pumpkin curry at Nuch’s before heading back over the Warners and numbly down.

Coming into Nevada, in a scene reminiscent of that opening shot in “Vanishing Point” where Kowalski crosses himself going and coming from Denver, an immaculately white 1950 F-1 streetrod pickup passed us northbound, low-slung for to carry him home.  I didn’t think about it at the time, just concentrated on getting on home ourselves

to three dog beds and one sad dog.

 

He was a good one, more than…

 

 

 

 

[October 21, 2002; four days out of the Owyhee…]

 

 

Travel well, little Friend.