Arthur 2012 - 2024

Hello Everyone,

I’ve really struggled to write this one. I’ve probably revised it 50 times or more. Only the living get to read obits, usually, but it feels like a service to the dead, a way of respecting them, so it means a lot to me to get the words right. Sometimes that’s easy; sometimes, like this one, it isn’t. But I’m content with how this has turned out. I wouldn’t say happy, but I’m at peace with it. As with other things.

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The first time I met Arthur, he was alone. It was a sunny day in September 2012, and we were visiting the Ottawa Humane Society “just to have a look”. The facilities were new and clean, and the staff caring and dedicated but Arthur was housed in a small concrete room with a bed and a water dish and a couple of toys. I like to say that we adopted him, not that we rescued him, but like all the dogs there, he needed a real home.

He had been brought in after being found wandering on Friel Street, near downtown Ottawa. We always suspected there was more to that story. The staff at the Humane Society estimated that he was about 8 months old, meaning he was born in January. That’s a tough time for a mother and newborn pups in a place like Ottawa. Somebody was likely helping them, and it’s also likely that that same somebody brought Arthur in and left him there. I like to think that this person made a difficult decision in the hope that Arthur would have a better life. I'll never know this person, so I'll never get the chance to tell them that their sacrifice meant that Arthur had a great life, and mine was made better for it as well.

“He was only a fox, like a hundred thousand other foxes. But I have made him my friend, and now he is unique in all the world.” - Le Petit Prince.

We were lucky, Arthur and me. Like the people he lived with, Arthur was smart, robust, and just devastatingly handsome, so he was going to be adopted on that day for sure. I just happened to get there first.

Sophie, our self-assured orange poodle, was friendly enough with him when they met for the first time in the Humane Society’s yard. She let him know in no uncertain terms his status in the social order, and he seemed fine with that, so they got along well. She was much less impressed when we took him with us as we left the building and got into the car. Like a lot of older siblings, her first realization that she couldn’t monopolize our time and attention was a rough awakening.

Which is your true self, when you are scared or when you are free?

My favourite image of Arthur isn’t of something we did together; it’s of him running off with Sophie. It caused me a lot of headaches, chasing after them through the forest at the cottage, or running after them escaping an unfenced dog park. But there was a joy there, a completeness. As Emilie said, he was never fully ours. We were friends, buddies, but I didn’t own him.

Arthur would come back to me when I called him, out of mixture obedience and separation anxiety, but he ran off with Sophie without a care at all. I got him out of the shelter; Sophie set him free.

A namesake for adventure

He wasn’t called Arthur at first. The name they gave him at the shelter was Sprocket, like the dog in Fraggle Rock. I loved that show, but it wasn’t the right fit. On one of our first walks, his name came to me in a flash. My grandfather had a pair of uncles, red-headed twins named Walter and Arthur that lived adventurous lives. We already had a cat named Walter, so Arthur it was.

He integrated well into the family. He excelled at puppy class and learned basic commands easily. After her initial hesitation, Sophie came around and she and Arthur became a unit. She was happy to have someone under her command, and he was happy to be part of the team. In his prime, Arthur was very fit but despite her bird-like frame, when wrestling over a toy, Sophie would growl and growl while he tugged her across the hardwood floor until he eventually relented and let her have it. He didn’t really want the toy. He wanted the companionship.

It was that companionship that allowed them to run off together so often. They chased after squirrels so many times at Brewer Park, barking fanatically for them to come down out of the trees, that I stopped taking them there. There is a dog park on Lemieux Island in the Ottawa River that became one of our favourites. Can’t run away on an island.

He was the only dog I know who swam in both the Pacific and the Atlantic. For several years, we made the drive to Pugwash to visit Anna's family at the beach. We both loved it. He had a whole huge beach to run around on, shorebirds to chase, and more friends to play with. I had local oysters and an introduction to the beauty that is a gin and tonic in the afternoon. He didn’t shiver in the cold Northumberland Straight like Sophie did. To say nothing of me.

It was a few years before we found our real calling: mountain biking. An escape for us both. Being fit, but with a good recall, Arthur became my trail buddy. At first, we rode the trails in our area, but when I hit the road in 2018, we did every trail that would have us between here and the Pacific Ocean. He got to see seals in San Francisco, went nose to nose with an aardvark in Arkansas and chased some bears in B.C. We also visited hot springs, which he didn’t like, and glacier-fed streams, which he did.

“You are responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.” - Fox to the Petit Prince

After he and Sophie had to part, he didn’t try to replace her. He mostly kept to himself at the dog park in his older years, though the unshakeable positivity of Ace and the quirkiness of Jada meant he would grudgingly play with them both, for as long as he was able.

When we moved to Wakefield, he could spend his days outside more or less as he pleased. Exploring the yard, chasing chipmunks, laying out in the sun or under a pine tree. He got to bark at the terriers when they walked by, matching their empty rhetoric (theirs because they were too small to do much, his because he was too old).

Arthur’s reaction to meeting the Munchkin was the inverse of my own: it was a core moment of my life, while he sniffed her once and moved on, palpably disinterested.

He came around though, particularly when she started to be able to move on her own. He’d put up with her rolling around in his bed, with unsolicited hugs and curious fingers, and he played the patient many times to a doctor of dubious training. In true curmudgeon fashion, he’d probably never say so, but by his actions you could tell that he loved her deeply, in his own way.

As the years passed, I could see that he was aging, and the kidney disease was getting worse. As important as it was for me to see him as a companion, not a thing I owned, I now had to face the fact that despite all of that, I was responsible for him. He wasn’t a wild animal that visited, and he wasn’t just a friend. If I didn’t want Arthur to suffer, I had to take responsibility for his end.

His last full day was one of our best. We hiked in the forest, he ate as many treats as he liked, and in the evening, we all played in the yard. Arthur mostly sat in in the shade in the garden, while the Munchkin made art out the flowers that were blooming. But mostly, we were together.

When do we die?

It’s not a finite moment, I don’t think. More like a process after the heart stops and you lose the last pieces of consciousness. Or maybe, as the last pieces of you transition to the other side. At the end, after the drugs had taken effect, and Arthur’s heart had stopped, after we had said our last goodbyes, I picked up his limp body and held him close. I looked into his eyes for the last time, but I knew he couldn’t see me, that’s a human conceit. He knew the world through smell. I wanted to hold him close so that he would know that I was there, that his last thought, the last sense he had, would be that he wasn’t alone.

Wes

Photos

At rest in the grass. His last day.

Arthur and Jada in the snow. They were younger then.

Taking a break on the trails somewhere outside of Crested Butte.

The sunny shores of the Northumberland Straight, near Pugwash.

The beginning. One of the first nights with Arthur.

At rest in each other's company.