Hello friends. The last couple of weeks have been hard. Almost always, here in my little corner of the world I try to keep things light, happy, and fun. But life isn’t lived that way, not on a constant basis. Still, I debated whether or not I should post this. Some things are just very private and grief happens to be one of them for me. Too, I don’t know how much of Oreo’s story to share. How much is too much? So I’m just going to share and you can read all about it – or not.
We lost our beloved Oreo, on October 25th. He was 15 and a half years old.
We had had him since he was weaned from his feral mother at six weeks old. She had a litter of puppies underneath an abandoned mobile home about a mile from our house in the Kingdom. He was the only boy that Denton could catch; those puppies were fast.
We took him home and basically handed him over to Sampson, our 150 pound Chesapeake Bay Retriever (who had brain damage, but that’s another story I’ve never been able to tell) to be his companion and friend for the next twelve years. They were inseparable. They romped and played in the woods with the kids for the next six years.
Unless the coyote’s called. Then Oreo would yip back at them and take off. I have no idea why they didn’t kill him, but every time they would come around and start yipping, he would yip back; run off to join them – wild, cagey coyotes – and stay gone with them for a couple of days. Animals are very strange that way. At least at my house…
When we left the Kingdom and moved to our tiny town, we bought a house in a subdivision. It’s a wonder the transition didn’t kill Sampson and Oreo. They had had free rein over sixty acres of land and woods for all of their lives. Now we lived on less than an acre.
Our new to us home came with a ready made dog lot where we immediately put their dog houses. Which lasted approximately 30 minutes that night when we went inside the house. Oreo and Sampson both had dog houses, which they almost never slept in. They slept on the front porch, to guard us and keep watch over everything at night. Now they were being punished, or so they both thought, by being banished to a doggie prison twenty feet away from the back door where their people were. The howling was deranged. I know the neighbors wished we would go back to wherever we had come from. The neighbor across the street who had kids the same age as ours came over the second night and asked us very politely to stop the demented racket. Please.
I know what you are thinking. Why in the world didn’t we just bring them in the house. Well, we would have. Side story: But Sampson had lived in the house the entire first year of his life with his sister Sadie. Until he ATE THE WALL. Our laundry room was about 10 X 10 in our house in the Kingdom. Any time we needed to go somewhere, we put Sadie and Sampson in the laundry room until we got back. One fine Spring day, we had been to town, and when we came home the first thing I did was let the dogs out. When I got to the laundry room the first thing I noticed – because it was everywhere – was this floating pink stuff. When I opened the door Sadie was laying as far from Sampson as she could get. She was very, very smart and didn’t have brain damage like her brother. Sampson meanwhile, was jumping for joy that we were back from what he believed was a three week journey.
He apparently was bored, so to entertain himself while we were gone for a couple of hours, decided to chew on the baseboard. While that was fun, the Sheetrock was possibly better. The prize was the fluffy pink insulation that was hidden inside his new toy. To remove said toy he needed to get all of the wall out of his way. Which he systematically tore off as far up as he could reach, all the way around the room. There was pink insulation everywhere and no piece of Sheetrock bigger than the palm of my hand left.
Sampson also had on 37 fur coats. You could have dropped him at the arctic circle and he would have been happy as a lark. He didn’t want to live in the house, he just needed to be able to lay in front of the front door to protect us from all of the monsters that he knew were coming for us all. Oreo wanted to be where Sampson was. Back to the original story.
So, we built a fence around the back yard and into the woods for Oreo and Sampson and they lived happily there for the next half a decade. And then Sampson died. He lived to be 14 years old and Oreo had never been without him. Not even for a day. When Denton and his Daddy took Sampson away to bury him on a friends farm, Oreo was visibly anxious. He had no idea what was happening, but it wasn’t good. As soon as it got dark that night, the mournful howling started. And it didn’t stop. Oreo was absolutely inconsolable. We knew exactly what he wanted, and we couldn’t give it to him or explain why.
For the next two weeks, we did what anyone would have done at this point. Denton slept on the back deck with Oreo. That man. If I hadn’t already loved him more than humanly possible at this point, that would done it for me. He loved Oreo. Loves him still. So he slept next to him every night so that Oreo could mourn the loss of their best friend until Oreo could sleep at night without wanting to scream out his sadness and loss the only way he knew how.
And life for all of us carried on until about a year or year and a half ago. At 4:01 AM in the morning I woke up to vicious, pain filled barking, growling and all around chaos. It sounded like someone was torturing Oreo to death. It was terrible. Denton ran downstairs to grab the big flashlight and something to defend us all with – why in the world we were keeping all of this downstairs is still baffling me and Denton – while I stood at the french doors and stared uncomprehendingly at Oreo through them. He was fine, but the horrifying sounds were still happening. To someone else’s dog, in our woods.
Right before Denton came back upstairs, I see Oreo start barking like mad at the gate. He was losing it. As I started to step out onto the deck this great big, horrifying animal dropped onto the deck from the top of the fence in front of the door. It was a raccoon. Oreo didn’t see it because he was going berserk at something I couldn’t see. Still the howling, screaming and pain filled cry’s are going on.
My brother laughed when I told him how big this raccoon was because he didn’t believe me. Sampson in his prime weighed in at 155 pounds. His and Oreo’s dog houses matched and were the same size, so you can imagine how big these things were. When that raccoon dropped onto the deck he waddled over to Oreo’s house and tried to go inside to make himself at home, and he got stuck in the doorway. Oreo weighed about 65 pounds in his prime and he had no problem going in and out of his house. That thing was enormous.
By this time I was screaming the house down for Denton to come upstairs. When he opened the door and stepped out, Oreo was on the deck and the racoon was gone. Denton said immediately to get Oreo inside while he went hunting for what we assumed at this point was a pack of rabid raccoons attacking someone’s dog. This was a terrible idea in my opinion. BTW, can you believe that not a single one of our neighbors heard this racket? I mean, I’m a light sleeper, but that’s crazy.
Denton hunted for about 15 minutes, but didn’t find the dog or what had attacked it. It was 4:30 in the morning at this point. There was no way in the world I was sending Oreo back outside after all of this, so we made him a bed in our bedroom and locked the cats out. We had no idea how everyone would react, and after all of the terror and excitement, I didn’t want to find out.
Most saying’s have some basis in fact, but I’m here to tell you that the one that says you can’t teach an old dog new tricks is completely WRONG. My Daddy told me later that he was so surprised that Oreo adapted so well to living in the house. He acted like he always had. He wouldn’t touch the cats food, he didn’t bark like a mad thing when someone rang the doorbell (like most people’s dogs that we know), and he never had an accident. Well, in full disclosure he did have – I wouldn’t call it an accident the way that Denton’s parents described it – something while we were on vacation and Denton’s parents were house sitting for us. I suspect though, that that incident had something to do with nutty buddy’s, just from the way Oreo’s eye glowed with hope anytime anyone got one out of the freezer, hahaha.
He quite literally was the perfect house dog. He was happy to spend all of his time with his people, to go on walks and see all the things. And if Denton sneaked him Slim Jims when I wasn’t looking, Oreo was never going to tell. He didn’t try to eat the cats, which was one of my biggest fears. Batman quite literally pretended that Oreo didn’t exist. Koshka, our resident scaredy cat who is afraid of his own tail was equally terrified and outraged. How dare we bring home someone he couldn’t beat up.
Oreo’s one and only quirk was car rides. Every. Single. Time. we put him in the third row seat of the Pilot (we learned very quickly he had to ride all the way back there, or he would try to drive) he would bark like mad. He didn’t do this before he came inside to live. So I don’t know what his trigger was about riding in the car in his golden years. Maybe he was warning everyone to get out of the way? Hahaha.
I can’t write about having him euthanized. This was our second time going through this process and it was just as excruciating as it was with Sampson. Just know that it was quiet, calm, and heartbreaking.
Our Oreo was quite literally the best dog on earth. He has left us with a giant hole in our hearts and he will be missed immensely.
