OK, enough about me. This is a dog blog, after all.

burly stayed with us over the weekend--he and his little chocolate lab brother, bigsby, who might or might not be gay. (his parents, john and ann, are divided on the issue. ann says yes. john says oh shut up who cares anyway why are you always bringing that up he's just a dog.) burly and bigsby are both excellent hunting dogs. john and ann are both excellent hunters. that's one thing they agree on.

doug and i used to work with john, and one thing we love about him is how he has two pictures of ann that he keeps on his desk at work. he changes them seasonally. in one picture, which he usually brings out in april or may, she is holding a gigantic fish. a walleye, i think. and then, in late october or early november, he puts that picture away and takes out the other one. in the winter picture, she's wearing a red and black buffalo-plaid jacket and an elmer fudd hat with earflaps. she's holding the head of a giant eight-point buck. she caught that big fish. she shot that deer.

burly has been with them for more than 12 years. he's grizzled on his face and also on the tops of his paws, and he's getting that old-dog smell about him. he's only a few months older than boscoe, but he has led a much less pampered life.

burly is an old soul. he is very gentle. twice he has been hit by cars, but neither time did it do a lot of damage. he has spent a lot of his life in the woods--shivering in the bottom of a duck boat in the early morning, leaping into the frigid waters to retrieve, tromping through the tall golden october grass after grouse. his back legs are starting to get wobbly, but he is still strong. despite spending a lot of time around shotguns, he doesn't appear to show signs of deafness, as did his precursor, charlie the springer spaniel..

i used to take care of charlie sometimes in duluth. toby didn't much care for him, i think because charlie was deaf and couldn't hear toby's barks. toby took that as disrespect. also, the first time charlie visited, he toddled around my living room, sniffed everything, and then lifted a trembling leg and pissed right on my fireplace.

a few years back--maybe seven or eight years ago, now--burly had a run-in with a porcupine. the porcupine got the worse end of the deal; he died. but burly didn't fare much better; he made the regrettable decision to eat the porcupine.

the vet was taking quills out of his snout and paws for a long time. but more had to pass through his system. poor foolish good natured burly and his bad decisions. pure lab, through and through.

not long after he recovered from that, john and ann and their daughter were celebrating christmas at ann's parents' house. they have a neat, small bungalow on 80 acres of land in northern minnesota. burly was roaming the back 40, as he so often did, and everyone else was inside the warm and tinseled house, celebrating the holiday.

but when they called burly, he didn't come. this was unike him. they had to go out and search for him. it took a while to find him; he was lying in the snow some distance from the house, bloody and nearly unconscious. someone had shot him--right in the face, at close range, with buckshot. somehow, john and ann dragged the 80-pound dog back to the house, loaded him in the truck, and started driving toward town. one of them drove while the other one got on the cell phone and started calling veterinarians' emergency numbers. it was christmas day, and someone had shot their dog.

this story has a happy ending. they found a vet, burly survived--it was touch and go for quite a while, but he's a hardy, tough lab, and by the next hunting season he was out there again, rustling up the grouse, leaping into lake of the woods after the ducks. though it was very hard to explain to a weeping little maggie why someone would shoot her dog.

burly is going to be 13 years old next spring, and this fall might be his last hunting trip. it might be time for him to start taking it a little easy. boscoe thinks that would be a good idea, though boscoe has been taking it easy since he was about eight months old. in any case, we were glad to see him last weekend, glad to have him peeing on the tomato plants and confounding riley in our back yard.

you've had a great life, burly--full of love and excitement and adventure and drama and near-death experiences. it's been quite a ride. and it's not over yet.