A true friend

January 2000 Trevor and Kyle arrived a our back door with two adorable pups. They had been left abandoned in the ditch at he foot of our garden, left to die or for someone to have pity on them. They never left us: Gillian said she thought they had Rottweiler eyes. The decision was taken to take them in and give them a home. A decision we never regretted. They were no longer two brown puppies now they were Fox and Sox, full of energy and fun, unless you were a small fury friend. We had to keep them away from sheep and they did, on a couple of occasions manage to kill a gosling and a few rabbits.

Over the last ten years they became my faithful friends. When life was difficult and some people made life difficult for me they were there as faithful as ever. Peter taught them to fetch and leave the stick or ball a his feet and to "Speak", I learnt that if Sox spoke Fox soon came to find him even if he failed to come to my call. Stuart became my deputy who looked after then when I was away and he did so with such love and commitment. Both Sox and Fox stole our hearts.

Every morning they greeted me with a wag of their tails and an eager expectation of getting into the back of the car in the hope of going for a walk: Sox demanded that sticks or balls were thrown and he retrieved them time without number and Fox dandered off to do his own thing, caring little for this strange act of retrieval unless it was feathered or woolly:today Fox is leaning to live on his own. Just as the dreaded cancer takes so many people so it threatens the doggy world. Up until Sunday morning Sox was apparently living a normal life; constantly being admired by people who have become his friends but then he failed to get up out of bed. He just lay motionless with his eyes open but unable to move even his head to get some water. At first I thought nothing of it: perhaps he was having a bad day like most of us and after all he was getting old but by Sunday afternoon, when we returned from church, to find him still motionless the alarm bells began to ring. I phoned the emergency Vet who said I should bring him in immediately. The initial thought was that he had eaten some rat poison because his blood was not coagulating. Fox was summoned to play the big brother hero by donating some blood but when nothing had changed on Monday we all began to realise that it was something else. The Vet did some other tests and another scan was taken. Then came the devastating news that he had a massive tumour and would only live for a few days. We could take him home to die but we did not want him to suffer just so that we could have him for another day. We all went to see him and soon realised that life was not great for him and the kindest thing would be to "let him go",

The Vet gave him an injection and we gathered round him to embrace him in his final minutes and very quickly he died. We told him that we loved him, even though he had no idea what we were saying but he died with the sound of our voices in his ears. We also told him that he was a great wee dog and brought him home to bury him in our garden.

I will never forget this faithful wee dog whose sole purpose in life was to please his master and that he did, I wonder how many of us humans could say that our sole purpose was to please our master? Sox was only a dog but to me he was a gift sent to me by God.