The Last Ride of Lucy the Lion Hunter

The Prologue

Love and loss; tale as old as time. A family buys a dog.  They love the dog. They care for the dog.  The dog brings joy to everyone.  Predictably, the dog dies and everyone cries, and it’s all just a big, sad mess…  But, that doesn’t quite fit here; not really.  It’s a more complicated relationship; a bit more… nuanced than what you’re probably used to.  This is a story about a dog and a human, for a full decade intertwined by fate, love, loyalty, and animosity.  It doesn’t end well.  Not for either of them.  But, then again, maybe it does.

The Early Years

According to the vet forms I was given after she passed, she was brown, weighed 69.7 pounds, and was named Lucy.  I’m not exactly Hemingway, but that is a complete trash description, so I’ll do a little better.  She was, quite simply, a strikingly beautiful specimen of a canine; a thick, copper main coat, subtly layered like the colors of a sunset, with a few well-placed darker hints on the shoulders and the tip of the tail, white feet, medium muzzle, hypnotic, golden eyes, and the musculature of a Rottweiler.

She was a pound hound, a mix, a mutt.  And, she was one of the cutest puppies I’ve ever seen.  Alert, precocious, nose to the ground, quick to stalk off and stare down any potential threat right from the get go.  She hated to be still, but she loved to ride in a car.  Lucy was the quintessential “hang your head out the window and smile” dog.  Those car rides with her are some of my favorite memories.

We finally figured out what her dominant breed was while watching the movie “Blood Diamond” in 2007 or so.  She had this trait where, when she was in full-on stare-down mode, a little rounded ridge stood up all the way down her back, along her spine.  She looked, sounded and acted exactly like the dogs in that movie, Rhodesian Ridgebacks.

Per Wikipedia, Ridgebacks trace their roots back to the European settlement of Southern Africa.  Colonists crossed their white-people dogs with the “semi-domesticated” hunting dogs of the Khoikhoi people in an effort to ward off LION ATTACKS.  The outcome of that breeding were dogs so damn stout that they could keep an actual lion at bay while the master found enough ammunition to kill it.  That all fit in with Lucy’s personality; she was a savage… sometimes to a fault.  It was this semi-domesticated portion of her personality that became more and more of an issue as she grew.

We don’t have any lions in North Mississippi, but we do have an endless supply of small mammals and birds.  Lucy killed nearly all of them.  If you ranked the ecological effects of particular environmental crises in Mississippi in terms of sheer devastation, it would be 1) Deepwater Horizon, 2) Lucy the Lion Hunter. She killed upwards of 50 moles, a few dozen squirrels, eight rabbits, two possums, and seven birds, two of which I watched her take directly out of the air.  I know that she killed these animals because each one of them was brought onto the driveway and laid out like a ribeye at the Kroger meat counter; “Here’s supper, Dad.”

Now, that’s all okay.  Nothing wrong with killing a little dinner, especially when the vast majority of these animals were natural nuisances.  I could just chalk the bloody remnants up to survival of the fittest.  But, the visceral and somewhat primeval essence of her soul wasn’t just exposed to her fellow four-legged (or two-winged) animal nemeses.  Lucy was aggressive, HIGHLY AGGRESSIVE, with respect to any sort of perceived stranger who dared venture too close to her dominion.  She made mortal enemies out of neighbors, passers by, service providers, etc, and the absolute bane of her existence were the FedEx and UPS guys.  She never once listened to anything I ever said, but she could hear the diesel motor on a delivery truck from 10 miles away.

And I know you may be reading this and thinking to yourself that this is just typical dog behavior; that they’re all territorial to some extent and they all hate the mailman.  But, it was different with Lucy.  She had an absolutely ferocious, heart-stopping, Earth-shaking bark, and it didn’t stop there.  She would stalk off with that ridge standing straight up and flex those shoulders until they rippled, and if that didn’t do the trick, she might resort to actually chasing or trying to attack.  When she was in the mood, there was nothing I could do to control her.  From the time she was 18-months, I lived with the fear that she would eventually kill another dog or attack a person.

In an effort to try to keep her interactions with the general population to a minimum, we obviously kept her fenced… but, the digging.  The moles she left strewn about our property on Vance Cove would still be alive today if they knew how to dig and tunnel as well as Lucy.  It didn’t matter how well you reinforced a fence, or how often you refilled a hole, if she wanted out, she was getting out.  One of the reasons we bought the house that we bought in Byhalia was that it came with a ready-built dog run.  We might as well have lit the fence on fire on move-in day and saved ourselves the trouble.

After that miserable failure, I went out and bought one of those invisible fences.  But, as it turns out, Lucy did not really feel pain, so the shock collar was useless and she still just came and went as she pleased. She started digging in neighbors yards and causing other forms of general chaos, so she had to begin spending the majority of her days locked up in the garage, and I hated myself for it.  I was fully aware that I was failing her, but I stayed angry at her constantly because she just WOULD NOT listen and learn.  Our relationship had deteriorated to the point that I started searching for a new home for her.

The Diagnosis

It looked like a bruise at first.  I thought maybe she had just rubbed her ribs on the concrete in the driveway and caused an abrasion.  But then, it started swelling.  Before you knew it, she had a small mass, roughly the size of a racquetball, hanging under her skin, near her bottom-most, left rib.  We took her in to the Vet, Dr. Stephens, and he took it off.  She had a drain tube in for a few days, but seemed to prefer that to the recently-excised mass.  A sample was sent to a lab for cancer screening.

Subcutaneous mastocytomas is what they’re called by people smarter than me; mast cell tumors, typically found in the connective tissue or just under the skin at the ribs, belly, or trunk.  Variable in size, variable in severity, but constant in likelihood of recurrence.  Lucy had cancer… officially; the Vet’s office sent me a letter and some literature.  She was 6 at the time in 2011, which is a bit early for this type of disease.  But, as I’ve laid out in great detail, she never really was one for following norms.

Typically, this is a slow-progressing form of cancer.  The Vet told me that she’d probably live through it long enough to die from some other malady, but who knows? The only real certainty was recurrence, so we agreed to just keep an eye on her and wait it out.  I felt like I owed it to her, to guide her through the end, so I stopped looking for another home for her and concentrated on making the best out of what had become a contentious situation.

It was 2014 before we ever saw evidence of another tumor.  In the interim, we had our third child and moved from Byhalia to Olive Branch, into an actual subdivision.  The garage arrangement continued, but I tried to get Lucy plenty of yard time every day.  She kept on being a neighborhood nuisance.  I tried the invisible fence and shock collar again; the definition of insanity and what have you.  We were fresh out of moles, but picked up several walkers and joggers in exchange.  She was well taken care of; content and happy.

By August of this year, two more knots had developed; one on her left knee joint and the other within an inch of the original tumor site.  These were smaller fatty tumors, not the mast cell variety, so they grew slowly and weren’t much of a concern outside of aesthetics.  Early September was the first time I noticed the tumor that wound up killing her.

The Last Ride

By the time Lucy was three, if you had asked me how I thought she would die, I’d have bet on it happening on a Wintry weekend after three straight weeks of hard freezes, just to make it as difficult as possible to bury her.  I was half right.  It did happen on a Saturday in December, almost Winter, but it was one of the prettiest December days I’ve ever seen.

It started to look like the end on that Wednesday.  The tumor that we spotted in September was basically the same size at Thanksgiving.  In the next two weeks, it quadrupled in size and her quality of life became dramatically worse.  The position of the tumor on her ribs, coupled with the size, made it difficult for her to lay down comfortably.  Still, on Tuesday she was able to run around a little bit in the yard, and I was planning on taking her in to the Vet at the end of the week for an assessment.

On Wednesday morning, she could barely rise to her feet voluntarily.  She stopped eating, even biscuits and treats.  If I had known then that Tuesday breakfast was to be her last meal, I would have come up with something better than dog food.  I’m sorry for that, Lucy.  It all happened so fast.

We made it to see Dr. Stephens by 8:00 AM on Thursday.  She was in bad, bad shape.  The swollen spot bothered her to the point where she started picking and licking at it, causing it to bleed and become even more uncomfortable.  I had tried on Wednesday to bandage it, but it was like trying to mend a broken leg on a rodeo calf, before tying it up.  Our conversation quickly led to the determination that Lucy was down to days instead of weeks.  Surgically removing the tumor wasn’t really an option anymore; high chance of metastasis to organs and abdominal tissue plus a ridiculously painful recovery.  Doc Stephens gave her some painkillers and Prednisone in a last ditch effort to hopefully reduce the size of the tumor. Thus, the death watch began.

After taking her pills on Thursday, she seemed to pep up just a bit, but she still wouldn’t eat.  Friday was worse.  I’ve heard that sometimes, when dogs know the end is near (and, rest assured, they know), they will wander off into solitude and lay down to die.  Folks, let me tell you, that is an absolutely pitiful thing to witness.  It took everything short of a crane for me to get her on her feet, and once I did, she just slowly walked away.  I called for her… nothing.  She could barely walk; a hitch in the left side of her gate.  Still, she set out, hobbling toward eternity with every bit of determination she had left.  I had to go get her and carry all 69.7 pounds of her back to the driveway.  She didn’t want food, wouldn’t take pills, was ready to be done with it.  That was the first time I cried.

On Saturday I had to run a half-marathon, because of course I did.  I needed to be a complete physical and emotional wreck before I even started dealing with Lucy’s last hours.  Before I hit the shower, I checked on her and tried to give her some food and meds.  She growled at me over the pills.  She wouldn’t or couldn’t move.  I knew what had to happen.  Dr. Cox was on call over the weekend, but he was attending to an emergency with a horse, so we had to make alternative plans.  He recommended Horn Lake Animal Hospital and agreed that it needed to happen as quickly as possible.

We already had a burial spot picked out.  My in-laws have a small pet cemetery out on the back side of their property.  It’s a small, manicured plot at the treeline, surrounded by a white picket fence; the resting place of three of Lucy’s cousins.  I had to buy a coffin of some kind, so I went to Lowe’s and bought the biggest Rubbermaid container in the store.  I needed for it to be comfortable, regardless of the fact that it wouldn’t really matter to her.  I found a few pillows and laid a fleece, Tennessee blanket across them, and we were ready to go.  God bless Randy and Stephen Bing, my father-in-law and brother-in-law, for what they did that day.  They dug the grave so I wouldn’t have to, which was especially kind because I don’t think I had it in me.

I wasn’t ready to be that sad.  I had lived in nearly constant animosity with that dog for a decade, and I thought it would be much, much easier.  I think it was the kids reactions that tore me up so bad.  They didn’t have much of a relationship with Lucy.  We spent a great deal of time and effort trying to keep them shielded from her, for fear that she might knock one of them down, or nip at them, or worse.  But, here we were, at the last goodbye, and they were all crying, balling, sobbing as the permanence of the words “put her to sleep” washed over their hearts.

This was about the point where I had an epiphany.  During the decade I was tied to Lucy, I often wondered… why?  Why was she so hard-headed? Why would she not just listen?  Why could she not have been a normal, lazy hound dog, with normal lazy hound dog tendencies?  The answer to all of those questions about her nature and behavior, in the end was pretty simple.  I needed her to be the way she was, because I needed to be a better version of myself.

At some point during Lucy’s life, I went from being a young adult to a man.  Her stubbornness drove me to patience.  Her loyalty drove me to forgiveness.  Her wildness drove me to peace.  It was all out of sheer desperation and necessity, but she broke me.  All of the bad parts of me were diminished, and all of the good parts enhanced, because I simply HAD to change my behavior to survive her.  She was a walking, barking example of what is and what is not within a person’s power to control. She was a living, breathing lesson in patience and grace.  God used her to make me a better husband, a better Father, a better Christian.  And now, as she lay dying, she was helping my children learn to grieve for the first time.

The Last Ride of Lucy the Lion Hunter took about 25 minutes.  I had to hand load her into the back of the car, next to her coffin.  I remembered the day we picked her up at the Collierville Animal Shelter, how wild she became… and all of the times I lost my temper with her.  And, I spent most of that 25 minutes apologizing to that dog and thanking her for teaching me all that she had.  It was as low a moment as I’ve ever had, and I’ve had plenty.  The guilt, the sorrow, the remorse… I patted her head and put on some Patsy Cline, because Patsy is perfect for times like that. There was no head out the window, no smile, no fight left in her.

At the Horn Lake Animal Hospital, they treated Lucy well.  The whole thing was over in about 30 minutes, though it felt like half a day.  I knelt down beside her, put my forehead on hers, and told her “Thank you” and “I love you” until a kind man named Dr. Mobley told me that she was gone.  I took her and laid her in her casket, drove her out to Moscow, and Stephen helped me bury her, while my niece Isabel watched and told me she’d pray for us.  Seven-year old’s always know what to say during trying times.

Obituary

The life of Lucy the Lion Hunter spanned just over ten years; June 10th-ish of 2005 – December 5th 2015.  She is survived by one sister, Snoopy (14) of Olive Branch, MS, as well as a human family who miss her more than they ever realized they would.  In the end, it was cancer that killed her, though it was never really able to take her life.  She lived fiercely and loyally, and protected those she cared for with every ounce of her being.  She dealt mainly in death, chaos, and destruction, all the while teaching lessons in patience and grace.  She was and always will be loved and appreciated by those who knew her well.  She is buried on Poole Rd. in Moscow, TN, on a piece of property that will now likely be rodent-free until the return of Jesus Christ.  Thank you, Lucy.  I love you.  God Bless.

Thank You’s

I wanted to take the time to thank my family and friends for all of the kind words, thoughts, and prayers, since Lucy passed.  Also, thank you to Dr. Cox, Dr. Stephens, and the rest of the staff at All Animal Hospital in Olive Branch, as well as the staff at Horn Lake Animal Hospital.  And, a special thank you to the owners and staff at Paws Inn and Suites; she loved you guys.