Where to Bury a
Dog
by Ben Hur
Lampman
From the book "Old Dogs Remembered"
edited by Bud Johns
We are thinking now of a setter,
whose coat was flame in the sunshine and who, so far as we are aware, never
entertained a mean or unworthy thought. This setter is buried beneath a cherry
tree, under four feet of garden loam, and at its proper season the cherry tree
strews petals on the green lawn of his grave. Beneath a cherry tree, or an
apple, or any flowering shrub of the garden, is an excellent place to bury a
dog. Beneath such trees, such shrubs, he slept in the drowsy summer, or gnawed
at a flavored bone, or lifted his head to challenge some strange intruder. These
are good places, in life or in death. Yet it is a small matter, and it touches
sentiment more than anything else. For if the dog be well remembered, if
sometimes he leaps through your dreams actual as in life, eyes kindling,
questing, asking, laughing, begging, it matters not at all where that dog sleeps
and at last. On a hill where the wind is unrebuked, and the trees are roaring,
or beside a stream he knew in puppyhood, or somewhere in the flatness of a
pasture land, where most exhilarating cattle graze. It is all one to the dog,
and all one to you, and nothing is gained, and nothing is lost - if memory
lives. But there is one best place to bury a dog. One place that is best of
all.
If you bury him in this spot, the
secret of which you must already have, he will come to you when you call -- come
to you over the grim, dim frontiers of death, and down the well-remembered path,
and to your side again. And though you call a dozen living dogs to heel they
should not growl at him, nor resent his coming, for he is yours and he belongs
here. People may scoff at you, who see no lightest blade of grass bent by his
foot, who hear no whimper pitched too fine for mere audition, people who may
never really have had a dog. Smile at them then, for you shall know something
that is hidden from them, and which is well worth knowing. The one best place to
bury a good dog is in the heart of his master.
