Free Lambsquarters by Barbara McLean Page A

overthe months her markings changed. The dark hair remained over her head and back, but formed a wide symmetrical band around her face, detailed with tan. Her legs and belly turned beige and she grew a white ruff. The older she got, the more her white father surfaced in her fur, eventually making her Snowy Zoë and Snowface.
    She was the runt of six pups, the last born, and she retained a bit of the underdog in her demeanour. Her effective bark did little to ward off strangers, for as soon as anyone approached her she’d turn turtle and submit. Zoë shadowed her mother sideways through fences, trailed behind her over the hills, and lost all their games of bite-throat, throwing herself down on her back, her mother’s teeth pointed at her neck. Never could she get enough attention.
    At thirty-five pounds, she made a rather cumbersome lapdog, but she was determined to live on the couch, snuggle up and settle into quiet adoration. She turned into a rag doll then. We would gently clutch the tendon in the crook of her front leg to make the relaxed paw rise and fall in a wave. She would be on her back, her chin high in pleasure, her eyes half closed.
    Zoë loved to sing. When she was on her back, on my lap, I’d rub her chest and hit a note, and she’d start in on an uninhibited aria. Tremulous, melodic, Zoë’s operatic numbers far surpassed the baying of hounds at moons. My guess is she’d have loved the costumes of formal performance as well. But Zoë was a farm dog.
    She inherited her father’s skill at groundhogging. Her mother was a natural killer as well, but Zoë was a pro, an Artemis, eagle-eyed and fast. Her aim was perfect and her method, which was to attack and shake, broke the groundhog’s neck in an instant. Sweet singer, she turned vicious when a woodchuck showed its yellow teeth.
    Groundhog bodies would lie in state for a few days, depending on the heat, before Zoë would drag them home for a final ripening on the lawn. When they were really rank, she would alternately chew away on them and roll in them, spreading the scent of rotting flesh all along her coat before begging for an evening lap-sit. She got to sleep outside in the summers.
    It seemed incongruous to breed Zoë, a perpetual pup, so we took her into Murphy’s Mill to be spayed after her first groundhogging season. It was autumn, the vermin were gone to ground for the winter, and she’d begun to smell more like a dog than a charnel house. She would be able to convalesce inside.
    Because Zoë had a hidden infection, something went wrong during the anaesthetic. She lost vital signs, went into cardiac arrest, turned flat. The vet jumped all over her, administered life-saving drugs, did CPR, bagged her, got her breathing again. Whatever was wrong was beyond his scope and equipment. Guelph, he said. We had to rush her to the animal hospital at the agricultural college. It was the only way to save her.
    Thomas drove the pickup. Zoë lay unconscious on my lap in the passenger seat, her reflexes too shallow now for even a wave. I cradled her in one arm and held up the IV bottle with my other. An hour’s drive down the highway, ambulance speed, taking our dying dog to the best veterinary care in the country. Thomas, used to tending emergencies along the same route on code 4 trips to the hospital, was reduced to relative and driver.
    We left her at the college in the care of the vets. They called us in the middle of the night and I heard Thomas try, through the fog of sleep, to make sense of what they were saying, try to translate dog-owner talk into medical language so he could really understand. “You mean she has peritonitis?” he asked and pressed for details. It was touch and go. She was infected, was in grave condition. They had removed what damaged tissue they could, cleaned up the rest, put her on drugs and were waiting for improvement. She was stable.
    Such a sad face she had when we arrived to take her home. Hound eyes turned down, great pools