This spring, Nellie the wonder dog is pushing up daisies instead of trampling them. She passed on Easter Monday morning. I couldn’t quite bring myself to smile, but I sure felt relief when when I came downstairs to find her sprawled in her favorite spot on the family room carpet, peacefully at rest with no fuss or bother.
A black Lab (why would anyone have anything else?), she was the runt of a litter of 11 and outlived all her siblings, though she only made it to 12. I wish she’d had another good year, but her last one was good enough. She got to hunt several times, picked up a goose or two, went crabbing and fishing every time we did, and didn’t have a bad day until she fetched up with the stomach cancer that took her in two months.
On Easter Sunday, her last, she went to the boatyard with me, wandered off while I painted the bottom, got dragged back by a concerned citizen, slept all the way home, and ate leftover lamb chops with her dinner.
She was the happiest dog I ever knew. When I took her to the Bay Ridge Animal Hospital three weeks before she passed, the vet looked over her records and said everyone who had seen her had written the same note in the margins: “Happy dog.” The vet said there was nothing she could do and encouraged me to take her home and spoil her till her time was up. I thought I’d have to take her back for euthanasia, but she spared me that pain, and instead of turning her over to strangers I got to bury her in the back yard, with help from my neighbor Hank, whose eyes grew moist when we eased her down in my old hunting coat, her burial shroud.
She was never sick, that I can remember, other than a few stomach issues which resulted from injudicious eating. Well, she was Lab, after all.
She was a great boat dog. She loved crabbing, fishing, and any kind of motor boating, but like a lot of powerboaters she did not care for sailing. It’s hard for big dogs to cling to stuff when the boat heels, and she never got comfortable with that. But she could last all day on the crab boat, eyes alight, chasing flies, snapping up mouthfuls of spray, and nosing perilously close to crabs or perch that got loose on the floorboards. I never saw her get nipped.
She was a good retriever—not trained well enough, but with all the right instincts. My favorite day in the blind; it was just the two of us in early teal season. A flock of greenwings buzzed by at about 120 miles an hour. I swung on the lead bird and watched it tumble. “Nellie!” I said, which was her go signal, and she bounded off in the wrong direction by 45 degrees. I whistled to stop her but she wouldn’t have it, and kept swimming out 50 yards where she stopped, snapped up something, and turned around with a drake in her jaws. I guess I’d dropped two with one shot. As soon as she brought that one to hand, she swam out to fetch the other. I never knew the first one was down.
Nellie was given to me by a Potomac River fishing pal, Mike (Animal) Bailey, who had a high-strung field-trialing black Lab named Siri. He mated her with a big, blocky, even-tempered hunting dog from Montana. The mix was magic. Nellie was high strung when she hunted, which you want, but calm as a judge any other time. And unlike her predecessor, Kramer, who hyperventilated every time he got in a moving vehicle on land or sea, she liked car rides and couldn’t wait to get in the boat.
She’s gone now, off to her heavenly rewards, and I’ll miss her. Every time we took a walk in spring, summer, and fall, we’d somehow end up at the boat dock. Usually we’d go for a ride. I sure hope they have boats up there.
--by Angus Phillips