goodbye old friend

i have been struggling to put words in this post for about a week now.  we lost our dear sweet gunner a week ago.  we took him camping with us a week ago.  he got sick on sunday night and was throwing up.  on monday morning (jared's birthday and memorial day) he seemed so much better.  jared let him out of his kennel and he went to get a drink.  he walked up by the trailer and just collapsed.  he never got up.  we think he might have had a heart attack.  we brought him home and buried him in the back corner of jared's parents pasture.

gunner was with us from the beginning.  when jared and i were dating i bought a puppy.  her name was maizie.  when we got married we couldn't take her with us.  she became my mom's dog.  we bred her with my uncles lab and gunner was one of her pups.  jared knew right from the start which pup we should take.  gunner always had the sweetest disposition.  he was so kind and gentle.  he became like our little baby.  we were so worried about him when we had braylie but from the day we brought her home from the hospital he loved her so much.  he would lay by her on the floor and just look at her.  i never had to worry about him with the kids.  i knew he would protect them at all costs.

we didn't take him camping very often with us.  something always seemed to happen when we took him with us.  we had taken him camping to strawberry a couple of years when he was still a pup.  one year when he was really little he was on the boat with us fishing.  jared's mom and dad had a puppy also.  jared's dad accidentally stepped on him in the boat and he cried and cried.  then the next year we took him to strawberry with us.  jared was trying to get him out of the truck and he got his leg caught between the carpet kit and the tailgate.  i think he might have broken it, it never was the same.  on the same trip we left him at camp with jared's parents dog and when we got back he had a very large gash on his back.   i think that might have been the last time we took him camping with us.

when we moved from our last house into this one we had six weeks of limbo.  we lived with my parents for those six weeks.  my parents lived just three blocks from our old house and they live about a mile from our new one.  when we moved into this house the fencing on the north side of the yard was only about three feet tall.  gunner learned quite quickly that he could jump over the fence.  he would get out of the yard and head on back to my parents house.  we never quite knew his path and it would take him about two hours to get there but we always knew where he would end up.  one night my mom woke in the middle of the night to sounds down by the front door.  she woke my dad and told him that she thought someone was trying to break in.  when my dad went to check with his baseball bat he found gunner scratching at their front door.

we are so thankful that we got penny.  she has been a really great companion to gunner for the last year.  she has brought out his youthful side and really enjoyed being around her.  he was kind of like a little old man and she was just like the child who should be seen and not heard (or dealt with for that matter).  but there were so many times that we would look out back and see them laying together or playing together. about a month ago she went into heat.  he really seemed to enjoy her then.  the kids would see them and start laughing thinking they were playing a game.  the neighbor kids told me one day that they saw them "dancing" together.  i don't know where she learned anything about any of this but lily would tell jared that gunner was helping penny get her babies out.  thank heaven that he was fixed many years ago. 

gunner has been a good friend and companion for the last 11 years.  we will truly miss our great buddy.