When Ben Hur Lampman coined the famous phrase, “the one best place to bury a good dog is in the heart of his master,” I don’t know how many of man’s best friends were crammed into his heart.
Lampman, a brilliant editorial writer, associate editor for The Oregonian and an Oregon Poet Laureate, loved to hunt and fish (mostly fish) and was arguably the paper’s first outdoor writer, writing about the outdoors and nature throughout his career, in addition to his early feature-writing assignments, even while he was an editorial writer.
The paper’s latest online outdoor writer just added No. 11 to his cardiogram.
Kazuri, our 14-plus-year-old chocolate lab, crossed the rainbow bridge last week, her loving head sandwiched between my lap and my wife’s comforting hand.
These dreadful moments never get easier — bittersweet rewards for fond memories and the ultimate sacrifice we accept without question from the day a puppy first breathes into our noses and wags a tiny tail.
I gave it some time, but still find myself a week later saddened and perplexed as I go to bed without saying good night to her in the bedside kennel...or don’t see her lying on the other side of the gate when we get in the car, probably sad and wondering why she’s not going, where my shotgun is and why it is already daylight.
Of all our field dogs, Kazuri was by far the most loving — that is, when she wasn’t sitting in a blind, intently watching the distant sky for ducks or geese.
Puppy chow quickly saw to it that she outgrew her Swahili name, which means “small and beautiful.”
We’d run out of salmon and trout names starting with “K,” a kind of quirk of mine (my first dog was a golden retriever, Kokanee, who was the color of smoked fish by the same name). So we picked Kazuri, since we’d recently been in Kenya and had visited a famous bead factory by the same name. Their hand-crafted art is sold worldwide.
Kazuri only stayed small for a few months, but never lost an ounce of her beautiful soul in all 65 pounds.
Not all of her moments, however, were small or beautiful.
When she was two, she’d come to love racing alongside my pickup and trailer-load of goose decoys as we bounced across a pasture to the blind to unload.
But one day she tried to cut too close to the trailer and a tire ran over her, dislocating her hip joint, landing her in the loving care of a brilliant veterinary surgeon who had mastered the technique of ostectomy, the complete removal of the ball from the leg bone. Muscles then filled in the vacant joint.
After an extended recovery (and plenty of whining every time I went hunting without her), Kazuri never walked or ran with a limp and remained mobile until cancer crippled her momentum sometime around Christmas.
Kazuri spent most of her life on a tag team with Spring, our small Munsterlander (no, not a ‘K’ name, but coined with spring chinook salmon in mind). Her ears perked up at the distant sound of honking geese or wind through the wings of unseen close passes by ducks, long before mine or Kazuri’s did.
Kazuri never had either Spring’s ears or nose (Spring never lost a cripple, no matter how long it took), but typically saw geese so far away that Spring hadn’t even heard them yet.
And Spring learned early on to surrender her retrieves to her larger partner. They were a joy to watch at work.
Last Friday, Kazuri surrendered her last loving trust and was laid to rest peacefully in her favorite resting place in our backyard.
Thank you, Ben Hur Lampman, for full hearts and clear memories.
Free for all! — for fishing, that is — next weekend (June 6-7) in both Oregon and Washington.
All usual rules and regulations, bag limits and other restrictions apply in both states.
Oregon drops all fishing license and tag fees for both days, statewide and offshore, including crabbing and clamming.
Washington still requires the purchase of licenses and catch record cards for salmon, steelhead, sturgeon, halibut and all shellfish, but angling for other saltwater fish, and for bass, trout and other freshwater species, is free on both days.
Hunting tag results: Tens of thousands of Oregon hunters will learn the outcomes of controlled-hunt draws for big-game tags (deer, elk, antelope, sheep, goats) on June 12.
That’s the day Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife officials will post the results online.
Those without an online account can either check with a licensing agent or call the department’s licensing office at 503-947-6101.
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