by Barbaraanne Helberg

Created on: May 22, 2010

Memories of my canine adoptee Mick are fraught with a nightmarish recollection and replete with joy.

Mick spent hours running boundlessly on The Ohio State University campus where he feverishly chased squirrels and tirelessly played swim-and-fetch in Mirror Lake, and he sailed fearlessly with me on Hoover Reservoir. 

A medium sized, colorful red-brown-black-coated mix, Mick was three months old when I adopted him from a Columbus

animal shelter. He was a sleepy furball resting inside my jacket when I carried him home to my Oakland Avenue apartment.

He loved to lie on the front of my ten-foot, one-person dugout seat sailboat. I sat in the dugout, controlling the single sail, while my furry friend kept a lookout for potential Loch-Ness monsters. I'll never know how he could lie there, head up and nose in the wind, still as a rubber plug on that slippery surface, water and wind spraying and rushing about him, with never a slip. It had to be love of the moment.

Mick was seven when my neighbor shot and killed him one starless night that I will never forget. And I will never hold myself blameless for his loss.

I had moved with Mick out of Columbus proper into a country farm building renovated into several apartments. Next door lived a family with a fenced-in back yard full of German Shepherds. Twenty-five and a farm girl at heart, I was pleased to have a new country setting in which to live, and Mick was happy to roam with me over the half acre of land that included a small pond fifty yards away from our back door. My apartment was on the second floor, accessible by a long, straight wooden stairway.

The night Mick died, I actually heard the shot, but didn't relate that loud crack to gunfire until two days later, when the sister-in-law of Mick's killer confessed his crime. Nevertheless, I had let Mick out and down the stairway on his own that night to relieve himself while I prepared for bed. When I called him back through the pitch dark of the night, he didn't come. I searched vainly, finding nothing.

The sister-in-law and my landlord, both of whom also lived on the property, returned Mick's body to me, and I wept over his new stillness and the small, round hole in his red belly. Tears streaming, I buried him in the partial clay of the steep embankment that led to a nearby creek running beyond the pond.

Then I climbed

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