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My mother called me today, two-thousand miles away in Wisconsin, with the not-so-unexpected news that the childhood dog had passed away yesterday. Star had had several tumors - one had ruptured in the night. My parents rushed her to the emergency clinic. There was nothing that could have been done for her. Our canine centenarian was simply succumbing to the rigors of her full and happy life...

So my parents had her euthanized, the pure-white fourteen-year-old mutt leaving our world a continent away from where her life had started. My father and uncle dug a hole near the garden on the old Bigalke homestead in Wisconsin; though the ground was frozen, they managed through determination and grief to prepare a proper resting place. She now lays in the ground less than a mile from both my paternal grandparents, nestled into a Portage County hillside.

Star had quite the journey. I was away across the Tetons in Idaho Falls with a friend from school when my sister and father were walking into the KMart in Jackson, Wyoming. There was a person outside the store in the middle of March with a box of six-week-old puppies. A mixed litter of curs and mutts, one pure-white puppy looked up from the motley crew...

... and my father was soon inside the store, pet products now added to the day's shopping list. I came home later that evening and was instantly greeted by the cutest ball of white fuzz skittering around on the linoleum floor. Somehow, somewhere in all those disparate breeds there was constructed this creature perfectly designed for her environment. Star was camouflaged uncannily for the long months of snow in Grand Teton National Park. She would romp around for hours on the drifts in the backyard; when summer came, she would tussle in the grass, roaming around curiously.

We had another dog at the time we adopted Star - a pomeranian/toy poodle mix inaptly named Duke by his previous owners. But Star was different... this was the first time my sister and I had a dog from puppyhood. Actually, there was one other dog we had when we were younger, so young my sister cannot even recall the thing, but that was a short-lived pethood. And throughout the years, other dogs have come and gone, yet Star always remained the constant in the household...

Duke lasted around for several more years, until we gave him to an elderly lady. We bought a Chesapeake Bay retriever from friends and named her Adelaide; we thought we had found the perfect compliment to Star. Yet Adelaide had been the

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