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| Master of all he surveys! 1601 hrs : 5.1.2012 |
The last calendar picture..... so appropriate.... Gunner as ever, me behind him, looking out into the .. well, whatever it is he sees out there. Always looking out, always looking ahead, computing everything in that amazingly handsome head. Here he is standing at the top of one of our fields, looking down across his territory - the fields and hedgerows where he'd trained as a youngster, where he'd (dare I admit) chased those rabbits before he learned not to, from where he'd herded the piglets back when they wandered too far away..... The fields where he'd demonstrated to Jaunty and Bugler what it meant to 'sit', 'stay', 'fetch' and 'give' and, in the distance, the fields where - before those two came along - we'd walked and hunted for hours alone together, teaching each other little things about the way we saw the world. We couldn't do it now - many of those fields have been subsumed into someone's "shoot" and he doesn't approve of spaniels "running around"!!! Ah well. Memories crystallised simply because they are unrepeateable.
So... on this winter's evening - and it could just as easily have been the week before - Gunner gazes at the sun setting at the end - or the beginning - of another year..... and my lens betrays me watching him yet again..... whatever the future holds......
"A (man) is not dead while his name is still spoken.
While we remember the ones we have lost they stay alive in our hearts and our memories.
They live on in the stories we tell......"
It is 16 months since he left but it seems like only yesterday... it will always be only yesterday.
