I badly miss the bird dog. This page is to record her presence until I can see her again.
The bird dog has been with us for more than a decade, since I was a child in elementary. We adopted her at full size: the bird dog had once been a street puppy, and she had once been abused by a previous owner, and as a result of this past she’s very silent and jumpy, prone to bolting on walks. She is big and has black fur and milky eyes. We thought she was blind for quite some time but it turns out she just has bad milky eyes from her time on the street. The bird dog doesn’t like to be pet.
When we were little and unused to each other I used to poke at her nose and throw my arms around her: I had never had a dog before, and I couldn’t read the signals to tell that she didn’t like it. But despite shivering and showing her teeth she never ever bit me, or even moved out of the way. And when I realised and stopped doing it she began to come to me and sit with me and kiss my hands. We got used to one another.
There’s a joke in my house that the bird dog is the dog version of me, and in a sense it’s true. Doesn’t it really speak for my parents that they raised two of the same personality, even in different species? We’re both cagey and anxious, flinch at touch and loud noise, lash out angrily. We both have itchy skin that we scratch too much. We’ve both bitten someone when we were little and were scolded for it, and our favourite activity is sitting by our loved ones quietly. The bird dog hates thunderstorms, though, and I love them. So I guess that’s one divergence.
She’s not really a “bird dog” in any traditional breed sense: the pseudonym was inspired by the game “Beet The Devil”, to preserve her identity. But to me it’s perfectly fitting. She is a bird in a dog body, flighty and peckish. When she feels like it she comes to me preening and clucking.
On 18th September 2026 the bird dog and I nearly died together (I wrote an entry about it on this website). Afterwards she had diarrhoea and I had hyperventilation. I don’t think the bird dog really understood the fact that if we had been a few seconds slower we would have been smashed dead by the truck, but she grasped that I was very upset and behaved a bit better accordingly.
Sometimes I worry the bird dog doesn’t know I love her. She doesn’t listen to my authority or trust me, and she treats me like her equal; I believe this is because we were little together, and she doesn’t understand the fact that I’ve grown up now, because even in old age she’s still a baby. I love her awfully.
I love my bird dog. I miss living at home. I hope get to see her soon.
the bird dog. i drew this trying to show someone what she looks like and it was so bad i started laughing, but it made me miss her a lot so i saved the image and then went home and wrote this.