Vale Hamish

The phone rang at 7.30 yesterday morning, just before I was about to set out on my walk, and shortly after running Robbie up to town to catch the 7.10 bus. It was my friend Pat, distressed and crying. She asked me would I be able to find some time to help her husband Mal dig a hole for Hamish, whom they had to have put down by the vet last night.

I told Pat I'd be there shortly. There'd been a couple of inches of rain overnight and it started raining again as I went outside to unload and unhitch the trailer which was full from a gardening job finished late the previous day. My plan had been to do my walk then get Lib breakfast. She had a doctor's appointment at 10.00 am and one with a specialist at 11.30, so I had a little reorganizing to do.

It was 8.30 by the time I drove into Pat and Mal's. It'd been raining for most of the last hour and I thought Mal would have waited for a break. Hamish, an Irish wolfhound, was a big dog and would need a big grave. I was thinking a couple of hours in it at least. Pat was on the front verandah with a neighbour I'd not met before and I could see down where Pat pointed to where Mal had been digging, another man, the neghbour's husband, driving a crow bar into the earth.

When I got to the site Mal was in the hole, now over four feet deep, cleaning out the dirt loosened by the crow bar. I offered to give Mal a rest. He was tiring, he said, and got out of the hole and I got in. He said he started at first light, about 7.00am and was surprised at how easy the digging was at their choice of site, a grassed area where Hamish loved to lie. He'd expected it to take half the day.

Mal is in his seventies, and depite the unexpected moist soft earth, it was no mean feat to have a hole dug in such quick time, the other neighbour arriving only shortly before me. Not that I would ever underestimate Mal. From a Scottish farming background, he joined the British army as a young man and served as a paratrooper in Malaya. He told me once - we were talking about a train incident in my youth when a friend's father, coming home from work, stepped out of a train which stopped short of the station in thick fog and plummeted head first straight to the bottom of a subway - of a soldier in his platoon at KL station who slipped off the platform and was caught by the arm under a train. Mal knocked out the delirious man with a punch to the jaw and extricated him by severing his arm with a knife. He retired to Gembrook after a career ex army as an civil engineer with a large international British construction firm. Called back to help out recently due to a shortage of engineers, he's currently involved in major repairs of the wharf in Darwin, which is threatening to drop into the ocean.

We went inside for coffee and Pat and Mal told stories of Hamish whom they had both loved during his six years with them from puppyhood. A huge dog, he was a gentle natured, playful, and affectionate. Pat in particular, doted on him like a child, her companion when Mal was away in Sydney, Queensland, or Darwin every other week. I did a couple of hours work for Pat last Thursday. Hamish was wheezing, Pat cancelled her yoga class to stay with him, the vet having said he had one of the 52 types of kennel cough which antibiotics should fix. He seemed happy and active walking around the garden, but Pat was anxious. It was all down hill from there. It turned out he had a congenital heart problem missed by the vets in check ups, an oversized artery, and his heart was unable to pump strongly enough to remove the fluid that was building in his lungs. They discovered by going into his family history that all his siblings, and his mother, had died of the same condition some years earlier.

Hamish fought hard to stay. He was the happiest of dogs. Pat is devastated.