Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/433799
S P O R T I N G C L A S S I C S 2 4 for me to have the pleasure of these last pups for the hopefully 14 to 15 years of their natural lives, I'll be 86 or 87. I'll not be impractical and ask for 14 more. Time has inverted the hourglass. Ever before it has run against the dogs. The unfathomable injustice of the years that has taken beloved field companions when I have with all my being wished for them to abide for my lifetime. Now it runs against me, and for the first and last time of my life, I will consider it a conscionable act of benevolence should they go first. I do not want to leave and cast these two dogs on the vagaries of fate, to place them upon the laps of strangers—however kind; I cannot bear the pain of their bewilderment as to why I'm not there. I do not want to be as Corey Ford, forced to look from a hospital window at his last two setters—Cider and Tober if I remember correctly—to have at least that—but die knowing I was unable to give them the one thing they loved most, and I loved most. More than any or all else. To go afield. Together. I will give these pups my all. In the latter years we shall grow old together. Though I ask now and with all my heart that I outlive them, and the other dogs I love, old now but who were once pups too. Who are still with me. That I be there for them, to the end. See them to a ripe old age . . . walk with them through the fall of dusk and the dimming path ahead. Be with them, care for them, help them away. Be there to gather the joy from every moment of their lives between. Most of them I saw into this world. I want to see the last of them—as I have all before them—to the next. There, should there indeed be a last gesture of kindness to this life, to wait for me. Until we are reunited again. Give me that, and only one day more.