I'd forgotten about this post, I'd started it right after talking to Neil months ago, wrote a bit on it, and then never got back around to it till just now. He told me the story of telling his eldest, John , about the "K-words" a few weeks back. John thought it was a pretty good story. So do I ....
Last night my friend Neil let me know that his husky Kobok hadn't made it through the day. Kobok had been part of his family since the day after he was born, and his death came as a near surprise. They knew something was wrong, and he was around fifteen years old, but when he took him to the vet yesterday, he expected that Kobok had eaten something that didn't agree with him, and the vet to charge him a couple hundred & tell him that he'd be fine in the morning. That didn't happen. Having been through this a few times myself, I can imagine what Neil & his family are going through today. I thought I'd tell some stories about Kobok to memorialize him a bit.
Pioneer Park was where we walked our dogs when we both lived in the Olympia/Tumwater area about 12-13 years ago. We had a number of dogs that would join us, but Neil & Mary's Kayla & Kobok, and my dog Josh where sort of the anchor dogs of the pack. Neil would usually give me a call early-ish on Saturday mornings so we could hie the hounds down to the park. I'd usually be asleep when he called, content to let the answering machine pick it up. Not long after I'd first met Neil & Mary, Josh, my golden retriever, fairly quickly learned that hearing the names Kayla & Kobok meant he stood a pretty good chance of going for a walk. This caused a pretty predictable response, a wound up dog wanting to go get in the truck for his walk, NOW! I learned to be careful saying their names around Josh to prevent his reaction. I started calling Kayla & Kobok "the K-words" so he wouldn't know what I was talking about. Neil had also learned about this & took to leaving messages on my answering machine that went along these lines:
"Josh, go get Dave!" "Where's Kayla?" "Where's Kobok"? "Do you want to go for a walk?" "Go get Dave!" "Where's Kayla?" "Where's Kobok?". You'd think that this wouldn't work, but it did, Josh would whip himself up into a frenzy, and come banging into my bed to wake me up. Then as expected, we'd usually go to meet with the K-words & their people for a nice walk & chasing his favorite softball or Frisbee.
On another occasion I got a call from Neil to tell me that Kobok had gone walk about...again. Kobok as a husky, felt he was honor bound to run often and far. On this particular weekend I think he was found roughly fifteen miles from where he got "lost", and not by us, a good samaritan found him way out by Black Lake & called the number on his collar. That didn't keep us from driving all over the Olympia area looking for him all weekend before the call though.
Neil & Mary went to great lengths to keep Kobok in their yard, but his instinct for running coupled with a keen sense for weak points in the defenses allowed him many forays into the wild in his day. Sometimes even the defenses helped in his escapes, you'd find stretched out chicken wire where he'd managed to jump high enough to get his hind paws into it while he scrabbled up and over the top of the fences designed to keep him in. In time he lost much of this ability through age & injury, but I don't think he ever lost that spirit.
A couple of weeks before his final day, Rita, Lola & I had a chance to say goodbye to Kobok, even though we didn't know it at the time. Lola was to go through her own scare within a week or so that thankfully had a better outcome. He was still up & wobbling around, and probably would have run off if given a chance & a cane to do so.
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