Dog Stories

Every hound who passed through Greyhound Gang’s door has a story.

My dream is to write the book which brings fabulous attention to these hounds who always command our attention and undying love.

Click on a picture, or the bolded name below,  to read about some hounds from the early days of Gang’s existence, and also some musings about my personal hounds who will always live on in my heart.  I miss them so.  Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak whispers the o’er-fraught heart and bids it break. – William Shakespeare

Here’s a video created back in 1999 – called Sleeping with Hounds. Beauty and Slim are the stars.  I wrote a booklet – Sacredness of Tears – to help during the grief – which begins before death and continues after it. 

Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,

the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders

of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is

nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.

“In Blackwater Woods” by Mary Oliver, from American Primitive. © Back Bay Books, 1983.

To all my dogs whose spirits have soared, save a spot for me in Doggie Heaven.
Claudia