My Best Friend Chief

By Kelly Kortman

It was May of 2001, I was engaged to a nice wholesome PLU grad named Suzanne and living in my condo in Newcastle with a roomate Joey Rodriguez. We were all very good friends, we were all young (or younger) and broke and we one hot summer Sunday in May came to the conclusion that we needed a dog in our lives. We picked up a newspaper and looked through it for lab puppies. It was never our true intention that day to buy a dog, we just wanted to go and look at some labs and maybe play with them and pretend we were interested and then go back to doing what we did best at the time which was to have barbeques and drink..... a lot. We found an ad for lab/golden retriever mix puppies for $125 dollars. It was in Kirkland so we headed out. We arrived at the door and the guy opened the garage and there they were, 8 adorable 6 week old pups in a mix of black, tan and chocolate.

He wasn't a breeder, it just turned out that his female golden retriever got knocked up by the black lab male a few doors down. His goal was simply to find a good home for the puppies, he wasn't in it to make a profit, just wanted to get back the money he spent on shots, dewclaws and puppy chow that he had been shilling out for 6 weeks. We put all the puppies out in the yard and said, "Well if we are going to get a puppy let's get the one that comes to us first." One of the black puppies came darting right for us all giant paws and happiness and excitement. It was love at first sight for all of us. We could not drive down that driveway without leaving with that little guy. As it turned out he was our destiny and as it turned out I was his. We were all so broke at the time that we literally all pitched in for him (at least as it pertained to the purchase price, the rest going forward would of course fall on me.) $41 dollars a piece, that was the deal. We brought him home and I swear to God he was the smartest most intuitive dog that any of us have ever seen. He was housetrained in a week, could sit and stay and give paw in a month, initially learned how to roll over and then forgot, learned how to speak in about 5 minutes. I said, "you want a treat, go woof" And he literally went, "woof". And from then on he could "speak" on command.

Chief travelled everywhere with me, he was my nonstop companion from day 1. Immediately we had a bond that I'm not really sure I've ever had in my entire life. The weeks turned into months, Joey moved back to where he was from down in Santa Cruz, he bought all my furniture off of me with a promise to send payment for it when he got settled. He never did, fine with me, he had no intention of taking Chief, that was all I cared about. I maybe talked to him one more time, I have no idea where he is now, my guess is up to no good. I was a trainee at Morgan Stanley at the time that I got Chief and money was tight to say the least, they pay you just enough that you don't starve to death. Things were going OK with my girlfriend Suzanne, not great and I think we both knew that we were headed towards a break up. She had a Golden Retriever of her own named Eugene who peed all over himself whenever people would come over. He would roll over on his back and piss himself silly. If you were unlucky you would lean over to pet him and he would pee on you also. So that said when we broke up she had no intention of taking Chief with her either. So as we parted ways Chief was left in my sole custody. There were no battles in that regard. I would find out later that Eugene would die of cancer, it was sad to hear that. They spent thousands themselves trying to save him to no avail. It's amazing the things that we will do for our dogs.

August came and I was at my wits end with Morgan Stanley. I hated working there, it was the end of the summer in 2001, I knew that I needed to move on, I knew that I was going off of salary and I knew that I was going to go from starving to death to literally having to shoplift at costco or something. So I up and quit. It wasn't but two weeks later that September 11th occured. Morgan Stanley had their major operations at the World Trade Center. They were toast in more ways then one, the market was closed, their back office operations were destroyed, thousands of financial advisors flooded the street looking for work and I just so happened to, preemptively, land safely into a cushy little job as a financial advisor working in a bank for WaMu Investments. Higher payout, clients walk right in the door with $400k and a dumbfounded look on their face as if to say, "Please invest this for me." My life was changing. Had I waited but two more weeks Lord knows where I would be today, the world works in mysterious ways.

Meanwhile as the towers burned and collapsed I called Suzanne and we commiserated. We decided to spend the day together with Chief. I know that it's hard to remember now but I think that we all had a feeling that day that it was the end, or the beginning of the end or the beginning of something terrifying. F-15's cruised through the Seattle sky looking for rogue airplanes that needed to be shot down, every television everywhere played the collapse of towers one and two over and over and over again. We walked to a beautiful park in Greenlake, it was the most beautiful day that I may ever have seen. For those of us who lived in Seattle on that day and remember that afternoon we know that it was spectacular from a weather standpoint, not a cloud in the sky. Just jets.....patrolling.

Chief ran around the park in all his puppyish glory. Running up to strangers, kissing them, panting, excited and happy and stopping more than one person on that day from crying, if only for a moment. It was on this day that I learned the true meaning of ignorance being bliss. The grass was green, the trees were just ever so slightly turning color, the water echoing the color of the sky was as blue as blue can be. Chief in his prime soaked up the glory of the day, 10,000 years of dog and man commingling has not led us to a point where they have grasped the concept of human tragedy and yet they can lift us up in an instant like nothing else except perhaps God or a best friend or a parent.

Suzanne and I reconciled on September 11th as many of us did with somebody, anybody. Who wanted to be alone after that or who wanted to hold a grudge after that, thousands died that day unexpectedly and I don't think that anybody wanted to continue to dislike anybody needlessly.

My job took me to Bainbridge Island and Poulsbo. Places that I had driven through on my way to the coast or where I would take dates if I wanted to do something really different. Shortly thereafter I simply moved over there, the commute from Newcastle to Bainbridge was ridiculous. I moved out of my condo, rented it out and found a small cabin for rent on 5 acres for 800 bucks a month. It was about 700 square feet but it had everything that I needed. I was about 80k in debt at the time with my credit cards and it was, for me, the perfect price in light of all the uncertainty that swirled around my new job and the post 9-11 stock market.

Everyday that I came home Chief seemed to grow just a little bit more. He grew into a massive and yet slightly holy terror. He ate every tree and plant in the yard of the cabin I rented sending my landlord into an unstoppable piss-fest. Every time that she came to pick up the rent check she would mention that my security deposit was a mere forgone conclusion. I came home one day to find that he had eaten my mountain bike helmet. There was little this dog would not chew on. Suzanne tried her hardest to make this Bainbridge Island, South Seattle thing work out but slowly and surely it began to fail again. She left my life as a leaf leaves a tree in the fall, hardly noticeable, scattered among the debris. I don't question her love for Chief but she had bigger fish to fry. So did I. She moved on, when she left, she left us both, didn't even bother to ask for her $41 dollars back. I always respected her for that.

It was March of 2002. Things were normalizing and I was finally hitting my stride. I was doing huge numbers at work and making the big bucks for the first time in my life. It was very exciting, I was putting in long hours at work and Chief spent a lot of that time neglected sadly but he was the perfect dog. Never peed in the house, rarely ate anything larger than a couch and just the best thing in the world to come home to at the end of a 12 or 14 hour day. How a mangy wolf evolved into a siken haired black lab with a never ending array of love in his heart I have no idea. There is a saying about how a dog is lucky to know it's God while it is still alive. I think there is something to be said for that. If I loved God the way that Chief loved me I would venture to guess that my life might be just about as untroubled as his, tragedy aside.

It was a Saturday afternoon right around both of our birthday's his first and my 34th. I woke up that day, strode to the kitchen to make coffee and he, for some reason, jumped up and put his paws on my shoulder. I remember saying to myself, "You are the most perfect and beautiful dog that I have ever seen in my life." He was 100 pounds, pure black, hair longer than a lab but shorter than a retreiver, intelligent eyes, big head, perfectly amazing in every way. A supermodel of a dog. I loved him more than life itself. As a birthday treat I decided to take him for a jog. We headed down a usually desolate dirt road that leads to a lake (Lake Gazzam). He was on the left side of the road I was on the right, he stopped to take a leak, I continued forth, I saw a car emerge from a driveway, picking up steam, Chief finished his business and ran across the road, I saw it happen before it tragically did and then it, well, happened. The car hit Chief going about 40 miles per hour. Chief flew about 40 feet, the front bumper flew about twenty, I couldn't bear to look. I knelt to the ground and covered my eyes with my forearm and I just stayed there unable to move. I knew he was dead, I was devastated in the way that a parent is devastated at the loss of a child. I sat there silently picturing in my mind what I would find some 13 yards away and then I felt this wet nose on my neck. I looked up and there was Chief. He had ambled back over to me but something wasn't right. He was dragging his front left leg. It was limp and lifeless. I prayed it was merely broken. I made the guy who hit him give me a drive to my house probably about two miles away. He obliged. I transferred Chief from his car to mine, ran into the house to get my keys and told him to hang out so that I could get his information. I ran back out and he was gone. I could have found the driver again cause I knew what driveway that he had come out of but I never bothered, there wasn't much that could be done, it was just as much my fault as his for not having Chief on a leash and I heard that I could have maybe been just as liable to the damage that had been done to his car.

I raced Chief to the Vet. I panicked at every stoplight, I had no idea what the extent of his injuries were, he could have been bleeding internally for all I knew. I arrived at the clinic, parked poorly and gently speed walked him into the front door. They took him immediately and ran a bunch of tests and x-rays. He was perfectly fine, he just wasn't moving his front leg. It wasn't broken at all, the Dr. said that he would, over time, probably be fine, that perhaps his leg just hurt to the point that he was trying not to move it at all. I had high hopes in that moment, I was still in the denial phase of the mourning process. Just as we were getting ready to head home the Dr. said, hey, wait a minute, I want to try one last thing. I literally already had Chief in the back of the truck when he came out with a simple baby pin in his hand. He began to poke Chief's leg up and down with the pin......nothing. No reaction. He then poked him in his good front leg, he flinched, gave a small yelp. He pricked the other leg, continued lack of reaction. He poked all the way up to the shoulder and finally got a reaction but the leg didn't move. He told me the news I didn't want to hear. The leg was paralyzed, dogs legs go back and forward, they do not go side to side, when he got hit his leg got whipsawed in the wrong direction and snapped his nerve in half. He did give me that 1% chance that it was merely temporarily paralyzed due to trauma and could return. But it was a long shot. I asked about quality of life and he assured me that three legged dogs do great. I didn't want to have a dog that couldn't do the things that a dog needs to do, to well...... be a dog. But he continued to insist that despite the possiblity of a shorter life-span that he would be just fine.

I took Chief home and babied him like crazy. Gave him leg massages to try to restimulate the nerves if they were still lying dormant. Gave him treats and table food and baths and whatever else I thought that I could to make him better. Whereever he went though he continued to drag that leg around. Time marched on and lo and behold in a couple of weeks he was feeling really quite well. He was even running around a bit but of course the leg just flopping around. I bought him a special shoe I found online for sled dogs so that he wouldn't continue to abrade his paw as it dragged along the ground. It kinda worked although the shoe fell off a lot. A month went by and still no feeling and no movement. I knew that sooner or later the sore that was developing on his paw would get worse and worse until it became infected and probably killed him so it was, sadly, time for the leg to go.

I consulted with the Dr. and he agreed to do the surgery even though he had only done one before while in medical school. He said that as part of his recurrent training he would discount the surgery down to about $1500 dollars. Normally it was well over $2000. Of course having a novice, dog leg remover kinda made me nervous, I needed all the cost savings I could get as I was still digging out from quite a bit of debt, etc. I brought him in for the surgery. I prayed on the way there that all would go well. I had to go to work that day but went to go and see him afterwards. I walked through the door, through the waiting area and down a hall to a set of "recovery cages" It was one of the saddest things I had ever seen. My once perfectly glorious dog from just a month earlier was reduced to a kind of Franken-dog. He was shaved over a wide area of his body. He was missing an appendage and had what seemed like a thousand stiches and staples. The way that he was sewed back together gave him a little man boob where all of the areas of stiches came together, he was restrained and attached to tubes. He did not look happy but he recognized me immediately and tried to get up as if to say, "Hello, get me the hell out of here, what have they done to me and where is my frickin' hair and um my frickin 'leg." I wanted to cry. But being the strong, silent type in the most serious of situations I kept a level head. I opened the cage door where he was being kept and scratched his ears. He just lay there and looked at me with those big, brown, sad eyes. After about 10 minutes the Dr. came around and told me how the surgery went, that Chief would be staying with them for a couple of days, that I could come around and see him if I wanted to but that he was being taken good care of. All the girls in the clinic had of course fallen in love with him and his personality and disposition. I knew he was in good hands. I walked out of the clinic feeling just about every emotion that you could imagine, sad, despondent, responsible, callous for not getting a sleeping bag out of the car and staying with him. One day I imagine I might have to leave a child in the hospital overnight, I can't imagine the feeling might be much worse.

Alas, the day finally came to take him home. I packed him into the car with all of his bandages and medications, painkillers, antibiotics, etc. We made it back to the house. I layed him on the couch and he slept for what seemed like an eternity. Dogs in kennels bark all night long for whatever reason, probably didn't give him a lot of time to rest. Watching him lying there on the couch all bandaged up was difficult but at least he was home where he belonged.

It was tough for a while there, I was working a ton and would hire kids from the neighborhood to come and keep an eye on him from time to time. The days slowly turned into weeks, the staples came out, the hair slowly began to grow back in, the man boob slowly disappeared into his fur and he learned how to get along on just three legs just fine. Pretty soon he was back to being my full on running partner and whereever he went he was the talk of the town. If I had a nickel for every time I heard the phrase, "Mommy, that dog only has three legs!".

Weeks turned into months, things were getting better and better for me financially. I finally bought my first house. Chief and I moved into it and continued to live life. Chief by this point was just as fast as any other dog, almost to the point where I would say, "Man that fourth leg served to do nothing but slow him down!" Despite the series of fences that I had built to keep Chief from running away he would still find a loophole from time to time to sneak out and roam around the neighborhood. He slowly over time became part of the scenery and had any number of people giving him treats and letting him hang out at their house. There was one family in particular where he would go because there were always a ton of kids playing there and they had a couple of dogs that somehow Chief must have recognized as his "pack". So whenever he would escape my Byzantine array of fences I would find him there, chilling, playing with the kids or the dogs. It did make my job easier when he ran away to know where he would be. I can't recount how many times I recall picking him up to put him in the car, his belly wet from the quick ocean dip he would take on his way over there and of course I was usually wearing a suit and a tie and was either on my way home from work or on my way to work and of course I would get soaked. I always wondered too if he really couldn't jump into the back of the car or if he just knew I would do it so he stopped trying.

I started to take Chief everywhere with me again. Hiking, camping, to the beach where he of course became a phenomenal three legged swimmer. He remained a very powerful dog with super powerful hind legs that perhaps got that way because of the extra work that they were doing. He loved everybody and everybody loved him. He learned to do this thing where he would lay down on that missing shoulder with his butt in the air and his head looking up at you as if to say, "Pet my belly but I'm not really interested in going all the way onto my back for you, it's too hard to get back up." He served as an inspiration not only to me but to many people that he would come into contact with. He was an inspiration to me because he taught me that you should never be held back by whatever handicap it is that you might have. Whether it's a missing leg or what have you you just have to keep moving forward because what other choice do you have? One girl that I would hire to "babysit" him from time to time actually wrote a poem about him for a school project. Later I would hear from her as she entered her twenties that he had the same effect on her as well. It's so easy to feel sorry for ourselves until we find someone or something that has it worse than us while at the same time having a better attitude, better disposition or a better life.

People would marvel at his speed and endurance and disposition. I would marvel at his ability to overcome and the fact that he never took the time to feel sorry for himself. If there is one human trait that I wish didn't exist it's that. Whenever I was having a bad day or wasn't able to close the big deal or whatever the case might be I came home to the most loving animal on the planet who didn't care what my accomplishments were, so long as I loved him back and gave to him what he gave to me, everpresent friendship and companionship and love. He was there for all of the ups and downs of my life. The newfound love that had just walked into my world or yet another relationship coming to an end. He gave them all a chance, he never judged them and where he had taught me so much about so many other things I guess the one thing that I never did learn from him is patience and forgiveness and a better sense of understanding. And yet he was and has been the one constant in my life throughout this last fourth of my life.

More time went by, we moved into an even bigger house. The stock market roiled upwards, everything was going very well. I was taking flying lessons and doing all the things in life I had always dreamed of doing. At the top of the stock market I bought a cabin out in Leavenworth. By this time also, Chief had a little brother come along, Samson. Samson was a white male Lab and the worst trainwreck of a dog that you could ever imagine but of course that is a story for another day. But it would be Chief and Sam and I heading out to the mountains every weekend to go and work on the cabin. It was that fall of 2007 when I was constantly taking Chief in and out of the Defender that I noticed that he was starting to get very apprehensive about jumping out of the truck. I had always put him into the truck but he was always eager to jump out and do whatever it is that dogs do once they are freed from the confines of the back of a vehicle. I of course was clueless at first as to what was going on because of course not only do I see myself as resilient and indestructable but I thought Chief was as well. I guess that I just assumed that he would pass away silently in his sleep at age 15 after having spent the day chasing rabbits around a golden field in an act of futility. But what I didn't realize is that all those years of overusing his back legs that he was slowly wearing down his hip joints or perhaps dealing with the age old Labrador issue of hip displasia. In fact there was one weekend where he couldn't even really move or get up and would cry every time that he tried. That was a very sad weekend. By Sunday I would take him to the emergency vet clinic and of course the minute I got him there he was moving around again just fine. The least expensive thing you will ever do is pay for the dog; the vet bills.... totally another story. I paid 1/1000 for Chief what I've spent over time in vet costs and medications. It's pretty amazing to think about. And I know, being a pretty healthy guy with good insurance that his medical costs have outweighed mine by a mile.

So now we are giving him tramadol for pain, novox for the reduction of joint swelling and I just ordered from Amazon.com some omega three and glucosamine infused dog treats. We'll give this a shot. The thing I notice lately is that his front leg is getting a little shaky. He spends more and more time simply lying around. He doesn't want to get up in the morning, I have to drag him out from under the bed and down the stairs to put him outside so that he can go do his thing. I take him for a walk and he has to rest after a block. I from time to time have to leave him up the street after a brief walk, go and get the car and drive him back to the house because he still weighs 90 or so pounds and I can't really carry him. What makes this really sad is that his mind is still the same, I see the light that is on inside, he is the same dog but with none of his former capabilities. His internal organs are without flaw, he still has great muscle tone, his teeth are gleamingly white, his eyes are bright and alert, everything about him is flawless. He just doesn't have much left in the way of mobility.

I pray that this new round of joint supplements does the trick. I would love to keep him around for a long time to come. I always thought that he would be the ring bearer at my low key beach wedding which is pretty much what I'm down to having at this point in my life. I hope he makes it. There is a fine line between keeping a dog alive for the dogs sake and keeping a dog around for your sake. I'm trying to find balance with that line. My friends say that once the front leg goes that I should have him fitted for some kind of dog dolly or something like that. That to me seems almost more cruel than the alternative. Dogs are not meant to scoot around on dolly's. Ok so maybe the puppy born without back legs or what have you but not a 10 year old Lab with three legs, two bad hips and an arthritic, shaky front leg.

When the day comes and that day will come it's going to be one of the most difficult days of my life. I had a pretty difficult childhood, I lost my father at a young age, I had a mom who kind of struggled with that and went off to find herself leaving me to find a way in this world pretty much on my own. My sister moved down to Florida, I went off to the Army in Hawaii, I came back, my sister was married and off raising a family of her own, I had high school friends, then I had Army friends, then I had airline friends and then I fell into a group of buddies up here in Seattle. I guess my point is that although having been blessed to always have people in my life they have not always been the same people. Chief, crazy as it may sound, has been one of the most consistent things in my world all these years.

Raising a dog is like raising a child. You feed them when they are hungry, you bath them when they are dirty, you love them with all your heart and they love you back. You scold them when they are bad, you forgive them and move on. They love you back with all their heart, they are excited to see you every single day as you return home. They follow you around from room to room as you go about your day, they look at you quizically as you do the crazy things that you, as a human, do. Despite their fear of vacuum cleaners, dogs and kids, I would assume, have a lot in common. They are kids that you raise from babies who pass away at the age of 10 or 15 if you are lucky. It makes you wonder why they have such a short life span. Is it to teach us about mortality and loss? I don't know. If God ordained the Universe and created all the laws that make this world work there has to be a reason for this phenomenon.

"I have sometimes thought of the final cause of dogs having such short lives and I am quite satisfied it is in compassion to the human race; for if we suffer so much in losing a dog after an acquaintance of ten or twelve years, what would it be if they were to live double that time?"

-Sir Walter Scott


I will never forget Chief, I will always love him and I will forever be changed for having had him in my life. I feel that he was my destiny and that all of the things we went through - we went through for a reason. I'm a perfectionist and he taught me how to deal with imperfection. He taught me to find beauty in the simple things. He gave me a reason to come home at night when I would have turned my 12 hour day into a 16 hour day otherwise when I was coming up in my new career. He taught me about the true meaning of unconditional love. He led me to many places that I would have never gone had I never bought him. The guilt of ownership took me on many a hike that I wouldn't have taken otherwise. By simply being there he created a situation that no matter how much I tried to isolate myself at times from the world, I was never truly alone. As I type this right now he is laying at my feet, seemingly content with the world. I wonder what he thinks about. Does he know the end is coming? Does he feel sad about it? Is there something instinctually inside of him that tells him that his hips will most likely continue to worsen and not get better. Is he my guardian angel who had come to earth to keep a closer eye on me, is his job almost done for some reason? I don't know. I do have this feeling though that I will hang on till the bitter end and I believe that he will as well. I just don't want to hang on too long and I don't want him to either. For as long as I live though he will never be forgotten and I do not think that he will ever forget me either and if there is a heaven for dogs I know that he will be up there keeping an eye out for me. If there is a singular heaven for man and dogs alike I know that whomever is waiting for me at the end of my life that he will be amongst them and the first to run towards me, fur flying, tongue wagging, eyes filled with happiness and joy as he leaps into my arms knowing that we will be able to spend eternity fetching sticks from a crystal blue river and of course this time he will be swimming out to get them all four legs moving perfectly in time against the water in an effortless motion.

"My goal in life is to be as good of a person my dog already thinks I am."

-Author Unknown



Editors Note:
My greatest memories of Chief are:

1) When he was a tiny puppy and I took him for an early morning swim in Chelan. Once we were about 40 yards offshore he panicked and tried to use me as a life preserver, scratching the fuck out of my back and arms in the process. Luckily Jen was along on that trip. Othewise, explaining all that damage would have been awkward to say the least.

2) When recently and not in the greatest health, he followed the boys, Kelly, and I along with Sampson up a steep mountain behind Kelly's cabin and then, more impressively, somehow slid and banged his way down. I learned a lot about love and perseverance on that climb.

3) When he followed me into a raging Skykomish River and I barely managed to save him & myself with one hand on a slippery rock and the other around his collar.

This part sounds like someone I know:
What makes this really sad is that his mind is still the same, I see the light that is on inside, he is the same dog but with none of his former capabilities. His internal organs are without flaw, he still has great muscle tone, his teeth are gleamingly white, his eyes are bright and alert, everything about him is flawless. He just doesn't have much left in the way of mobility.