The dog we’d come to adopt was already spoken for, but we got a better one.
Zuri was athletic: a jumper of fences, a chaser of squirrels, and an eater of rabbits. Once she chased a herd of deer through Iowa City’s alphabet streets, collapsing in ecstatic exhaustion when she got home.
She escaped from the yard, from the house, and, once, her latched kennel. She loved running and diving into the snow after voles and cricking her neck at impossible angles to rest her head against chair legs and wall edges.
One time she ate rat poison at an Airbnb. Another time she surreptitiously ate a large gingerbread house in the middle of the night until she was surprised by a sleepy, suspicious human. Once she ate her own bed. And in her final days, she ate ice cream, a peanut butter and banana sandwich, a bacon cheeseburger, and cake.
When she first moved in, Zuri wasn’t supposed to get on the brand-new dog-fur-free couches, but we let her curl up there after a single day.
Zuri loved walks and could hike for miles. She loved car rides. She hated thunderstorms, fireworks, and going through the car wash.
She was a looker. Kids loved her one brown eye and one clear blue eye. She also shed a lot of fur.
When she started to limp, we guessed she was getting old and had maybe pulled a muscle. When it didn’t go away, the vet thought maybe it was arthritis. A scan revealed it was cancer and inoperable.
As the cancer progressed, she didn’t let it faze her. She was almost as good on three legs as four, and, even as she continued to atrophy through the late spring, Zuri caught a rabbit in the backyard.
All good things come to an end, and Zuri was a good dog.