Very germane to this thread; I had a great English Setter dog, the best I ever saw on ruffed grouse. When he got too old to hunt I looked into making him a therapy dog for local assisted living facilities. The docents told me, "Oh No! We can't have an animal in here that helped you KILL things!!" What would the residents think, most of them being so close to meeting their maker?" Well, I said, maybe some of them would just like to feel a cold nose and a warm nuzzle on the knee while they waited for the Mah Jong zen master to arrive for the 2PM session, or the 3:30 Podcast on the interpretations of the recent political thoughts of Ted Danson and Whoopi Goldberg.
Those would be the women, who make up the very vast majority of AL residents. More likely the few men there would begin the yarn, "I had a bird dog like that once; best damn bird dog you ever saw..." But they didn't want him; I took him home and poured 2 and a half fingers of highland single malt and asked myself, "What would MacQuarrie do? Side by side, pump or auto? Fixed or Poly Choke?
These are the thoughts that haunt me as I peruse these literary giants. Like the true identity of who killed Cleopatra's sister Arsinoe, we need to know a definitive history of who "Gus" was in the MacQuarrie chronicles; I hope to God he was in the country legally!
|