"I grieve to leave my native land. I grieve to leave my comrades all." I don't know how much puppies grieve, but I know that Nancy and her family did. The rest of the litter had gone two months earlier. Isaac/Kiva stayed on because U.S. Customs regulations require a rabies vaccination, and that can't be done until some later age. The happy result of this is that Kiva was wonderfully socialized and house-trained. The hard part is that Nancy and her family grew attached to him. The 12-year-old daughter was particularly fond of him. She stayed away, not able to witness this parting.

Every Canadian knows "Farewell to Nova Scotia", with its sadness, its yearning, and its toughness. I learned it when I lived in a Canadian officer's mess in Germany in 1969. Listen to it here. It was going through my mind all day.