Our golden lab Sheba had been a wonderful family pet but she was very much Mac’s dog. Sheba had walked me to work every morning and watched over the children while they played, but when Mac got out his windsurfer we were usually abandoned. Sheba loved standing on the front of the board as Mac tacked between the yachts, seeing the two of them windsurfing together was a familiar sight in Admiralty Bay. Sheba had a lot of puppies over the years, and we and had no trouble finding homes for such lovely dogs. Sheba had battled heartworm as a young dog and had survived, but when she got cancer years later it became obvious she did not have long to live.
Sheba was no longer young, and when our veterinarian friend Gus from Barbados came to Bequia for his yearly clinic he advised us to say our good-byes to her. Sheba had advanced uterine cancer for which there was no cure, and he said it wasn’t fair to let her suffer. Mac was grief-stricken by the thought of losing his loyal companion, and asked Gus to put her to sleep for us at the new house site. Mac wanted to bury Sheba under the Musiander tree in his garden, so with heavy hearts we drove to the construction site at Belmont and put our pet to sleep.
Not long after we had buried Sheba I discovered there was a new litter of golden labs at P.S.V., and I asked the owner to save a female for me. Mac had been so upset when Sheba was put down, perhaps a new puppy would be the perfect birthday gift for him. I asked our friend Andreas to sail the pup across to Bequia in time for Mac’s birthday, and told the children to keep the puppy a secret so their father would be surprised.
Mac WAS surprised, and NOT pleasantly. He wasn’t at all happy to be given a new dog, nothing could replace Sheba and he didn’t want a Labrador, he wanted a rottweiler of all things! Well, I wanted the puppy, she was a sweet little thing, and the children and I named her “Sophie”. Like all puppies Sophia was playful, and chewed vigorously on anything left in her path. One day she chewed Mac’s brand-new leather shoes from Italy, and he flew into such a rage that I asked my friend Melinda to keep the dog at her house for a while, I truly feared for the pup’s life. Mac had not and WOULD not bond with Sophie, she wasn’t Sheba.
The day came when Sophie was old enough to have puppies, and Mac took her to Mount Pleasant to breed her with a rottweiler, figuring a lab and rottweiler mix would give him the dog he REALLY wanted. Sophie got pregnant, and gave birth to her puppies one night under a bush in the front yard. When Mac discovered her the following morning, I found him crooning and stroking her head, saying “good girl, Sophie, good girl! Your puppies are all rottweilers, good girl!” Sure enough, our golden lab had given birth to eight black pups, she had indeed given Mac his rottweilers!
The girls were at summer camp in Canada, and I was getting ready to close the restaurant for the off-season. I was going to join Vanessa and Rachel in Ontario while Mac continued working on the house, and when I left Bequia he was busy building a pen for his eight little rottweilers. He said he was going to have their tails cropped, something that rottweiler owners for some reason always do, and that he was going to keep the biggest of the male pups.
I returned home 6 weeks later, and Mac proudly showed me the pen he had built for the litter. When I saw the chubby little puppies with their cropped tails I burst out laughing; Mac had eight LOVELY black labs with no tails, but I for SURE was not going to tell him that, why ruin his new relationship with Sophie? Mac loved his little rottweilers, and rottweilers they remained………..