Our first family pet was a black lab/German Shepherd mix named Cheyenne. My parents adopted her as a puppy before I was even born, and she was considered a part of the family. She had black fur all over except for her tan underside, and her face resembled a raccoon. As far back as I can remember she was always very docile, and well behaved to the point we could let her go outside and call her back a few minutes later without having to worry about her running away. She was a part of our family for 10 years.
Unfortunately, when we moved to Canada, we had to put her up for adoption as we couldn’t bring her with us. Around the age of 6 we adopted another dog named Emily. She was a pure breed black lab, with pitch black fur all over. She was fairly violent, and we had a lot of trouble with her training, to the point where we had to keep her in a crate most of the time. We only had Emily for 2 years before we put her up for adoption. Around the same age we also had a few cats. Peaches, an over weight, orange cat originally belonged to us, but he got out one day and we were never able to keep him in the house again.
Yet strangely enough, he never left the area, and even followed us when we moved a few miles down the street. Our other cat was named Sevens. She was mostly gray with a few darker gray stripes down her back. We never had Sevens spayed, and as a result she ended up have 3 litters of kittens throughout her life, but we never kept any of the kittens. It was never confirmed, but we always believed Peaches was the father. A slightly less memorable pet, but I will never forget was an oscar fish simply named Oscar. I mostly remember Oscar because we had a lot of fun feeding his minnows.
We owned all of these pets throughout the first 9 or 10 years of my life, and around that time we moved to Canada. My parents wanted to make sure that we always had a family pet so they immediately went on a search. The first pet we owned in Canada was a golden retriever/beagle mix puppy named Tess. She was definitely more beagle, but she has pure golden fur. We also adopted a black lab named Sam shortly after. I really don’t remember much about them aside from how much trouble we had with their house training.
There was a very large field full of tall grass and weeds at the end of our street, and we would take them out there and let them run around and play for a while, which turned out to be a bad idea when one day they run pretty far out, too far for us to see, and eventually they were gone. They turned up in a kennel a few days later but we didn’t have the money to get them back, so that was the last we saw of them. We waited a few months before we tried to adopt any new pets, but my father always knew exactly what he wanted.
His favorite breed of dog were huskies, and we found a husky trainer a few hours north, and that is where we adopted Komo and Seeka, two pure breed huskies. Komo was the more traditional looking husky; a mix of thick black and white fur with icy blue eyes. He quickly grew attached to my father and he couldn’t have been happier with the outcome. Komo was around eight years old, so he was usually very docile and enjoyed curling up on the couch with my father. Seeka was younger, somewhere around three, slender when compared to Komo, and had snow white fur with patches of brown.
She had one brown eye and one blue eye, which I thought made her more unique. She was a beautiful dog, but when we first adopted her along with Komo, she was very shy. She would stay away from everyone, wouldn’t really do much. One day, I stayed home sick, I was the only one home so my parents let me spend the day in their bed, and I kept Seeka in the room with me. After taking a nap, I woke up to see Seeka laying on the bed with me. She was so warm and soft, so I curled up with her, and from that day she was MY dog. She was still shy with the rest of the family, but she was always so excited whenever I was around.
She would always follow me around, jump up to try and lick my face, it even got to the point where I could walk around the corner while someone was holding her, and she would start to whine until I came back around. I had my dad take apart my loft bed so she could sleep with me at night shortly after she grew attached to me. I remember during the winter, we would hook her leash up to a sled and she would pull me around the block until she tired herself out. This was the first time I ever had that “boy and his dog” kind of relationship with a pet. I loved Seeka, and she loved me.
I never waned to lose her, but things took a bad turn far too soon. About a year and a half after we moved to Canada, and about a year after we adopted Komo and Seeka, my father was laid off. He tried to find another job, unfortunately, with no avail. We tried our best but we were evicted from our house, and at the time we had to move in with some relatives in New York until we could find a new house to move to. What made this worse was that there wasn’t enough room in the house for Komo and Seeka, so we were afraid we would have to give them up.
It was devastating, but we had one glimmer of hope that made everything better. The kennel we adopted them from promised that they would hold onto them and take care of them until we could take them back. It was sad saying goodbye to Seeka, but it was OK because it would only be a few months. Time had gone by, we moved into a new house, and it was time to go and get the dogs back. When we called the kennel, they very coldly told us they had sold Komo and Seeka, and told us they never made that promise.
There was nothing we could do, because we never got it in writing so we had no way to prove it or even take any sort of legal action. I was crushed. At this point in my life, I had never lost a loved one, and never got this close to any of our other pets, so this was the worst moment in my life. Knowing that not only would I never see Seeka again, but that she was still out there somewhere made it even worse. I didn’t know what to do, and no one had any answers. In the end, I could do nothing. I had to live with this now, and even to this day I still miss Seeka.
