So Long, Skipper Two Boys Devastated By The Death Of Their Bouncing Pet Dalmation Take Solace In Caring For The Dog’S Two Puppies

The tinkling of a dog’s collar floats over a field bathed in the hot, yellow light of a summer evening. This would be heaven for a dog, especially if she could romp with a boy like 8-year-old Steven Casados.

But there is no dog running these fields right now. Steven, his brother A.J., 11, and their father, Tony “Little Creek” Casados, stand in a circle around a scuffed bare spot in the dry grass. They’ve just buried Skipper, Steven’s brown-spotted dalmation, there.

“She’ll be happy here, honey,” Little Creek says to a stone-faced Steven, who holds Skipper’s empty collar in his hand, gently jingling the metal tags. Skipper had been a birthday present just last April, a young, pregnant dalmation. Steven had hoped for 101 dalmation, but had been content with the two pups Skipper produced: Sheba and Pepper.

The three stand around the grave that Little Creek has just filled. Little Creek still holds the shovel; he and A.J. aren’t stoic. They’re weeping big, slow tears.

Little Creek tells his sons a story from his boyhood on the Beaulah Reservation in Colorado. Young Little Creek found a lone surviving baby raccoon among the corpses of his mother and siblings, killed by wild dogs in an area charred by a forest fire. Little Creek nursed the raccoon to health and named it Alive. Then, one day, Alive disappeared into the woods it had come from, only to return months later with eight young in tow.

“By saving one life, you’ve created eight,” Little Creek’s grandfather told him.

The point of the story isn’t lost on the boys, who get Sheba and Pepper. They set the pups on their mother’s grave for a while.

“What we’ve learned today is that the Creator is good, even in death,” Little Creek says. He pauses, then smiles at his boys.

The day had started at the Pet Emergency Clinic in Spokane. A.J. and Steven sat in the padded chairs. Steven looked straight ahead. “We’re OK, but our dog Skipper isn’t,” he said.

He was right. Soon, they were on their way home in their old van with Skipper’s body in a black plastic bag on the way to her burial in a field near Tum Tum.

“My legs went asleep because I squatted down by her grave so long,” Steven remembers.

Little Creek remembers being worried that Steven had showed little emotion.

“Steven was just sitting in the field next to Skipper,” Little Creek says. “I asked him what he was doing, and he said he was just talking to his dog, telling her he’d take care of her puppies.”

That promise was soon tested.

By the late evening, Little Creek and his sons are back at the Pet Emergency Clinic with Skipper’s daughter, Sheba. The pup lies ruglike on a stainless steel table. In a few hours, she’s gone from a bounding puppy to a limp, sick animal.

“Parvo,” says Diane Odell, a veterinary technician. “That’s what the mom died of, too, we’re sure.”

“What now?’ asked Little Creek.

“Will she die, too?” asked Steven.

Sheba’s white blood count is 900. At 1,000 or below, Dr. Jeff Duenwald recommends euthanizing the dog rather than making it suffer a slow death.

“We’re fighters, Doc, and so are our dogs,” says Little Creek. Sheba gets an IV and a cage in the quarantined area of the clinic.

The next day, Skipper’s other pup, Pepper, is in the next cage. Everyone is worried about Sheba more than Pepper.

She’s skinny; he’s fat. She’s frail; he’s robust.

But a few days later, Sheba is getting better at the house of the boys’ mother, Betsy Dinwiddie. Sheba bounced through the house, eating beef and egg noodle baby food, getting Pedialyte and water from a syringe.

Pepper died, though, after his white cell count fell to 400.

So Steven has one brown-spotted dalmation pup, a memory of Skipper.

“She’s kind of an expensive, valuable dog now,” says Betsy.

The family’s bass boat, which they bought four weeks ago, is for sale to help pay the bills for the illnesses of the three dogs. But no one seems to worry about that.

“Sheba’s my dog. All of them were. But Skipper’s the special one because she’d play with me and run with me,” says Steven.

“She knew everything we told her, like ‘roll over.’ But she didn’t know all the tricks because we hadn’t had a chance to teach her all of them. Sheba’s still a pup. She’ll probably grow up to be like her mother. I hope she doesn’t die young like Skipper did.”

PARVO CAN BE DEADLY Parvo is a relatively new disease for dogs. A very small virus that uses quickly dividing cells in the intestine and bone marrow to reproduce, it can kill a dog in a matter of days, sometimes hours. Symptoms include lethargy, vomiting, diarrhea and bloody diarrhea. The best way to deal with parvo is to vaccinate your dog, starting when it’s a pup. Protocols vary, but at about 8 weeks, pups should get their first shot, followed by three or four more three weeks apart. After that, yearly booster vaccinations keep a dog immune. Any veterinarian can give the vaccination as a part of a normal course of shots.