In Memeory of Dixie

In Memeory of Dixie

It was a hot January day when I stepped off the school bus and headed for home. I had already had a list of things to do before the nights end; cleaning and cooking dinner, not to mention the mountain of homework my teachers seemed to load my backpack with. The walk to my house was not that far, but by the time I got home I was ready to take a break from the day.
I had decided to go play with my three dogs, two labs and a really old beagle basset, out in the backyard.
Dixie was bought when I was born as a gift. She looks like a beagle with the legs and ears of a basset hound. Dixie had traditional beagle colors of brown and white she was marked just so the white pooled into the brown so it looked like she had a picture of Florida on her back left hip. Dixie was a extremely fat, well-fed, happy dog who could smell food a mile away.
I remember one Christmas she found the beef jerky I had bought for my aunt under the Christmas tree, I had even wrapped the jerky, put it in a tin, wrapped the tin and put it at the bottom of all the presents. The next day I came home and she had found the tin which was scratched and dented with claw marks of a hungry beast in the floor and its contents spilled everywhere Dixie was eating hurriedly trying to snatch up the last few pieces of jerky before I stopped her. My aunt got a home made candle instead of beef jerky that year.
When I got out there I knew immediately that something was wrong, my two labs, Smokey and Rusty, Smokey is a black lab except for a little white under his chin he is always jealous of the other two, and Rusty is a rusty orange color lab, that is where he got his name, he is always hyper and energetic, he always wants to play; came up to me and started to whine, not their usual excited jumping that I was expecting.
I let them lead me as I started to look for Dixie, I found her and could definably tell
something wrong with her. Dixie was breathing so hard that she could not walk, everything...