While biking down one of my favorite trails last year I happened upon a couple of fellow mountain bikers from New Orleans. They were on a short vacation-camping trip in the park while back home, visitors there were making a mess of their town. It was Mardi Gras week. They were stopped alongside a small creek taking a break.

They had two dogs with them. They explained that their Mardi Gras always included their two Springer Spaniels.

The dogs would run along with them as they rode the bike trails. Jumping over each other in the stream, taking an occasional sip from the clear water, full of energy and looking like they could run all day.

Both dogs were wearing leather foot-coverings to protect their feet. Today, a Saturday, they would bike the 17-mile loop two times and the dogs would do the same, one loop in the early morning and the other in the late afternoon.

I remembe the four of them saddling up and heading down the winding single-track path, disappearing in less than a minute through the wintered leafless silver gray trees.

When I got home, my own aging dog Thunder barely raised his head to half-heartedly acknowledge my existence.

Poor Thunder, I really loved that old dog. He was all stove up with arthritis and a bunch of other ailments. He had an ongoing ear infection that made him shake the night away, medicated but still endlessly aching and uncomfortable through sleepless nights and days.

Finally, I broke down and took him into the vet’s office for our final good-bye. I couldn’t stop crying as I walked him down the hallway. I held him in my arms, all eighty pounds of him, trembling but trusting me, in his final minutes.

I remember, right there at the end, feeling all that tenseness leave him. For the first time in months he felt soft, like a pup. Later that day, my son and I buried him atop this little hill behind our house. I said a little prayer for him as the Sun went down. Thunder was a good dog.

Then Pax came into my life. Friends found him in the woods unconscious, only about two months old.. Max, his big brother, was barking out a constant alarm, remaining with the weaker Pax, protecting his weaker sibling.

These little guys had been abandoned to die out in the wilds of Winston County. And they would have, all to soon, had it not been for a nurse and her physician husband, Paula and David Brassie.

They heard the yelps of big brother pup Max. With all the wind that day, it was a miracle they even heard him at all. They’d been out canoeing, along a remote passage of Rock Creek, when they heard Max barking.

Pax was at least part retriever. His coat was mostly white but those ears were as golden as they get. When he was about seven months old, I took him out to the park, to a big open field and let him loose. Showed him a bright yellow tennis ball and after he got a good nose of it, I threw it as far as I could.

Just as I guessed, Pax was lickety split after that ball and grabbing it on the run, rolling over with it in his mouth and gaining his feet and darting back past me in a flash.

Our ball-playing seemed to naturally evolve into trail running. Actually, as I walked the beautiful trails at the park, Pax would run circles around me. I figured for about every mile I walked, Pax would run three. He loved it, we both do, and this week we took another step together.

Pax cocked his head sideways, looking a little puzzled as I un-racked my mountain bike from the back of my car and started pulling away from him. "Come on boy, let’s go!" and we were headed down the trail.

Even with me on my bike, Pax still easily runs circles around me, packing it up and down the sides of these hills, running beside me and dipping into the streams. I think about old Thunder, knowing he’s at peace.

Then, I think about what a morning in heaven might be like for a dog. That vision made me smile.

Wayne Lankford