Luca JH

In 1805, a young man fell to his death on a mountain in England. When they finally found him, three months later, he wasn’t alone… His name was Charles Gough, a young artist who set off that April to cross Helvellyn, one of the highest mountains in the Lake District, taking his little dog Foxie with him. Somewhere on the way, he fell and died, far from any path or house, and for weeks nobody knew what had happened to him. Then, on 27 July, a shepherd working near the lonely mountain lake of Red Tarn heard a dog barking. When he followed the sound, he found Gough’s body, and beside it, still keeping watch, was Foxie. She had stayed with her master through all those months, alone on the mountain, and she had even given birth to a puppy there, which sadly didn’t survive. The story moved all of England: two of the greatest poets of the day, William Wordsworth and Walter Scott, each wrote a poem about it without knowing the other was doing the same, and Scott wrote these lines as if he were speaking to the dog herself: "How long didst thou think that his silence was slumber? When the wind waved his garment, how oft didst thou start?" More than twenty years later, inspired by Scott’s poem, the young Edwin Landseer painted the scene and called it Attachment. It depicts a dead man lying among the rocks, and a small dog pressing herself against his chest, as if she could still wake him… Foxie didn’t understand death, but she understood love better than most people ever will. She didn’t know her master was gone, she only knew that he was hers, and that she would not leave him. And that is the miracle every dog offers us, whether we deserve it or not: a love that lasts forever and asks for nothing. Wordsworth said it best, and his words are still carved on a memorial stone on the mountain today: "How nourished here through such long time He knows, who gave that love sublime; And gave that strength of feeling, great Above all human estimate!"