Every evening Spot would be waiting for me at the gate, as he had throughout all my school years, almost all my life. When he would see me approaching, he would bound down the street to greet me. But sixteen years is a long innings for a dog and so he bounded slower and then waited at the gate and plodded after me up the driveway, and then one day wasn’t there at all. He had curled up on his mat at the back door and gone to sleep and had not woken up again. Horrie buried him in the back corner of the yard before I got home. It was the last time I can remember crying. The last link with my childhood was broken. But that didn’t mean I’d grown up yet.

The retriever, finding the front door shut against him, had bounded around and in the back way, and now stood smiling in the doorway leading from the passage, the cartridge still in its mouth and the fuse spluttering. They burst out of that bar; Tommy bounded first after one and then after another for, being a young dog, he tried to make friends with everybody.
   The greatest ever dog story: Henry Lawson’s The Loaded Dog. We’re on the goldfields of Victoria and three miners are doing some blasting when they see that their dumb mongrel retreiver has fetched up the explosive that they have just run away from and the long fuse is burning. Men are set scurrying everywhere as the dog bounds about, trying to make friends with everyone and enjoying the game of hide and seek that they all seem to want to play. It comes out rather well in the end.