Lady AKA "White Water Dog".

Lady passed away today October 11, 2011 after a fight with cancer.

She was probably born in April of 1999. She was a stray dog who came to stay with us the following year.
LaVerne Danyew 85 and Lady became friends immediately, and Lady accepted the job as a companion to LaVerne.
May LaVerne Holmberg Danyew was born April 9, 1914 in Iron Mountain, Michigan. She grew up in Amasa which was a small town in the north woods, of the upper peninsula of Michigan. Logging, mining, hunting, fishing, trapping, and some agriculture were the economic base of the area. LaVerne and Lady had a lot in common.
Lady was one of the friendliest dogs that I have ever known. When Will Rogers said " I never met a man I didn't like" Lady would have agreed with him.
She would always greet anyone who came to visit with great enthusiasm, and made friends with everyone.
Lady was always free to go and do whatever she liked. She liked LaVerne and all her neighbors in Richville.
She always wore her collar and dog tags. She would dress up with a leash for special events, such as Karls graduation from Cornell University. But of course it was all an act, because she could slip her collar off any time she felt like it.

On her days off she loved hiking in the woods with me. She especially liked canoeing down rivers or across lakes in the North Woods.
Her travels took her from the Beaver River of New York, across the Adirondacks and Lake Champlain over the Green Mountains to the Connecticut River. Across the White Mountains to the Androscoggin, The Kennebec, the Penobscot, the Mattawamkeag, the Saint John and the Allagash. When the bugs were bad she liked to sleep in the tent with the mosquito netting. On rainy days she would prefer to make camp early, instead of continuing to paddle down the river. She was a dog who lived in the "Land of the Dawn" and had seen a large part of it.

But her home was in the Champlain Valley town of Shoreham, Vermont overlooking the Lemon Fair River.

Taking kids fishing was important to her, or was it eating the fish? The more people to go on a fishing trip the better she liked it. She liked Trout fishing in the mountains or fishing on Lake Champlain (Bitawbagok). She could hardly wait for good ice to go fishing for smelt.

Occasionally she would get to go up to the logging job in the mountains to help bulldoze a road on a weekend.
She enjoyed riding in the hay truck, and helped deliver hay to farms in New Hampshire, Vermont and New York.

By 2007 LaVerne who was 93 years old needed constant care. So Lady did not take days off to go canoeing, but stayed with LaVerne.
This was the year of the Whopper Dog. Without much exercise Lady gained weight. Lady was 104lbs. and LaVerne was 98lbs. A contest ensued. LaVerne tried to gain weight and Lady was supposed to loose some.
When the buss for senior citizens arrived to take LaVerne to Bridport for lunch, Lady would get on and greet everyone. She then would get off and wait for their return, latter in the afternoon.
Lady slept by the side of LaVerne's bed. When LaVerne died on November 24, 2008, Lady continued to sleep by her bed for two more years. Then when the room was remodeled and the bed removed, she moved outside to the front lawn to wait by the side of the road. In the winter she did move inside the woodshed to sleep in her bed of hay.

After her accident in the Androscoggin river she developed a problem with her right front leg, and could not put weight on it. The animal hospital did not have a remade for the problem. This did not stop her though, she learned to run on three legs. It was sort of a hopping run.

All her friends miss her, but appreciate the joy of life that she shared with us.