It's hard isn't it to think about, let alone write about, the passing of your closest friend, so I'll just let my fingers type.

In the past 2 years I have lost all of my trained working dogs to dingo baits or to highway deaths from speeding motorists who don't care that dogs are working with stockmen droving cattle on the routes. 

Rowdy was the last to have left the farm.

You would think that after this string of losses recently, as well as the scores of dogs that have come and gone in my life, would have me a bit more OK about losing a dog, but I'm not and it hurts so bad.

My dogs and especially Rowdy are my best mates.. we work together, feel the trials and triumphs, live together, and share the sunrises and the dusks that always comes too soon.

Rowdy's dusk came too soon.

As the tears just cascade down my guilt ridden face I remember the cute little red pup that was tied up on the step of mum and dad's homestead looking at me inquisitively and sitting obediently with that innate sense of obedience  and balance that only the Australian Kelpie has. The little bugger never jumped up or yapped so it wasn't hard to ask my old man if I could take him and train him, as Dad had another pup that he was working with and I reckoned there was something special in this little hound.

Rowdy was my shadow from then on, He came with me and Marc to western NSW, where we worked on an irrigation farm that resembled the Gobi desert thanks to this relentless drought that he never really saw an end to. We even took him down to Melbourne to enter a dog show, but the excitement of thousands of people and the 13 hour drive and all that passed along the way was too much for our tiger, so when it was his time to shine, he promptly fell asleep and we had to carry him out on stage exhausted and not in much of a state to do his strutting and herding demonstration.

He did however get endeared to the crowd, as he always endeared himself to strangers with his respectful curiosity. He made it onto Dancing with the Stars, even albeit watching intently, shuffling in the red dust with Eliza and chewing on an old bone. And I am lucky for that, as that is how I'll remember him, always there  just waiting for the signal to jump on the back of the ute and go to work.