Mary knew it was time before I did. Or maybe I should say she admitted it before I could.

Giving up on a dog, even when it’s pretty clearly time, can be difficult. And I needed some help from my wife, and from our vet, in recognizing the obvious.

So the time for Rosie, our 14-year-old springer spaniel, came one day last week, after a two-year decline that accelerated over the last six months and especially the last six or eight weeks.

Mary was home sick, so I sat alone with Rosie in an examination room at the animal clinic, talking to her and stroking her head and side as she drifted off, giving in peacefully to the sedative the vet had injected a few minutes earlier. Then I started to sob as I touched the call button summoning the vet and her assistant, who was pushing a cart that would take Rosie into the room where the final drug would be administered.

“I’m so sorry,” the vet said. “We’ll take good care of her.”

I left Rosie in their gentle hands and wept my way out of the exam room, down the hall, through the lobby and on to my pickup.

And when I settled in behind the wheel, I felt Rosie’s leash in the pocket of my jacket and acknowledged through my tears that a dog that had been such an important “is” in my life had become a “was.”

I do not mean to overstate the emotions of this. Obviously, the loss of a dog is not the same as the loss of a human being. But it is the loss of a life. A life that mattered.

For most of her 14 years with us, Rosie was a high-energy force of nature in our home and out across the wild lands of our state, leading me with the gift of her nose through mucky cattails and dense upland grasses and deep-woods aspen groves.

East River. West River. Missouri River country. Black Hills highlands. We explored them all, wet and dry, windy and calm, hot and cold and quite a bit in-between.

She loved best the kind of difficult-to-traverse coverts that Pennsylvania writer Charles Fergus called “thick and uncivil sorts of places,” and I got to know them better and love them more deeply by sharing them with her.

Oh, the things you can learn by going afield with a good dog. Magical, enduring things, about the outdoors, about the dog, about yourself.

We watched more sundowns together than I could count, usually when a bird hunt was done, we were both tired and fulfilled and often enjoying the added gift of coyote song. Rosie always raised her ears and cocked her head at the music, listening intently as if trying to decipher some canine-encrypted code.

The call of the wild? Of course. And she understood it much better than I did.

But she wasn’t just a strong bird dog. She also was a talented backyard escape artist and unreconstructed garbage gut with a special affinity for kids’ sweat socks, the sweatier and dirtier the better.

I’ll skip the undignified details about how those socks, once swallowed, worked their way out, one way or the other. But Rosie processed a dozen or so over the years, with great effort but without requiring emergency room care.

She was a licker, not a fighter, that dog, known in our family and throughout our neighborhood for her sweet, outgoing personality. And she was especially fond and tolerant of the 19 grandchildren — now ranging in age from a gainfully employed college graduate to a toddler — who got to bask in her affection and be her pal.

I bought her from a kennel out in the James River breaks when she was eight weeks old and officially named her James River Rose. But I rarely called her anything but Rosie.

She was the most headstrong and challenging dog I’ve had to train, or to control in the field, but also the most athletic and relentless on bird scent. And despite the occasional adrenaline-driven indiscretion, at her core Rosie aimed to please.

She was six months old when she flushed and retrieved her first prairie grouse and a few weeks older when she did the same with her first rooster pheasant. And a year or two later, she led me to three ruffed grouse — a noteworthy limit on the first day I ever saw a Black Hills ruffy — in a disorderly gathering of willow and aspen and birch deep in a spring-fed hollow up off Tinton Road south of Spearfish.

She made a four-hour round-trip drive for a two-hour hunt worth it every time, even if all we trailed and flushed were a couple of hen pheasants. “No shot, girl,” I would say, and I praised her just as effusively as if we’d bagged three roosters.

She was puzzled whenever I missed a bird, ecstatic when I hit one and even in the most inhospitable of cover rarely missed a retrieve.

When we weren’t hunting pheasants or grouse, we were often up on the trails in the forest above our house in Rapid City, where Rosie maintained her nosy optimism, fervently believing — despite overwhelming odds to the contrary — that there was a pheasant or grouse waiting to be flushed around the next bend.

Never a slacker, she stayed blue-collared busy, whether snuffling her way through a Lyman County sorghum field or — in her younger days, at least — frantically chasing butterflies and even bird shadows back and forth across the backyard grass.

She was unremittingly upbeat and never failed to lift my spirits, even at the lowest of times.

Then came the decline, slow at first, much faster near the end. It was nothing out of the ordinary: an old dog with a bunch of old-dog ailments that finally reached her time.

And an old-dog lover who needed some help in admitting it.

ST. GEORGE, Utah — — Noa Gonsalves’ 22 points helped Utah Tech defeat South Dakota 92-87 on Thursday.

Gonsalves shot 6 for 13 (6 for 11 from 3-point range) and 4 of 4 from the free-throw line for the Trailblazers (4-10). Beon Riley scored 21 points while going 7 of 11 and 6 of 9 from the free-throw line and added 14 rebounds. Samuel Ariyibi shot 5 of 7 from the field to finish with 11 points, while adding 12 rebounds.

Kaleb Stewart led the Coyotes (9-5) in scoring, finishing with 26 points and two steals. Chase Forte added 24 points, six rebounds, four assists and two steals for South Dakota. Isaac Bruns also had 12 points and six rebounds.

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The Associated Press created this story using technology provided by Data Skrive and data from Sportradar.

Phonics-based instruction could soon be a state standard in South Dakota. The Department of Education is working to align state standards for English and language arts with the phonics-based “science of reading” framework.

The proposed standards revision had its second hearing Thursday in Sioux Falls during a South Dakota Board of Education Standards meeting. It’ll be discussed at the board’s meetings in Pierre and Rapid City next year before approval.

The revision follows a global debate — often called the “reading wars” — about how best to teach children to read. One side advocates for an emphasis on phonics, which is understanding the relationship between sounds and letters. The other side prefers a “whole language” approach that puts a stronger emphasis on understanding meaning, with some phonics mixed in. The “balanced literacy” approach gained popularity in the 2000s, which is phonics-inclusive but favors whole language instruction.

Gov. Kristi Noem and the Legislature invested $6 million earlier this year to train teachers in the science of reading. 

The timing for the standards review “couldn’t be better,” said Shannon Malone, director of the Department of Education’s division of learning and instruction, during Thursday’s meeting.

Noem’s phonics literacy effort advances in Legislature

Most of South Dakota’s teachers who were trained in phonics before “whole language” and “balanced literacy” was the standard have retired. Just under 50% of South Dakota students last school year didn’t meet standards for English and language arts, according to the state report card.

“We hope to see those numbers go up. I believe there’s good evidence they will,” state Education Department Secretary Joe Graves told the board.

The department is wrapping up its current voluntary training program on phonics-based teaching and transitioning to courses through the South Dakota Board of Regents, using part of the $6 million in funding from the Legislature. The department hopes to begin classes in fall 2025, open to all public, private and tribal school teachers in the state.

As part of the higher education system, state Department of Education officials hope the program will be used to train college students majoring in teaching before they graduate.

A $54 million Comprehensive Literacy State Development grant awarded to South Dakota from the federal government will also be used to help local school districts implement a phonics-based approach over the next five years. Those competitive grants, with applications opening in early 2025, can go toward improvements such as literacy coach salaries, teacher training or curriculum reviews.

The board also held hearings for optional content standards for computer science and the Oceti Sakowin Essential Understandings, which educate students on culture and traditions of Indigenous South Dakotans. The computer science standards would be new standards to explore technology, such as artificial intelligence, in the classrooms and workforce. One person spoke against the revised OSEU standards, saying that the standards needed more tribal consultation and more representation of the Nakota and Dakota tribes.