Who's the best?

A dog that "special" and my buddy could've went home by himself!!!! I'd went and got Ol' Spook myself, my dog or not!!

I raised a pup out to a Catahoula dog my buddy used on cattle and a bmc/walker I had and named him Duke. Ol' Duke didn't fire much when he was young and to this day I'm not real sure how he made it around here until ten months. Anyway some how he done just enough to get by, one night we were hunting and we stopped to listen and as far as we could hear (several years before garmin) we could he a dog bayed. I looked around and we had everything except Duke, my buddy said that's Duke! I couldn't hear good enough to tell but I had my doubts but when we got closer and the other dogs started to him I realized it was in fact him. Duke was never beat from that day on!!!! I could tell stories all day about that dog but one year a guy told me and my buddy that a man he knew had caught 250 hogs that past year, and it got us to wondering how many we usually catch in a year. We'd never kept count but vowed that day to start counting and just see. Four months later we were over a hundred and give up counting. Back then we hunted ALL YEAR round so I knew 250 was nothing to us. Now I told all that to help understand how many hogs Duke had bayed for us in those 4 short years of his life. When he was about 5 yrs old I was breaking a colt and when I went out one evening to ride the colt Ol' Duke had knocked his water over(August 100 Degrees out side) I knew he was real hot but after I filled his bucket he drank good and layed back in the shade and seemed to be cooling off. I ALMOST unsnapped him to follow along on the ride and had I done it that might have shown me just how hot he was, but I didn't and after returning from the ride his was dead. I got terribly mad at myself and when the wife came out and seen me burring him she started crying, I told her to "shut it up he was just a dog"!!! I had only been hunting about 6 years at that time and now nearly 20 years later I understand "THAT OL' DUKE WAS NOT JUST A DOG!!!!!!!"

Thanks for reading!!