Who Has Seen the Wind

The event the text is referring to is indeed, the death of Brian O’Connal’s dog. Brian is visiting Jappie’s grave and finds the Young Ben already there, in some shape or form. They’re mourning Jappie’s death and Brian realizes just how much he’s missed the dog, not just missed, but just being immensely saddened by the event, or as the book puts it, “an emptiness that wasn’t to be believed.”

The passage centers on Brian’s experience of the event and is one of the major events of the story, and contributes greatly to Brian’s life. The dog was originally gotten to replace Brian and his quirky view on god, so having the dog die could possibly be a metaphor of the death of the god-in-white boots image that Brian went by. That’d be a pretty big thing.

I think that Brian had placed a lot of faith in his dog, and maybe represented the prairies to some extent in the way of the dog being an animal that lived on the prairies with Brian. From this point on Brian became stronger friends with the Young Ben, which makes sense completely. I love how W.O. Mitchell describes the event aswell, not taking sides but just showing it how it is, with a very delicate nature.