Those of us who've never recovered from the promise and the joy and the innocence of a Llewellin setter puppy face understand a couple of things.  First, a puppy face is fleeting.  It will change rapidly in the ensuing weeks, months, until about the third year when suddenly...it's the face of "my dog."  

Then, for a time, a blessed time of stubborn denial, there's a sort of stasis, and we come to know every inch of that face - because it's with us at our feet when we read, on a blanket near the bed while we sleep, totally focused on a bowl of food being prepped, leaning into the wild bird scent that is at the very core of that dog's DNA.

But then, inexorably, there is the change we struggle hardest to accept.  The grey comes.  The skull outline sharpens.  The puppy that yesterday we could not wait to grow up we now cannot stop from growing older and more precious, more irreplaceable,  by the day.  It is the intensely bittersweet bargain we strike from the moment we agree to bring a companion gun dog into our lives, the knowledge of how deep can be the connection, how beautiful the partnership, how heartbreakingly fast it all goes.

But here we are again, beguiled by the classic beauty of this litter by Parker and Laurel, the litter even Eric Jacobs marvels at being so uniformly nice.  In these puppy faces rest the chance to share what only working dogs and their people can know, a chance and a hope and a dream we cannot live without.