Twice-orphaned, the big white gun dog was running low on luck when we met at the local SPCA. We happened into the place on a whim, when my wise wife and daughter told me it was time to get a new dog, a year after our old collie died.

Mostly lab with a few other ingredients thrown in, he calmly followed me around the dog pound yard and leaned against my leg.

“Looks like he picked you,” the SPCA woman said.

I reckoned so.

They had called him Samson at the pound, because he is big and strong. But I thought that was a dumb name for a shorthaired dog. I call him Buck. That’s what Jack London named that big dog in “Call of the Wild.” It seems to fit.

He is a serious dog with yellow eyes, and he furrows his brow in obvious puzzlement when he watches…