Happy pet stories

JHS
Tue, 06 Jul 2010 18:26:11 +0000

Last weekend, my wife and I were away for a large party in honor of my parents, and, as usual when we go away, our dog was staying at home, but spending significant time with a dog-walker we have used for years.

On Saturday night, just as the party was starting, the dog walker called me to tell me that my dog had escaped from the fenced back yard of a house where they (and a bunch of other dogs) had been hanging out. She had been looking for the dog for 20 minutes, and couldn’t find her. This was in a neighborhood about 6 miles from our house, where the dog was basically unfamiliar with the area. I kind of pushed it out of my mind for the party, but got very upset when it was over and I checked my texts and found that the dog was still missing.

We left for the long drive home at 5:30 Sunday morning. (I had to drop my wife off where she works en route; she had a work crisis going on and a 1:00 pm meeting to prepare for and attend.) I got back to my area about 12:30 pm, and spent most of the afternoon and evening covering the area around where my dog had vanished, along with the dog walker, and also making and copying lost-dog flyers to post and hand-out. By the time it got dark, I was crying every 15 minutes or so. The dog had been missing for 27 hours, and I was wondering if I would ever see her again. Every time I came home, I hoped she would have shown up there; every time I checked the voice mail, I hoped it was a message about her. But nothing.

Monday. Before and after work, more looking, more hoping, more flyer posting. Did online lost-dog registrations, and faxed flyers to vets and police in the area. Cried periodically during the day. Was completely depressed Monday night, couldn’t talk to anyone about it without starting to cry.

Tuesday. Online registrations produced e-mails inviting me to pay hundreds of dollars for premium services of dubious value. Went out at 5 am to post more flyers, look in a different neighborhood.

In the middle of the afternoon (and the middle of a business meeting), I got a call from a letter carrier. She had just seen one of the flyers, and she was pretty certain that she had seen my dog the previous afternoon, Monday, in an area only about half a mile from where she had escaped, but one which neither I nor the dog walker had seriously canvassed. (We had spent a lot of time a couple of hundred yards away, on two different sides, but for various reasons had not hit that particular neighborhood.) As soon as I could, I left work and went to where the letter carrier had seen the dog the day before. At that point, it was about 72 hours exactly from when she had vanished. I started calling her. She came! It took about 15 minutes, and I had moved a couple of blocks from where I started, but there she was racing towards me (and then I was racing towards her) from the direction I had come. We were both overjoyed.