I was on the phone with Steve Friday when he suddenly interrupted himself: “I need to see if that’s a dog in our back yard.”
Huh?
“It could be a coyote or a fox — it’s out by the shed.”
There was a long stretch while I talked him through finding the binoculars in the junk drawer and he tried to catch sight of the critter while it wasn’t hidden in shadow. Eventually, he decided it was a dog after all, and we assumed it would wander off eventually.
But when Loki and I arrived home from that evening’s walk, our neighbor was standing in our yard.
Daisy peeks out from her campsite in our back yard.
“Have you gotten a good look at that animal that’s been hanging around by your shed? Are you sure it’s a dog?” she asked, sounding a wee bit concerned.
I told her Steve had gotten a look at it with binoculars and said it was a dog… but I lost no timing herding Loki and my daughter into the house. Then I ventured out with my trusty telephoto lens.
The first shot confirmed it was a dog, because coyotes and foxes generally don’t wear collars. Then the dog ducked out of sight and I again forgot about it.
The next day, the dog was still around. The neighbor said she’d thought about feeding it. Oh, no… Feeding a stray is dangerous on so many levels.
Of course I fed it.
I crept down to the shed with a bowl full of food and a pocket full of bacon treats. The dog wouldn’t let me get close to it, but I got a good look. It was a beautiful, elderly animal. It looked fairly healthy, but was very, very frightened. I tried tossing it treats, but it retreated under the shed. I left the bowl of food in the grass and went back in the house. Eventually, the animal crept out and started eating hungrily.
“Loki, you might have a friend,” I muttered.
Steve went down to see if he’d have any better luck calling it. It retreated from him, too, but he returned to the house with a plan.
“I’m going down to the market,” he said. The front window of the village general store is a clearing house of local information. If someone in the area was looking for a lost dog, there would be a notice there.
Sure enough, he found a poster on the window and called the number. The people were at our house even before Steve made it home.
It turns out the dog, Daisy, had been rescued after spending years in a puppy mill. She’s very timid, but very much loved.
How much so? The woman who owns her climbed under the shed to get her.
There are things living under there. Some of the past residents had fuzzy black with white stripes down their backs. Snakes. Mice. Who knows what else.
Daisy is LOVED.
And now, thanks to Steve, she is home.
Growls and yips