Zoe escaped from me a few days ago as I was taking the dogs out for their morning walk. She saw/heard/smelled something, or thought she did, and bolted down across the yard and into the woods, with me calling. She apparently cannot run and hear at the same time.

I check the Fouche Gap/Texas Valley Facebook group when something like this happens, and during the time they were gone, there was one sighting down in Texas Valley. Later the same person saw both dogs near her yard, so I drove down to look. No luck. Then, even later, the same person posted that she saw them running back up the mountain, tongues dragging the ground. Zoe’s leash was also dragging the ground.

Zoe seems to be Zeke’s spiritual successor. I could never take Zeke out off leash. Every time he saw an open door, and sometimes even an open window, he jumped for it. Zoe is not that bad. I can take her outside to the truck and not worry about her running off. If she disappears around the corner of the house, she comes back when I call her. But when something happens, she takes off.

The main difference in their wandering is that Zeke always stayed around the top of the mountain, and Zoe does not. She runs down into Texas Valley, sometimes miles away. I don’t know why, but it might have something to do with the fact that for years I took Zeke for walks around the top of the mountain, sometimes into the woods, up and down the side of the mountain, but Zoe has always been walked on Fouche Gap Road. I have never taken her into the woods at the top.

But who knows what’s going on in her mind, assuming she has one.

Just before the dogs showed up at the back door, our neighbor Deb called Leah to make sure I was OK. She knew that I always accompany the dogs, so when she saw them running without me, she was worried that something had happened to me. The next day when I took the dogs down Fouche Gap Road, an older man stopped to tell me he had been worried, too, when he saw the dogs without me. He said he started looking carefully along the road to make sure I wasn’t lying disabled somewhere.

I have been walking the dogs on Fouche Gap Road for several years at around the same time of day. I always wave at passing motorists, and they always wave back. So we kind of know each other. It’s kind of funny, but also reassuring. People were paying attention.

Zoe didn’t want to complete her walk Friday morning. She didn’t pull on her leash as she normally does. Instead, she kept close and circled around me. We had gone less than a quarter of the way to our regular turnaround when she turned around and wanted to go back home. A couple of times recently she has started out on one of her short, restroom walks and suddenly turned and started pulling back towards the house. It seems she has had an encounter with a horsefly.

My second doberman, Bella, was afraid of horseflies. She was fairly old when I got her. Her hips were bad, and she had apparently never done much walking in her previous life. That was back when I was doing some running. I didn’t want to take her with me, because she couldn’t run the whole distance. I would have to stop and walk with her back to the house.

When I tried to go for a run by myself, I left her on the deck, where she would howl and cry until I relented and let her come with me. Inevitably, I had to walk her back home. The one time I saw her run, and fast, was when a horsefly came buzzing around her. She wanted nothing to do with that. Apparently a horsefly bite is worse than arthritis in the hips. She knew exactly what she was running from. One time I managed to smack a horsefly that had lit on her back. When it fell to the pavement, Bella leaned down to it, bared her front incisors, and bit the damned thing to death.

I don’t blame Bella or Zoe for running from a horsefly. I have been bitten a few times, and it’s not a pleasant experience. I assume Zoe has been bitten at some time because she recognizes the buzzing sound as something to fear. Her original home was Oklahoma, which probably has horseflies. Maybe even more than their fair share.