Against all expectations, Zoe came home on Sunday afternoon.
Zoe, finally back, between meals
I had just posted three lost-dog signs around the mountain and was sitting in the living room when I got a call from a neighbor up around the curve towards the top of the mountain. She said she just saw our dog running down the street past her house. I didn’t think it was really her, but by the time I got my shoes on and ran out the back door, she was running up the driveway.
This was a happy dog, and hungry, although she didn’t show any signs of malnourishment. She has always been a chow hound, so it’s hard to tell whether she was hungrier than normal. We went ahead and fed her as if she had not been eating. After all, her last meal at home was five days earlier.
We have no idea what happened to her, or how she ended up coming back when she did. She had left with a long harness-leash attached to a second long leash. When she got back, her harness-leash had been chewed off right about where her mouth would have reached. So, did she get hung up somewhere and finally chew her way free? Probably not. We had a pretty strong storm and lots of rain Saturday night, and she showed no sign of having been outside in it. Her coat was clean and dry.
Did someone take her? The neighbor who called to let us know she was on her way said she saw a car stopped in the road, and then saw Zoe running by her house. She did not see where Zoe actually came from, so we don’t know whether someone let her out of the car, or the driver just stopped because Zoe was running in the middle of the road.
I do have to apologize for suspecting someone of harming her, although that suspicion gave me some peace of mind in an odd way — not having to worry about whether she was trapped outside in the weather or in pain somewhere. I still believe that she would have come home if she had been able to, but whatever her story is, we will almost certainly never know. All I know now is that we are really happy, not to mention extremely surprised, to have her back. And I won’t be letting her off leash any time soon.
Our new dog Zoe has still not shown up, and something happened today that makes me think she never will.
I was driving around looking for her when I saw a woman outside her house near her car. As soon as I stopped, she started towards her front door. I spoke up and told her I live up on the mountain and was looking for a lost dog. She said they had not seen any dogs around there, and wanted to leave it at that. I tried to show her a photo on my phone, but she said no, just tell me what the dog looks like. So I did. She said she would keep an eye out and let us know. I wondered, how? She doesn’t have our phone number.
At the time I thought her behavior was odd, but maybe just fear of a stranger. The woman’s behavior and demeanor made me uncomfortable. To me, it was clear that something was going on with her. A few hours later a thought suddenly hit me and left me with a rare feeling of certainty: someone at that house shot Zoe.
I know that’s a big jump; there was nothing in our exchange that could pass for even the weakest of evidence. But that leap to certainty has happened to me probably five times in my entire life, and I have learned to trust it.
It explains a lot. There is no reason Zoe would not come home unless something prevented it. Sam came home, but only a day after they disappeared. He knows his way around, so there was a reason he didn’t come home that night. Seeing someone shoot Zoe would explain it in a number of ways. If someone fired a gun near him, I know he would run away as quickly as he could, which would explain why he wasn’t shot. But he wouldn’t forget or desert Zoe, at least not right away.
Someone on out local Facebook group recently posted about someone shooting a little dog in the head with a .22. I don’t necessarily think the woman (or more likely her husband) shot that dog, too, but it just shows that we have people like that. It’s not rare in the rural South for people to shoot strays. Not common, but certainly not unheard of.
Also, the woman has to have recognized me. I recognized her car because I have seen it many times while walking the dogs, and I always wave at the people who pass me. That means she has seen me and Zoe over the two months we have had her. So she knew the dog I was looking for.
The house is less than a half a mile from our turn-around point, so it was not too far for the dogs to have wandered.
I had planned to write a post about my search for Zoe, and to compare it to trying to solve a 500-piece crossword puzzle when you only have only five pieces. Now, in my mind, the entire puzzle has fallen into place.
I told Leah what I thought. She thought we should do something. However, I don’t have any real evidence to back up what I believe happened. Writing it out makes it clear to me how skimpy and meaningless it all seems on the surface.
A lot the works of the mind are hidden. Thoughts and memories swirl around beneath our consciousness. Sometimes we don’t know why we think what we think. In this case, the things I have mentioned plus everything else in this sad affair simmered in my subconscious. My subconscious has been working on this. It finally reached a conclusion and pushed it up to my conscious mind.
I don’t expect anyone to believe that the woman or her husband shot Zoe. The police would laugh at me if I told them my “evidence”. It probably seems a little crazy for me to have reached my conclusion, because I can’t articulate everything that went into it. Some of it is buried in my subconscious, and it would take a while to dig it out. But I don’t feel the need. Whatever it is that has convinced me, I trust it.
Once I reached that conclusion, I felt entirely differently about Zoe’s disappearance. The desperate urge to look for her simply evaporated. The worry about what happened to her, what’s happening to her right now, what will she do on Saturday night when the strong storms hit, all of that worry turned to sadness.
I had some color lost-dog posters printed today, but the only reason I’m going to put them up around the mountain is for Leah’s sake. I think Zoe is dead, and there is nothing I can do about it.
I hope I am wrong. I hope I open the door into the garage Saturday morning and find her looking up at me.
Our two dogs, Sam and Zoe, are missing. (But see the bottom)
I had been taking them into the front yard every day after lunch for a 15 or 20 minute play session, keeping Zoe on a long leash and letting Sam run free. I had let both off leash on several occasions, and on two of those occasions they had decided to run off into the woods for a romp. They came back both times before dark.
On Wednesday I took them out. I let Sam off leash and kept Zoe on her long leash. I had been doing that for several days. Sam would run around, sometimes keeping out of Zoe’s reach and sometimes not. But every time Sam ran past us, Zoe zoomed out to the end of the leash, jerking my arm and sometimes making me take a short, jarring run to stay on my feet. On Wednesday I let go of the leash a couple of times so she could catch Sam. So one time instead of wrestling, they simply trotted into the woods. I heard them thrashing through the leaves as they disappeared off to the north. They did not come home Wednesday evening, and so far they have not come home tonight, Thursday.
If I could have run, I might have caught them, but my running days are in the distant past. I didn’t worry too much at first since they knew their way home, especially Sam, who has lived up here five years. As it got darker and they didn’t come back, I took my truck around the top of the mountain to look for them. After dark I drove around some more. And then before I went to bed, I decided to drive further. So I spent about an hour right after midnight driving around in Texas Valley and on the other side of the mountain down to the road that leads into town. I saw a lot of deer, one coyote at our old house, and two stray dogs in Texas Valley. But not our dogs.
Thursday morning I drove the same route. Down on Huffaker Road, on the front side of the mountain, I saw someone trying to catch the two strays, who had walked probably five or six miles from where I had seen them the night before. I stopped, and it turned out it was a woman who had brought Zeke back one rainy night when he got loose. She knows the dogs, as do most of the people on the mountain and those who drive over Fouche Gap Road when I’m walking the dogs. She said she would look for them. Our neighbors said they would, too.
I am not optimistic. I’m afraid something has happened to the dogs. They would have come home if they could, so something is preventing it. I have no idea what it is. It could range from being lost at best to having been shot by someone who didn’t want them on their property at worst. Zoe was dragging her long leash when she disappeared. It’s possible she could have snagged it on something, but she has shown a tendency to chew on it, so I doubt it would take long before she chewed through it. I imagine they stayed together, at least as long as they could.
I drove more than 30 miles all around Texas Valley on Thursday afternoon. But we are in the middle of thousands of acres of forest, and there is no particular reason the dogs would be on the road at any given time. Driving around looking gives me the feeling of doing something, but I have no real expectation of finding them on the road. I walked through the woods later Thursday, following where they had disappeared, trying to see if there was some sign, but I saw nothing. I thought about looking further in the woods, but covering the areas where they might be would take me weeks, if not months. It’s not a realistic plan.
I am having some lost-dog posters printed. I will take one to animal control Friday, and I’ll post some around the mountain. Both dogs have tags with our phone number, and both are chipped. If anyone finds them it would be easy for them to contact us. I continue to hope, but deep down, I am afraid they are gone for good.
UPDATE: Sam showed up in our front yard a little after 9 pm Thursday. He ran back into the woods but eventually came out after I went in looking for him. Zoe has not shown up. From this I assume that something happened to Zoe. It does give some hope that Zoe might still be out there and might still come home.
It’s been a while since I posted. There hasn’t been much going on here worth mentioning. I am doing some programming work for the company I used to work for. I wrote a pretty complicated program about 20 years ago to read NOAA satellite data, and I have to update it. I’m glad I put copious comments in it so I can figure out what I did all those years ago.
Zoe is making slow improvement in the two areas that need improvement. The first is in not chasing cats. Here she is with Mollie in calm times.
Unfortunately, Mollie tends to run when she sees Zoe, and a small running animal triggers Zoe’s hunting instinct.
Zoe and Sam are getting along quite well. They play well together. I have been taking them into the front yard after lunch almost every day and letting them have 15 or 20 minutes of very vigorous biting and chewing on each other.
I originally let them both off the leash, which worked well for a few times, but they decided to take a four-hour trip around the neighborhood a couple of times, so they are now playing on leash. My arm has been almost jerked out of my shoulder socket a couple of times when Zoe gets a good head of steam and runs to the end of the leash. I got a nice rope burn another time. But they enjoy it.
Zoe has snarled and snapped at Sam twice, if I remember correctly, but this is more typical of their relationship now.
As both of my readers know, I have been taking our dogs on a longish walk every morning for several years, down the road and then back up. I have always looked forward to it, but not so much now. Sam and Zeke were so well behaved on their leashes that I could just walk and let my mind wander. And I like to let my mind wander. However, Zoe is not leash trained. She pulls so much it actually makes my arthritic knees hurt. So now I usually turn around and head home about halfway through the normal walk.
I have a head collar (Gentle Leader), which is supposed to help train dogs not to pull. It has two loops, one that goes up high on the neck like a normal collar, and one that goes around the muzzle. When the dog pulls, it puts pressure on the muzzle and tends to turn the dog’s head back towards the person holding the leash. Some people think the Gentle Leader will train a dog to walk without pulling while wearing the Gentle Leader, but not when not wearing it. In any event, it’s a trial for me to walk her right now.
I try to give the dogs enough freedom on their walks to investigate since they spend most of their lives inside. Lately, that has involved leaves in the ditch beside the road.
They run their heads under the leaves and push forward, like they are plowing the leaves. The leaves are pretty deep. I imagine they provide good cover for little creatures like mice.
So, for the next little while, I expect to be trying to leash train Zoe, and trying to remember how to write the code to apply response function files to spectral radiance files.
I got back from my trip to Colorado last week. I had two fairly long days of driving, splitting the almost 1400 miles in two equal parts. This was the view to the west at sunset on my first day on the road.
This was the view to the east the morning of the second day on the road.
Zoe was a great traveler. She stood, sat or lay in the back seat and never made a peep. Or a poop. Now that’s she’s home, she seems pretty comfortable on Leah’s side of the bed.
We don’t allow her on the furniture, but sometimes she jumps up if we’re not looking.
The main question was how the cats would react to her, and her to the cats. As it turns out, not particularly well. Zoe has a very strong prey drive, and cats look a lot like a dog’s natural prey. Zoe focuses intently on the cats as they walk around the house, and she chases if one of them runs. That’s usually Mollie. Mollie has taken to hiding under the sofa. She has hissed and swatted at Zoe a few times, but Zoe is oblivious. I think the two will eventually come to some kind of understanding. At least that’s what I tell myself.
The only other cat that comes inside is Sylvester, and Sylvester has his own story now. He disappeared Monday and didn’t show again until Tuesday afternoon. Leah was convinced he had been killed by a coyote as our gray cat, Smokey, was, but it seems he escaped by the skin of his teeth. Or maybe the cornea of his eye.
Sylvester’s left eye was completely covered with pus and mucus. We took him to the vet, who cleaned the eye and found a dent in the cornea. The vet also found a wound on the top of his head. She thought some kind of animal had bitten Sylvester on the face. It might have been a coyote, in which case Sylvester has used up yet another of his allotted nine lives. I’m not sure how many he has left.
So now Sylvester has to wear the cone of shame for a couple of weeks, until his eye heals.
He may end up completely healed, or he may end up with a scar right in the center of his cornea. In the meantime, he gets two eye drops once a day. Doing it has not been terrible for anyone involved, an unexpected blessing.
Sylvester’s vet visit was the third vet visit since I got back home. The first visit was when I took Zoe in for an ear check, which found a yeast infection. So she gets eight drops of medication in each ear for 10 days.
The second vet visit was Sam, who injured his dewclaw while playing with Zoe. Sam’s dewclaw was a bloody mess. The vet yanked off the outer part of the nail, which Sam did not like.
This is how they play.
Poor Sam used to be a runner, but Zoe’s legs are just too long. Zoe stays ahead, but I think she holds back a little, enough to keep Sam almost within reach. Occasionally when Zoe has to make a sharp turn at the edge of the grassy area, Sam can cut the corner, and then Zoe really has to pour it on to stay ahead of him.
When they stop, they lie down on their backs head-to-head, and continue to gnaw at each other’s cheeks.
Zoe is much taller and heavier than Sam. I was a little worried that she would play too hard for him, but he seems to take it in stride. They aren’t the buddies that Sam and Zeke were, but maybe they’ll get there.
The shelter where I got Zoe said she is a German Shepherd-Doberman Pinscher mix. I was not sure at first, but at some angles her head looks just like a Doberman. Her coloring is obviously German Shepherd. This is a nice coincidence, since I like Dobermans and Leah likes German Shepards.
I have already posted a photo of my friends’ dog Elroy, who looks a lot like Zeke, but here’s another.
Elroy did not like Zoe, pretty much the same way he did not like Zeke. I kind of understand that, since Zoe’s manners are somewhat lacking.
Elroy is pretty old now and has a really hard time getting around. He can’t take NSAIDs, the standard arthritis medication, but his mom and dad are going to try something new. I hope it works, because I really like old Elroy.
I told Elroy that he is to be there the next time I visit.
Oh, and fall arrived while I was in Denver. Here is some proof.
I see oak, which is mainly yellowish brown, some hickory, which is bright yellow, and maple, which is orange or red. There is even a green leaf.
Copyright 2013 Mark V. Paris
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