10/27/11 WHERE'S LUCKY?

FIRST LIGHT

9:00 AM.  36.5 degrees, wind WNW, calm.  The sky is overcast and it has started to rain, which is what the barometer predicts.
    “Where’s Lucky?” Joan and I asked each other at dinner time, which was rather late last evening, when he usually is beneath our feet.  I filled his food dish and called him, thinking he was in the house.  When he didn’t appear, we looked in the office, the bedrooms, under beds.  No dog.  It was already dark and I went to all the doors, opened the garage door.  No dog.  “Oh well, he can’t have gone far, he can hardly walk.  He’ll be back.”  He didn’t come back.  Finally I got the flashlight, looked under decks and bushes, all around the house.  No dog.  I expanded my search, looked in all the usual places he might be.  No dog.  Finally I walked around the block, looking.  Then we got in the truck and drove slowly around the neighborhood and beyond, anywhere we thought he might possibly toddle off to.  Nothing.  There was nothing to do but go to bed and look again this morning at first light.  The most obvious place for him to get lost in is the woods right across the street, which is very dense and full of ditches and ravines.  I covered it pretty thoroughly, at least the first hundred feet in from the road.  I would have broken a leg or ran into the bear if I had tried to do that last night.  Finally I walked the road again, looking and whistling.  No dog.
    Maybe he got disoriented and just stumbled off somewhere, but if he indeed does not show up, I believe he got tired of his existence and wandered off to die in peace.  I hope that is the case, and that the bear didn’t get him. 
    After coffee and breakfast I will look again in a few places I have thought of while writing this.  If it were ten degrees colder he would no longer be alive, but these are is not yet hypothermic  conditions for a dog, even  one as old as Lucky. But his survival time is getting short.  It's a sad household this morning.