LUCKY DOG IS BACK FROM THE "DEAD"! NOW,LET'S BOTH STOP PRESSING OUR LUCK

THE CREEK AND SWAMP

THE BRIDGE

THE TRAP

THREE DAYS WITHOUT DINNER...YOGURT AND BACON SURE TASTES GOOD!

I'LL NEVER LEAVE HOME AGAIN!

Sunday, 12:00 PM.  47 degrees, wind W, light to moderate.  The sky is overcast and it is misting.  The barometer predicts partly cloudy skies.
    We were just getting ready to make dinner last night, when a Sheriff’s car drove into the driveway and there was an insistent knocking at the front door.  I knew right then Lucy was back home.  At the door was a Deputy, and Mike, the owner of the Seagull Bay Motel down on Hwy 13, who was holding a shivering Lucky dog, wrapped in a Seagull Bay Motel bath towel.
    Lucky was muddy, wet and bedraggled and smelled like the bottom of a gaseous swamp, but evidently very much alive, Lazarus back from the dead, exactly three days and nights from the time he disappeared (three days seems to be the standard time lapse for such things).
    Here’s the story: Mike was changing screens late Wednesday afternoon at the motel annex across Hwy 13 from Fountain Garden Park when he heard barking, whining and growling from somewhere in the nearby creek bed.  He investigated, and the sound was emanating from under a footbridge that crosses the intermittent creek, which had filled with water with the last three days of rain.  he tried to see what animal was underneath the bridge but couldn’t make it out.  Wondering what to do next he called 911 and asked for help.  The dispatcher was reluctant to send a Deputy Sheriff, and the Bayfield police night shift was not yet in.  He finally persuaded her to find a Sheriff’s Deputy, and one arrived within twenty minutes or so.  Mike didn’t know what kind of animal might be under the bridge…could be dog, coyote, or even wolf.  He and the Deputy removed enough foot boards from the bridge to see  that not only was it a dog up to its nose and eyes in water, but that it was Lucky, whom Mike immediately recognized, even though  covered with mud. 
    They pulled old Lucky dog out, and brought him home, shaking and miserable but otherwise seeming not much the worse for wear after warming up beside the fire.  We were frying bacon, and I added bacon bits and grease to some yogurt and it didn’t take but a minute and he was eating it off the spoon I held under his nose, and he ended up licking the dish.  He wasn’t thirsty.
    So, thanks to Mike and the Deputy, who are real heroes, we have our old dog back, and we can come out of mourning.  He isn’t any younger and still has mobility problems but he has proven he is one tough old guy.  If he goes now it will be in his own bed.
    Now, you say, how about my theory that  he just went off to find a place to die?
Well, I still think that was the case but he either changed his mind when the water got up to his nose, or it simply didn’t work.
    Which reminds me of the old Dustin Hoffman movie, Little Big Man, and the episode where his adoptive father, the old Indian chief, decides he has had enough of this life and its travails and announces  that he is going up the mountain to sing his death song and wait to die, as Indians are supposed to be able to do.    So up the mountain he goes, and sings and waits, and waits and waits, and finally he gets hungry, comes back down the mountain and looks  for his dinner.  When he is asked why he isn’t dead after singing his death song he replies, “well, it doesn’t always work.”
    Lucky and I have even more in common now than before; we have both rather miraculously escaped the Grim Reaper recently. Now we will have to ponder why we were let off the hook. But let’s neither of us push our luck any further.