| | 8:35 AM - a little puppy, lost in the wood
Current mood:  relieved Yesterday at 2 I got a call from a rather panicked Bethany, who informed me that the younger (and smaller) of her two dogs had been hit by a car while Todd was home alone and could I go over there if I was free and help him out?
On my drive, my first thought was this: will I be taking Todd and the dog to the vet hospital, carrying a broken-legged man (Todd broke his leg well over a month ago in a baseball game) and a potentially fatally wounded dog in my car? Could I do this and keep it together? My second thought, andt he one that preoccupied me on the normally short drive to their street that seemed to take at least thirty minutes was, "Am I going the right way? Where do they live? Do I even know how to get around Athens? What if Todd is waiting for me and I'm not even going to the right place?" (Keep in mind that I know exactly where they live, even if I do have the inability to pull into their driveway upon first go-round each time I go over.)
After bursting into the house that was empty except for an excited and nervous Cleveland (the elder dog), I went back out to the street and spotted Todd, leaning on his walker and talking amongst his neighbors. From that point onward, I (along with an ever-changing cast of characters) trudged through the spiderweb-laden woods near their house, through the underbrush, over rotting logs, and smack into large vats of seemingly steaming Georgia red clay, looking for a scared, cowering Van Damm who may have been hiding somewhere. He escaped from Todd for just a few minutes; when Todd went outside to retrieve him, Van Damm playfully backed up into the street, feigning another escape attempt, when he was hit by a car. All Todd could say for sure was that the small dog's leg snapped before he bolted between the houses and into the woods--there was no telling if he was bleeding (or how badly), if he had been hurt anywhere else, or if the car had also hit him in the head.
Todd, unable to look for the dog on foot because of his own injuries, was calling the surprisingly long list of area animal hospitals to see if anyone had brought Van Damm in.
An uncharacteristically shaken-up Bethany arrived shortly after I did. Over and over we scanned the woods, the nearby construction sites, the streets, the abandoned sheds. I called people who I thought would be free to stop by and help with the search while we had daylight on our side.
At 4:30, I had to leave, get my things, and move on to my writing class.
At 7, during our break, I called Bethany. They had printed up flyers and were getting ready to put them up around the neighborhood. Bethany sounded as if she didn't think there was any hope, and I have to say that I started to consider being a mite bit less optimistic.
At 8, I finished class and called her right away.
They'd found him. As she and friends were going out to poster the area, a neighbor (who'd seen the sign or who had talked to one of the many people searching by car or foot earlier, I presume) was in pursuit of Bethany: "Your dog! Your dog! At least I think it's your dog!" A noticeably out-of-it Van Damm had been wandering the park around the corner from their house right at sunset, his leg shooting out in all sorts of unsightly directions. When I talked to Bethany and Todd, they were at the emergency vet's office.
Now I'm imagining Todd and Van Damm (who's a really cute, small Pointer-Beagle mix, white and brown with long, floppy ears) laid up in bed together, co-cripples with their offending limbs propped up on pillows while Cleveland, the big dog, serves them cool lemonade on a tray. MTV Cribs on TV. "Can we change this? I've seen this one," Van Damm suggests. "Yeah, whatever, I don't care," Todd says, "I'm mainly looking at the computer anyway." Van Damm changes it to the Crocodile Hunter marathon and whispers to himself: "Aww, crikey," thinking of how lucky he's been. How very lucky. |
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