Once my dog found her way home.

In My Humble Opinion
1

The thread about getting lost reminded me of when our dog Max possibly found her way home about four miles…we’ll never know exactly what happened.

She was staying at Mr. Lillith’s brother’s while we were on vacation. One of the kids left the gate open and Max got out. They couldn’t find her anywhere.

Meanwhile, Max shows up at our house and is seen going around and around to all the doors. The neighbors, who know we are on vacation, call Mr. Lillith’s parents to tell them. They come over, get Max, and take her back to Mr. Lillith’s brother’s house.

We don’t know if she really found her way home or if someone picked her up and took her there because of her dogtag. That is the likely story, but if you went to all the trouble of taking someone’s dog home, wouldn’t you tie the dog to something or knock on the neighbor’s door or something?

Anyway, we’ll never know if it was a very nice person helping our dog or if she had a guardian angel. A mutt from the pound, a wonderful dog. She lived to be @ 16 years old. We finally had to put her down a couple of years ago on Thanksgiving because she was very old and had collapsed. It was just awful–my husband sobbed all day. We had all his family over and we both kept crying.

Sometimes when I see a dog running around loose I stop and try to help. Once I was passing the home of someone I know and saw her huge dog outside. It was a bull mastiff, I believe. So I turned around and went back…the small door into the garage was ajar. I tried to go after the dog but realized there was no way I was going to catch him. So I got his attention and started running back to the house and he ran after me. I got ahold of his collar and put him back into the garage and shut the door–no one was home. Later I called and left a message about it to make sure I had put the dog in the right place. (What if it wasn’t even their dog? I wasn’t sure. ) Well, Linda never said anything to me about it. So I nentioned it to her one day and she was stunned. Her family had erased the message because they didn’t want her to know they left the door open!

2

I took my dog on vacation to my hometown once. We’d been at my parent’s house for only a day or two when, in the midst of some shopping, we decided to stop for lunch. We couldn’t take the dog in the restaurant, but my brother lived nearby and had a fenced yard, so we stopped by and put the dog in my brother’s yard. When we came back after breaksfast, dog was nowhere to be found. We looked around for a while, and were starting to get worried, when brother got a call - the dog was at my parent’s house.

She’d hopped the fence and ran to my parent’s home which wasn’t far away - only about a mile. The weird thing was that she’d never been to my brother’s house before, we’d never driven or walked directly from my parent’s house to my brother’s house to “teach” her the way, and we’d only been in town a day or two. My parent’s house wasn’t her “normal” house at all, this was the first time we’d visited. I have no clue how she found her way from one home to the other, but we were sure glad she did!

3

When I was a kid we had a beagle, and Dad often took him hunting a little ways from our house. Unfortunately, we were never able to train him to ‘come’ and ‘stay’ very well, and a couple times he would be so excited Dad couldn’t get him to come back to the truck with him. Eventually he would go home alone, and that night we’d have a tired and hungry rabbit hound on our back step, waiting to be let in.