My sister had a malamute who just needed a well and her own Timmy. She once led my sister to a dog that had been lost in the woods, she befriended a frightened stray cat (and convinced the cat that my sister was cool), and she alerted us through frantic barking that the little old lady next door had tripped and fallen down her back steps. (The little old lady was fine, just a little banged up. She told us, with great awe, that she heard the dog barking before she even landed.) Then there was the incident out west.
My sister and her boyfriend had decided to take an extended and poorly planned road trip. Juneau (her stage name, because her real name was really dumb) went along to stick her head out the window and occasionally vomit. (She loved car rides, but sometimes got motion sickness.) Because they hadn’t actually made motel reservations, every night they would have to search for a place willing to take a large dog. Because they hadn’t realized how far apart the towns get to be out west, sometimes this search took quite a long time. One night they had had to travel considerably farther than they’d wanted to before finding a motel. It happened to be a place with an interior corridor, which was kind of unusual for a place that would take dogs (although it wasn’t the sole instance where that was the case).
Normally, Juneau had no problem adjusting and would just lay down by the bed and go to sleep. They were exhausted and went right to bed. Juneau would not sleep. At all. She stayed by the door the entire night and growled.
They looked through the hole several times but didn’t see anything or anyone. (They decided there was no way they were opening the door, even if it was an interior corridor.) She had never acted like this at any of the other motels. She was not a growler. Even if another dog growled at her, she would just kind of glance over and say, “Yeah, you and what army?”
Finally, somewhere around dawn she laid down by the bed and slept. By the that time my sister and her boyfriend had pretty much given up on sleeping. They packed up and went to check out. As they were turning in the room key, they noticed there seemed to be a lot of activity in the vacant lot across from the motel, as in police cars and men in suits. They asked the desk clerk about it, and he really didn’t want to discuss it, but finally he admitted that, well, apparently there was a body and apparently it belonged to someone who had been murdered, but it had nothing to do with the motel, of course.
My sister’s boyfriend was marginally involved in law enforcement, and he went to one of the detectives and tried to describe what had happened, but it turns out telling a homicide detective “My dog growled all night” does not impress them. Since my sister and her boyfriend were just passing through, they never learned the rest of the story, such as whether the killer was a guest on the same floor of the motel and they barely escaped some horrible fate. But we’ll say Juneau saved them from some awful fate.
Of course, about a week later they were all in our yard and my foster brother started a fight with the other kid. Fred just watched.