So many fun things to share – Cairns! The Easter Show! Marriott Sydney! Baking Sundays!
But I can’t get last Thursday night out of my head. Warning: the bit about the dog doesn’t end well.
De asked me to walk with her down to the Barley to buy some wine. On the way there we saw two of our neighbourhood cats (as in owned by people, collared, but allowed to hang out in the street) – one was Lomax, a tiny little tuxedo cat who is cutely aggressive in demanding petting. As we were delivering said pettings De mentioned that she’d seen a stray cat on the street earlier in the week.
So we accomplished the purchasing of wine and walked up the street when a dog came trotting around the corner. I noticed that he was on a leash and assumed his owner was close behind him on the cross-street. By the time I figured out there was no owner around I was about three metres away from the end of his leash. I tried to grab the end of the leash but he panicked and ran out on to the road.
He ran under a moving car and there was some god-awful yelping and OMG, I just had my hands over my eyes and I was screaming. The car stopped, and the dog ran off. De ran off after him and I followed at a slightly more sedate pace, checking under cars and behind fences.
We tracked him for a few blocks but couldn’t find him, and people walking in the opposite direction said they hadn’t seen him. We went to the local dog park to see if he’d maybe gone there, but still couldn’t find him.
We were both bawling our eyes out by this time. I thought that as we’d seen him running he might not have broken anything, but at the very least we’d managed not to rescue a confused and frightened dog. If only I’d gotten to his leash a few seconds sooner!
So we were walking up our street when we saw the stray cat. Probably because we felt so guilty and helpless at the situation with the dog we weren’t going to leave the cat there, and after running through a number of options De just picked up the cat and carried her home inside her jacket. We gave kitty some food, found the cat-carrier and De took her to the late-night vets.
Turned out Frankie was a much-loved pet whose owners had recently moved to the area, and she had run off during the moving process. Thanks to the power of the microchip Frankie and her owners were reunited a few days later.
(And in my world, the dog was quickly found by his owners and he was absolutely fine. Shh, let me have my illusions.)
I can’t write that much about pets without a picture of Mr Puss:
Here he is lying on a sportsbag/suitcase combination.
Comments