To Misplace A Dog

Yesterday we lost Angus, my best friend's big doofy Golden Retriever, for about 20 minutes. It felt like hours.

His owner, who I shall call Kmoore, remained extremely calm and collected while we searched for him, shaking a bowl of kibble and calling his name. Four of us and two dogs had just gotten back from a fantastic low tide walk down the beach and out to a little island and were feeling a beautiful day/good friends/summer vacation buzz. That buzz died pretty quickly when Kmoore turns to me and asks, 'Is Angus in the house?' I look around at the three other wagging tails and laugh nervously when I realize the furriest of the tails is indeed missing. With four dogs running around in a small space it's pretty easy to overlook one of them. She and I had both thought that Angus had been the first to enter the house. I guess not.

The four of us immediately began the search, with the other two girls at the cabin joining in. When it became apparent that he wasn't in the immediate vicinity, my heart sank. I checked the beach, I checked the island (where Angus had been especially enamored with a big dead fish), I checked the awkward outbuilding near the cabin. No luck. We split up, and I see Kmoore jog up the street with a very worried look on her face. The minutes tick by, and when I hear the others still calling for him from a distance, my heart sinks even further.

Goose gone swimming, right before we lost him. 

Where we were was pretty isolated, and no one in the neighborhood had seen him, which was odd. After another lap around the beach, I conclude that he has to be somewhere really stupid, where he either can't get out or can't hear us, and he can't be far.

Turns out he was in exactly such a place. Angus had wandered into landlord's house that was adjacent to our little cabin. He had been intrigued by the path up to that house all day, and must have dashed up to the house as we made our way back to the cabin. The door must have been left ajar, and Angus's curious nose had led him astray. One of the girls finally walked over to check the house on the off chance he was there, and she found the screen door open but the front door closed. Despite this, she let herself in, called for him, and around the corner trots Angus (eventually), absolutely covered in fleas from the infestation in this house, and totally unperturbed that he had caused us so much anxiety. Now he gets to sit outside, tied to a tree, to wait for his 'mommy' to come back.

Angus's little misadventure drove home for me just how attached we become to these fuzzy creatures, and how much we depend on their continued presence. More than we'd like to admit to ourselves sometimes, I think. They make us so vulnerable. One minute they're there, the next minute they're not and you feel your world and your happy weekend crashing down around you. Walking around with Myles during our search for Angus, I just stop and turn to him, look at him standing on the beach, looking back at me, and ask him worriedly, 'Where's Angus?' He looks at me and gives a little whine, knowing that something is wrong, but not knowing what. In the car ride on the way home I turn to my boyfriend and say 'If that was Myles, I would have been absolutely losing my mind'. I applaud Kmoore for keeping it so together while we were looking for her missing dog. I don't think I could have been that contained. Maybe she is just stronger than I am, because I know she is just as attached to her dog as I am to mine.

And of course when you find the dog, very much as you would with a child, you feel a wave of relief along with a surge of anger at them for running off, and you talk to them as if they can understand what you are feeling. Angus sat outside for a few minutes, tethered to a tree, and his relieved owner looks out the screen door and says to him, 'Yeah Angus, you feel sad huh? Well that's how I felt.' And she turns to me, joking, 'I don't think he's getting the message, do you?' Nope. He's not getting it, and of course she knows that. As much as we humanize our dogs, they don't understand how much their unexplained absence tears us in half.

From the moment we realized he was missing, terribly thoughts starting swirling through my head. He's hit by a car, laying on the side of the road; he fell off that slippery rock by the beach and hit his head; he swam out too far and couldn't make it back. I don't think it's just me that has these thoughts, but man, are they terrible. And I realize, oh God, Myles didn't even have his collar on because it was so wet from swimming. He had no ID if it had been him that wandered off. I envy those that can stay outwardly chipper and optimistic and stomp down the panic and keep it in a deep, inaccessible place.

We like happy endings. 

When we had Angus back, everyone played it cool, acting like we hadn't just had a brush with a major crisis. Angus was back, that was all that mattered. All was right again. Hugs all around for the humans, and when I got back home that night, I hugged my dog extra hard, and remembered how fleeting and precious our time with our dogs really is.