And then a miracle occurs

Posted on January 13, 2020 by Mark P

Against all expectations, Zoe came home on Sunday afternoon.

I had just posted three lost-dog signs around the mountain and was sitting in the living room when I got a call from a neighbor up around the curve towards the top of the mountain. She said she just saw our dog running down the street past her house. I didn’t think it was really her, but by the time I got my shoes on and ran out the back door, she was running up the driveway.

This was a happy dog, and hungry, although she didn’t show any signs of malnourishment. She has always been a chow hound, so it’s hard to tell whether she was hungrier than normal. We went ahead and fed her as if she had not been eating. After all, her last meal at home was five days earlier.

We have no idea what happened to her, or how she ended up coming back when she did. She had left with a long harness-leash attached to a second long leash. When she got back, her harness-leash had been chewed off right about where her mouth would have reached. So, did she get hung up somewhere and finally chew her way free? Probably not. We had a pretty strong storm and lots of rain Saturday night, and she showed no sign of having been outside in it. Her coat was clean and dry.

Did someone take her? The neighbor who called to let us know she was on her way said she saw a car stopped in the road, and then saw Zoe running by her house. She did not see where Zoe actually came from, so we don’t know whether someone let her out of the car, or the driver just stopped because Zoe was running in the middle of the road.

I do have to apologize for suspecting someone of harming her, although that suspicion gave me some peace of mind in an odd way — not having to worry about whether she was trapped outside in the weather or in pain somewhere. I still believe that she would have come home if she had been able to, but whatever her story is, we will almost certainly never know. All I know now is that we are really happy, not to mention extremely surprised, to have her back. And I won’t be letting her off leash any time soon.

An unfortunate hunch

Posted on January 11, 2020 by Mark P

Our new dog Zoe has still not shown up, and something happened today that makes me think she never will.

I was driving around looking for her when I saw a woman outside her house near her car. As soon as I stopped, she started towards her front door. I spoke up and told her I live up on the mountain and was looking for a lost dog. She said they had not seen any dogs around there, and wanted to leave it at that. I tried to show her a photo on my phone, but she said no, just tell me what the dog looks like. So I did. She said she would keep an eye out and let us know. I wondered, how? She doesn’t have our phone number.

At the time I thought her behavior was odd, but maybe just fear of a stranger. The woman’s behavior and demeanor made me uncomfortable. To me, it was clear that something was going on with her. A few hours later a thought suddenly hit me and left me with a rare feeling of certainty: someone at that house shot Zoe.

I know that’s a big jump; there was nothing in our exchange that could pass for even the weakest of evidence. But that leap to certainty has happened to me probably five times in my entire life, and I have learned to trust it.

It explains a lot. There is no reason Zoe would not come home unless something prevented it. Sam came home, but only a day after they disappeared. He knows his way around, so there was a reason he didn’t come home that night. Seeing someone shoot Zoe would explain it in a number of ways. If someone fired a gun near him, I know he would run away as quickly as he could, which would explain why he wasn’t shot. But he wouldn’t forget or desert Zoe, at least not right away.

Someone on out local Facebook group recently posted about someone shooting a little dog in the head with a .22. I don’t necessarily think the woman (or more likely her husband) shot that dog, too, but it just shows that we have people like that. It’s not rare in the rural South for people to shoot strays. Not common, but certainly not unheard of.

Also, the woman has to have recognized me. I recognized her car because I have seen it many times while walking the dogs, and I always wave at the people who pass me. That means she has seen me and Zoe over the two months we have had her. So she knew the dog I was looking for.

The house is less than a half a mile from our turn-around point, so it was not too far for the dogs to have wandered.

I had planned to write a post about my search for Zoe, and to compare it to trying to solve a 500-piece crossword puzzle when you only have only five pieces. Now, in my mind, the entire puzzle has fallen into place.

I told Leah what I thought. She thought we should do something. However, I don’t have any real evidence to back up what I believe happened. Writing it out makes it clear to me how skimpy and meaningless it all seems on the surface.

A lot the works of the mind are hidden. Thoughts and memories swirl around beneath our consciousness. Sometimes we don’t know why we think what we think. In this case, the things I have mentioned plus everything else in this sad affair simmered in my subconscious. My subconscious has been working on this. It finally reached a conclusion and pushed it up to my conscious mind.

I don’t expect anyone to believe that the woman or her husband shot Zoe. The police would laugh at me if I told them my “evidence”. It probably seems a little crazy for me to have reached my conclusion, because I can’t articulate everything that went into it. Some of it is buried in my subconscious, and it would take a while to dig it out. But I don’t feel the need. Whatever it is that has convinced me, I trust it.

Once I reached that conclusion, I felt entirely differently about Zoe’s disappearance. The desperate urge to look for her simply evaporated. The worry about what happened to her, what’s happening to her right now, what will she do on Saturday night when the strong storms hit, all of that worry turned to sadness.

I had some color lost-dog posters printed today, but the only reason I’m going to put them up around the mountain is for Leah’s sake. I think Zoe is dead, and there is nothing I can do about it.

I hope I am wrong. I hope I open the door into the garage Saturday morning and find her looking up at me.

Gone dogs — updated

Posted on January 10, 2020 by Mark P

Our two dogs, Sam and Zoe, are missing. (But see the bottom)

I had been taking them into the front yard every day after lunch for a 15 or 20 minute play session, keeping Zoe on a long leash and letting Sam run free. I had let both off leash on several occasions, and on two of those occasions they had decided to run off into the woods for a romp. They came back both times before dark.

On Wednesday I took them out. I let Sam off leash and kept Zoe on her long leash. I had been doing that for several days. Sam would run around, sometimes keeping out of Zoe’s reach and sometimes not. But every time Sam ran past us, Zoe zoomed out to the end of the leash, jerking my arm and sometimes making me take a short, jarring run to stay on my feet. On Wednesday I let go of the leash a couple of times so she could catch Sam. So one time instead of wrestling, they simply trotted into the woods. I heard them thrashing through the leaves as they disappeared off to the north. They did not come home Wednesday evening, and so far they have not come home tonight, Thursday.

If I could have run, I might have caught them, but my running days are in the distant past. I didn’t worry too much at first since they knew their way home, especially Sam, who has lived up here five years. As it got darker and they didn’t come back, I took my truck around the top of the mountain to look for them. After dark I drove around some more. And then before I went to bed, I decided to drive further. So I spent about an hour right after midnight driving around in Texas Valley and on the other side of the mountain down to the road that leads into town. I saw a lot of deer, one coyote at our old house, and two stray dogs in Texas Valley. But not our dogs.

Thursday morning I drove the same route. Down on Huffaker Road, on the front side of the mountain, I saw someone trying to catch the two strays, who had walked probably five or six miles from where I had seen them the night before. I stopped, and it turned out it was a woman who had brought Zeke back one rainy night when he got loose. She knows the dogs, as do most of the people on the mountain and those who drive over Fouche Gap Road when I’m walking the dogs. She said she would look for them. Our neighbors said they would, too.

I am not optimistic. I’m afraid something has happened to the dogs. They would have come home if they could, so something is preventing it. I have no idea what it is. It could range from being lost at best to having been shot by someone who didn’t want them on their property at worst. Zoe was dragging her long leash when she disappeared. It’s possible she could have snagged it on something, but she has shown a tendency to chew on it, so I doubt it would take long before she chewed through it. I imagine they stayed together, at least as long as they could.

I drove more than 30 miles all around Texas Valley on Thursday afternoon. But we are in the middle of thousands of acres of forest, and there is no particular reason the dogs would be on the road at any given time. Driving around looking gives me the feeling of doing something, but I have no real expectation of finding them on the road. I walked through the woods later Thursday, following where they had disappeared, trying to see if there was some sign, but I saw nothing. I thought about looking further in the woods, but covering the areas where they might be would take me weeks, if not months. It’s not a realistic plan.

I am having some lost-dog posters printed. I will take one to animal control Friday, and I’ll post some around the mountain. Both dogs have tags with our phone number, and both are chipped. If anyone finds them it would be easy for them to contact us. I continue to hope, but deep down, I am afraid they are gone for good.

UPDATE: Sam showed up in our front yard a little after 9 pm Thursday. He ran back into the woods but eventually came out after I went in looking for him. Zoe has not shown up. From this I assume that something happened to Zoe. It does give some hope that Zoe might still be out there and might still come home.

Manmade clouds

Posted on December 30, 2019 by Mark P

We live about 70 or 80 miles northwest of the Atlanta airport, as the crow or airliner flies, so we see a fair amount of air traffic. Passenger jets are usually still pretty high when they pass over us, so we often don’t see the airplane, only the contrail.

A few days ago the conditions were right for contrails.

Sometimes if the air is dry, contrails don’t last long. If there is more humidity at airliner altitude, the fine particles in a jet engine’s exhaust can become condensation nuclei for water vapor, and the contrails grow.

We can also often see smoke clouds. When people clear land they sometimes make big piles of trees that they burn (with the appropriate permit). This was a particularly big and long-lasting burn.

The smoke from this fire did not rise to any great altitude. In fact, it brushed the ground downwind from the fire. In air pollution meteorology, this is known as fumigating. If you have ever seen what we used to call a smoke stack at a factory or coal-burning power plant, you might have noticed how tall it is. That height is a result of a calculation made by the owners. The calculation yields a stack height that will prevent regulated pollutants from reaching a prohibited concentration on the ground downwind from the stack under most atmospheric conditions. The further downwind a smoke plume goes, the more it spreads out, both vertically and horizontally. As it spreads, the plume is diluted and the concentration of pollutants decreases. So, the stack must be tall enough that the plume is diluted enough that the pollutant concentration is below regulated standards before it reaches the ground.

If there is a strong temperature inversion, the atmosphere forms a kind of cap, so sometimes a smoke plume doesn’t rise very high. In that kind of case, the plume might reach the ground before it is diluted enough. That’s fumigation, and that is apparently what happened with the fire in this photo.

Of course, the smoke from this fire didn’t get ejected from a tall stack, it just rose from the fire. The heat of the fire is often enough to get the plume high into the atmosphere to prevent what happened here. Not so this time. So people downwind from this fire probably had a pretty unpleasant day.

Or, as it turned out, an unpleasant several days. I took this photo on December 20. On the morning of December 29, the day I wrote this, there was still a little smoke coming from this fire.

I asked John, our grader neighbor, if he knew what the source might be. He thought it came from a privately-owned dump, where John disposed of the trees he took when clearing our lot. The owner piles the trees and occasionally burns them.

Anyone burning large quantities of vegetation requires a different permit from the one I get when I burn limbs I collect from our yard. Depending on certain conditions that I’m not familiar with, large-scale burning might require the use of an air curtain destructor or incinerator. This equipment is supposed to contain smoke until it is burned, which is supposed to reduce or eliminate smoke. This burn apparently did not use one.

A visit from St. Dogolas

Posted on December 25, 2019 by Mark P

Gather ‘round, doggies and kitties, it’s Christmas Eve, and time for the Christmas story of a visit from …

Well, Zoe, it looks like no one else is interested, so I’ll tell you about the visit of St. Dogolas. The story has been told many times, to the dogs and cats here today, to the dogs and cats that are no longer with us, and maybe to dogs and cats yet to come. It goes like this:

Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house

Not a creature was stirring, not even a …

Well, Zoe, you’re really supposed to be asleep, you and Sam both, but how can I tell you the story if you’re asleep?

Well, everyone seems to be asleep except me.

And you, Zoe.

Let’s forget the story. It’s late, but I’m going to stay awake to see whether St. Dogolas comes tonight, bringing doggy chews and cat treats for all the good little dogs and cats. And you can stay up, too Zoe. We’ll just wait here together to see. I’m sure he will be here tonight. He has come every other Christmas since, well, since a long time ago.

He’s chubby and plump, a right jolly old elf. I’m sure we’ll see him, if I say so myself.

Will he come to our house before we sleep? Let’s be careful and quite, not making a peep.

So he came by the house as we waited. He spoke not a word, but went straight to his work.

… laying his paws aside of his nose,
And giving a nod, up the chimney he rose;
He sprang to his sleigh, to his team gave a whistle,
And away they all flew like the down of a thistle,
But I heard him exclaim, ere he drove out of sight,