Just a little mite...

Sunday J, Cliff and I went out for an easy 45 miles to Ashland and back. J, my resident bird authority was the first to see the juvie eagles and gets the gold star for the day. Every ride with her is an education, as she can hear birds, tell you what they are, where they live, and all that fun stuff. In the summer, we'll go by a field and all of the sudden I hear her say, "Grasshopper sparrow," and by osmosis I've learned birds while riding.

Unfortunately, I've also gotten to practice my home grown emergency vet technique far to often while riding. I've patched together a lot of dogs while waiting for either their owner's or animal control to come. Some make it, some don't. All of them steal a little piece of my heart. Sometimes owners thank me, more often they don't. It's one of those nasty facts of life I've had to learn to accept.

Cliff and I found a puppy in a ditch a few summers ago. We called animal control, but their eta was about 3 hours, and the little guy was starving. So Cliff left me to go try to scare up some food. People rode by me, and some stopped to tell me that they had seen him in the ditch for a week. Really? And you didn't stop to free him?

Sunday, we were accosted by a ferocious little dachshund. She chased Cliff and then got confused when she saw me. So I turned the bike around to herd her back to what I hoped was her home. She promptly flung herself on the pavement and rolled over. When I stopped, she crawled to me and licked my hand. Then she decided we were best friends in another life and proceeded to go into ecstatic moans and slurps as we got reacquainted.

I asked the neighbors and they told me that "oh, she's fine, she's in the road all the time." So the rest of the day, I had to wonder about this little mite, with the coy eyes, and friendly attitude, and how long it will be before she meets a bad end. And then I took my 3 guys out to their acre sized dog yard, with 4' tall goat fencing to play with them. You can't save them all on a bike ride, but sometimes, little mites find their way to Camp Runamuck. We'll just have to wait and see...