Saturday, July 22, 2006

Taylor the Blunder Dog

The thunder chased our dog Taylor in just before lunch today. You could hear it rumbling in from the northwest. She came rumbling in from the east (Jilda's brother Ricky's house). Our house shook when she hit the porch. In fact, I'm convinced that the U.S. earthquake tracking system can actually measure her movements on the equipment in New Mexico.
She wasn't always "large". She was a scrawny dog when I found her starving at a roadside dump a few years ago. We nursed her to health and she was fine. However last summer she came up missing one day. This, by itself was not that unusual, because she had wandered off in the past chasing deer or the less popular skunk.
After two days, we became concerned. We looked every where for her but she was not to be found. We had to go out of town for a few days so we asked our niece Samantha to feed her when she came up. We expected to see her when we returned, but she was not there. It was almost dark but we got out and called for hours.
The next day the temperature was close to a hundred degrees and I began thinking that she was gone forever but I decided to walk one more time down the road towards the barn. About halfway down I heard a muffled sound coming from somewhere down in the hollow. It was a pitiful sound and I had no idea what it was. I walked toward the sound and came up on her. She was barely alive. She was stuck in a rabbit hole with the only her hind legs and her tail sticking out. I tried to pull her free, but the hole had partially collapsed and she was stuck big time. I ran back home and got a shovel to help free her from the hole.
When I dug her out, she was so weak that she could not walk by herself. I picked her up and carried her home. She was so badly dehydrated that she couldn't eat or drink. Jilda gave her gatoraid with a medicine syringe. We called the vet and she told us to try to get water down her.
Slowly, over the next several days, she recovered andbegan to eat. Slowly at first bu then she began eating everything in sight. She hasn't slowed down since then. She went from about 45 pounds to 90 pounds.
She's not the smartest tool in the shed, but I love Taylor the Blunder Dog just the same.

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