Wild Dogs

Somehow early mornings have the capability of escalating to craziness quicker than any other time of day. Maybe it's the groggy stage of mind, before a good cup of coffee or warm eggnog chai has hit the blood stream. Maybe it's just me. Perhaps you remember the dive bombing killer bats, if not, please refresh your memory, it's a worthwhile read: Bats & the Bees. Well, this morning is another morning to go down in the books as a bit crazy.

It snowed this past weekend. A whole whomping 3 inches. Not a huge deal, but the Hubs had to go do some snow removal which means a 4:30am alarm. I heard him get up, make some coffee and for some reason, Remington started barking. Yes, he's a dog and I know that's the normal sound that dogs make. However, our dog doesn't bark. If he's frustrated or sad, then he will. Not when he wakes up in the morning and is hanging out with the Hubs in the kitchen. I heard the Hubs take Remy outside. Exactly 5.7 seconds later, the door opens and slams shut again. I thought to myself, "Wow, Remy must have gone to the bathroom quick...." Silly me.... A couple of seconds later, I heard the Hubs yell my name.

Let explain something about my husband. There are different tones of voice that the Hubs uses. Yelling at now 4:35am generally means, get your butt out of bed, get your butt dressed and get your butt out here. Point taken. I have never - literally never - flown out of bed so quickly. I ran to the kitchen, were the Hubs quickly explained that when he had taken Remington outside, he'd heard coyotes around the house. [Quick side note - we have at least 2 active coyote dens in our 200+ acre backyard. Coyotes are normal, but not that close to the house.] So, he thought coyotes were outside, but he was wrong. They were dogs. I'm sorry, what? Coyotes are one thing, simply because they generally spook easily and you can run them off. Dogs are a whole different ball game considering that they are generally used to people, are territorial and not afraid to attack. So, we had two dogs running around our house.

At this point, I'm picturing all of us not leaving the house, being held hostage by two wild dogs who are ready to eat us at a moment's notice. I apparently had forgotten the get dressed part when the Hubs had yelled at me from the kitchen so I ran back to the room- dressing for battle. I ran past the front living room window on the way to our room and one of the dog's beady eyes caught my attention and scared the living daylights out of me. I may or may not have had a wee, tiny panic attack as I got dressed.

Dressed and ready for however we were going to handle this. I turned on the front porch light and saw the two dogs. They were beautiful, with huge brown eyes and long furry coats. Obviously hunting dogs, they both had orange and leather hunting collars on. Both of their tales were hiding between their back legs and they were scared out of their minds. Their paws were coated with chunks of ice and dirt. Their furry coats were matted with dirt and burrs. They were the least scary dogs I could image and instantly I switched into animal rescue mode and wanted to just give them a warm bath and feed them.

Thanks to Remington, being our first dog ever, we have at least 2 of everything. We grabbed our 2 leashes and tried to coax them to the back of the house so we could catch them. They refused to leave the front porch. So we went to them and they came up to us right way, so happy to see us. Catching them took absolutely no effort as we just walked up and attached the leash. We also have 2 kennels (well actually 3, but we only needed 2 this morning). We put both kennels in the mudroom and put the dogs inside. Instantly, they laid down and relaxed. Too exhausted to care and too tired of being scared, they laid down. On their collars we found the name and number of their owner. At 4:50 (the earliest I have ever made a phone call), I called their owner who answered on the first ring.

Come to find out... the dogs had run away at 10pm last night and their owner had given up searching at 1am. He lives at least 5 miles away from us and they had wandered all the way to our house. He had special ordered these prime hunting dogs, Long-haired German Pointers, from Michigan and there are only 400 of this breed in the entire USA. He came and picked them up 30 minutes later, so grateful that they had ended up with us.

Welcome Monday. I've been up for 3 and 1/2 hours and it's just past 8am. Let's see what else you have in store for us!

Hope you have a great Monday!

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