Quote:
Originally Posted by Deserve
I have to say this is the first time that I've heard a story like this with a happy ending. Go to church or by a lottery ticket.
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Good idea.
Alright, the full version...
Friday, Toby ate some supplements of my mom's, but then barfed them up, so I figured he was ok because he had puked (advice is to get him to puke, and he did it on his own. And it wasn't anything that would have seriously hurt him) Well, he had the squirts the whole weekend, and got a bath on Sunday because he exploded all over his crate Saturday night. He was feeling puny on Monday too, and was just lounging around all morning.
He needed to piss about noon, and I went out to get the mail, and he does his thing and I get the mail. My neighbor is driving down the street, and she slows down to wave/turn into her driveway, as they live caddy-corner from us. I don't know if Toby sees a squirrel or what across the street--he was just hanging out by the planterbox in front--and inexplicably sprints INTO the truck. Not in front of it. Into it.
He gets hit by the right rear wheel, but it's a small truck and she was going slow enough that the tire just bounced him and flipped him over instead of running him over. I saw it happen and absolutely panicked, screaming and throwing the mail in the air as it happened. (I wish I could block that out from memory) He pops back to his feet, and the hit combined with my scream I think scares the shit out of him--well, he did shit when he got hit...--and he takes off.
Where he takes off to is the normal loop around my neighbor's house, because the house two down from us is where the kids and dog that he loves live, so I figure he'd come back. But I chased after him anyway because I feared that he may be hurt because of the impact.
(the bath part is important because I hadn't put his tags back on him yet because he likes having them off and he was feeling crappy, so he didn't venture when he went outside. He had been doing his business and going back to the door)
I took off south, and didn't see him. He wasn't in my yard, or my aunt's yard, or any of my neighbor's yards. (this makes sense if you were hanging out in the backyard at the summit) So I took off south behind my house to the property that's owned by the seminary two blocks south.
I couldn't find him there, so I grabbed my brother and my aunt and put some shoes on and we started taking off through the neighborhood to no avail.
The lady that hit him got her other car and started driving around, and stopped the mailman on the main thoroughfare that our street connects to just west of our house. He said that he had almost hit Toby--he knew him--and that Toby was running west, so she told my brother and he took off to the grocery store just west.
In the parking lot of the grocery store and shopping center, he found two guys in an electrical truck that said that they saw Toby running west past the grocery store and along the street that heads west just north of the grocery store, also another busy thoroughfare.
I have no idea that he took off there, so I started searching the ravines behind the shopping center. After an hour or so of running around searching for him--I was shirtless, so the looks that I got going into car dealerships and businesses all sweaty were priceless. I immediately said that I lost my dog, and that softened their faces considerably, but you'd have thought I was robbing the place--one of the guys from a car dealership who had gone out to look for him brought me home and I put a shirt on and jumped in my truck.
Still nothing, and by this time it was about 2:30, so I made a flyer and made some copies and started to post them as we were searching. We just knew that he went west, but not how far.
The main thoroughfare that he ran west on--Englewood--goes under a highway about a mile from my house, so I figured that he wasn't going to get that far, but who knew? We searched the apartments at the corner of Englewood and the highway, as well as the shops right there and everything we could think of.
That night, a friend told us that she had seen him in a ravine at the intersection of the highway and Englewood a few hours earlier, so we ran down there to no avail about 8:30. (by that time we had posted about 80 flyers)
So the next day, we searched all day and posted more flyers, this time going west of the highway just in case. Still nothing.
Wednesday, we got our second tip from a guy who said he had seen Toby at the same spot that he was seen on Monday, but he didn't realize he was lost until he saw the sign at the grocery store and when he went back there he was gone. And someone at the pizza place there said that he had seen Toby in that same spot Tuesday.
So we made the decision to stake out the ravine on Wednesday evening. During the day, the office that abuts the ravine was very nice to us, and they had food near their windows and we gave them his toys, and they were going to watch for him and try to lure him into the office. But about 7 Wednesday night, it started to storm--the second storm in as many nights--so our stakeout got cut short.
At home, we figured that we should stake it out from dawn-to-dusk on Thursday, because we figured he had to go back there at some point if he'd been there all three days. (we had calls in to all the vets north of the river and had visited the two main animal shelters to no avail, as well as called other outlying ones in case that he had been taken there)
I got there at 5:30, and stayed until 9:30 when I went out with a friend to see if we could find him driving around. We drove around for a couple hours and found nothing, while we took turns watching the ravine. I went home at noon to take a nap--I was freaking wiped out both emotionally and physically. I couldn't eat and all I did was search and sleep--before I checked the pet sites and made another shelter trip that afternoon.
I found a lead on a pet site of a found lab mix who was black, a male, and a friendly puppy at the downtown airport, which was 2-3 miles down the highway from the intersection. It was feasible--ridiculous, but feasible--and the description matched him to a T, so I emailed the poster for more specifics.
As I was emailing back and forth with her (this was about 1:30) I got a call from a guy at the grocery store saying that he thought his stepson had found our dog and that he was going back to where his stepson was.
The stepson was west of the highway on Englewood road riding his bike and had found Toby, who was just chilling in the grass because he was tired. At that time, my brother was at the ravine, which was maybe 300 yards away from where Toby was found, so he sprinted down there, and sure enough, it was him.
We immediately took him to the vet, and he's got some bad blisters on his feet and some road rash on his belly and was obviously dehydrated. He had lost about 3 lbs (he was down to 42) but otherwise was in good health. He has to take pills for the rash and in case he got some sort of something from rummaging through God-knows-what and has to have ointment on his feet and wear socks, but is otherwise a-ok.
It's pretty unbelievable, and I am soooooo glad that it's over. It was a crazy, tense and bizarre four days. I'm glad life is back to normal somewhat.
And I have a dog that's alive and in one piece.