Tuesday November 10, 2009
The Raz
Raz at almost eleven months

He has his good moments and he has his bad moments and we probably wouldn't notice the bad ones so much if we weren't also raising a 2yr old kid at the same time. Still, he's a high energy dog and really likes to be the center of attention. When Zane and Raz are in the same room it's like a contest to see who can be the craziest and chew the most stuff up. Raz usually wins.

I lost him last month during one of our noon time hikes. About a mile into the woods he went zipping off and I didn't think anything of it. A minute later when he still hadn't caught up I started calling to him and backtracking. Nothing. Back and forth over the trail, yelling, and whistling for about a half hour and nothing. Thinking he may have headed off an a bush-whacking trail we'd taken a week earlier I started heading out that direction, but after ten minutes remembered that I didn't have the iPhone: so no GPS or Phone in case I got lost. Turned back, calling him the whole way, and went back to trailhead. Nothing. Drove to a couple other trailheads (it's a large area) and nothing. Picked up iPhone and as I pulled into the trailhead parking lot I looked up to see him standing across the road... "What???" he seemed to say.

A week later we were hiking in another section of the woods and ran across a backwoods jogger. He asked, "Hey, did you lose this dog last week?" Turns out he was Mt. Biking with friends and Raz came running up to them. From his description it sounded like I hadn't lost Raz back where I'd last saw him, but instead he'd gone the long way around a swamp I'd hiked by and continued on the trail hoping to find me. The biker said he was pretty frantic and finished with, what I thought, a great question: "What should I do with him next time we find him?"

Believe it or not I didn't say "keep him!"

Raz standing in woods
phil • 2009-11-10 03:03pm

What did you say?