Hero

My life has gone to the dogs lately.
If you're a Facebook friend, you'll see why.
I put pictures of my dogs on FB instead of pictures of me. That's because some P.I.'s...
myself included.... prefer visual privacy/invisibility.

Even though I am on the net, easy to reach...
when afforded the opportunity to fly under the radar, I will generally choose that option.

Celebrity doesn't interest this P.I.
The secrets do.
That's why I lurk in the shadow lands of cyberspace.
And why I make a dog I rescued from a pit bull fighting ring.... his name is Bubba... the focus of my pictures on my Facebook wall.
Bubba's fate was to be pit bull bait until I and/or or a higher power, intervened.

So I have been on the road with Bubba a long time these past few days working cases.
He's happy to travel with me every day as I go to and from locations all over western Washington.
My gas guzzling Chevy Trailblazer is like one big playground for Bubba.
When we go through the  ferry line, espresso stands and the bank drive-thrus, the clerks usually toss Bubba a dog cookie or a piece of their lunch when he bats his bushy brows at them.
In between cases, the GPS directs us to local parks. When free of crack heads, lunatics and pitbulls, we take walks.

 Bubba is also my early warning invasion detection system... a loud bark backed by a series of shorter and repeated barks as he spies a potentially dangerous advance on our locked, parked, tinted vehicle.... while I am looking elsewhere or writing up case notes in a neighborhood people like me do not belong in unless we're working.

So I want to tell you a dog story today.
I promise to be brief because I have very few words left in me at the moment.
I was in a hardware store in the town of Sequim, getting a  rare kind of door lock, when I met an elderly man who told me a story about a dog.
The man his wife (the wife was in the car while we were talking) built a home in the boonies.
It was their dream home.... a log cabin.... in a remote location and they built it over the years with their own hands.
They never met their neighbors, the houses were separated by patches of thick woods and long dirt drives with locked and gates fences.
People who live in  places like this deliberately want to be away from others.

So this man and his wife had noticed a bedraggled dog --  a Black Lab adult male, very thin, very friendly -- greet them their second visit to their property.  The dog stayed out with them every visit after that, all the while they built the house. Even after it went up.

The dog hung around if they hung around on weekends. While they assumed it was a neighbors dog, it always appeared hungry when they arrived and it stayed outside at night, sleeping by their ten door, then curled up by their back door at night on a blanket they provided while they slept inside.

"Of course we fed and watered him," the man said. "It was the right thing to do."

One day.... the man said as he told me this story in the hardware store... he was cleaning out a big fish pond in his back yard. He hadn't seen the dog all morning, he said.
The man tripped over a rock, fell face first in the water and broke his neck.
So he was unable to lift his own head up to breathe and was literally drowning in the fish pond.

He said he believed he was a goner.
His wife was in the house, there was no one there.
He started to black out when he felt something grab his belt and then felt himself being pulled out of the water. The dog continued to drag him a few more feet, then more feet, all the way into a level ground.. The dog licked his face, and turned the man's head with his nose. The man spit water everywhere then discovered he could breathe through his nose. But he could not move his body.

The dog then sat beside the man  and barked steadily until the man's wife came running.
911 was right behind.
The man lived, his neck healed and the dog stayed with them.
The man in and his wife took the Lab in, named him Hero.
There were no missing dog signs, no one ever came looking for Hero.
And Hero never slept outside another night unless they all went camping.

After I heard this story in the hardware store, I followed the man out to meet his wife and Hero, in the backseat of  the man's Jeep.
If I hadn't known Hero's story he would have been just another dog.

Yet if it hadn't been for Hero.... the man I was talking to would no longer have existed.
He would have been just another statistic of a tragic accident.
While his wife would have been just another widow.

Lesson learned from this amazing yet true story?
Miraculous things happen every day in the insane world of ours.
Look for those miracles.
Many of them arrive in animal form.