The escaping dog

Good news: Tock seems to be recovering from the doggy squits.  Bad news: he bolted out of the side gate when Hank was very carefully getting his bicycle out yesterday.  The crazed dog then ran across five lanes of (fortunately stationary) traffic before stopping for a pee, at which point Hank managed to grab him.

That dog can squeeze through the tiniest of spaces.  We were warned that huskies are escapologists but it was inevitable we would also find that out for ourselves.  Poor Hank must have been terrified.  If the dog had run out ten seconds later, those five lanes of traffic would have been moving very quickly.

A few days before I left DC, I was having dinner at We The Pizza on Capitol Hill with some (coincidentally dog-loving) friends.  Kosmo's dad's dog-accustomed eye spotted a mutt running across the street, across several lanes of fast-moving traffic and we all instinctively gave chase.  It transpires that the dog had squeezed out of the house of a couple who had been dog-sitting it (uh-oh), it was their BOSS's dog (UH-OH) and it was also not wearing a collar (D'OH).  Oh, and the escape artist was from Baltimore, meaning there was little chance of finding it sitting patiently on its owner's doorstep the next morning.

We sprinted on (at times like this I realise I really must do more cardio) and we caught sight of the dog again at Lincoln Dog Park about twenty minutes later.  But the crazy animal took off again and was lost for the night.

We wandered the streets until nearly midnight like a band of vigilantes, pockets full of dog treats, me rattling Tock's large chewing bone and Hank optimistically walking Tock alongside us (hey, maybe Tock could get in a fight with that missing dog just long enough for us to tie a collar around its neck?) But we found nothing.

In the end it was not the ability to entice or run after the missing dog which recovered him.  It was the insight and quick thinking of Kosmo's mum.  After the search team had gone to bed with heavy hearts, she posted the missing dog's description and the dog sitter's cell phone number on a local ListServ; when the sitters resumed their search at dawn, they started to receive calls from people who had recently spotted the missing hound on such-and-such a street.  A stream of real-time intelligence led them to the dog, who they eventually cornered in an alleyway.  So the hero of the day was Kosmo's mum; not much of a runner, but the most effective dog catcher on the block.