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Thursday, February 22, 2018

Lucky Certainly Was



Lucky, shortly after she joined our hilltop menagerie.


Lucky today.  She's grown a little, but not too much.

Living in the country, several miles from any town, we see the occasional pet that gets abandoned along our road. Lucky was one of the drop-off dogs.

A few months ago, our hired man came roaring up the drive on our neighbor's quad.  Working for the neighbor that day, he saw his dogs attacking a small black dog.  He yelled at the bigger dogs, then grabbed up this frightened little dog.

She didn't appear to be badly injured, though she did have a canine tooth hole in her back right leg.  He handed the dog to my wife. "Can you take care of this little one.  The neighbor's dogs attacked her. I had to get her out of there."

My wife, Sharon, is a Registered Nurse.  Her occupation has been taking care of sick and injured people, so caring for a small frightened dog was certainly something she knew how to do.

We put the shivering little dog in our kennel to contain her, and so our dogs wouldn't frighten her, though we were sure they wouldn't hurt her.

The next day she visited our vet. We learned the wound on her leg wasn't at all serious, and she didn't have a chip so there was no way to tell where she came from.  The vet said she was two or three years old, and in good health.

It was soon apparent we had expanded out hilltop by one more. She was a gentle and loving dog, and fit into the family easily. We decided an appropriate name should be Lucky, for she had the tremendous good fortune to land in our kennel. We didn't know just how lucky she really was though.

As she became acclimated to our hilltop, she began eating well and gaining weight. One day, after having been gone a few days, I was startled to see the size of Lucky's tummy. "Sharon, you've gotta stop feeding this little dog so well.  She's getting huge."

Uh oh, that's puppies, not from good meals.  Back to the vet for a pregnancy test, then an x-ray to see how many fetus there were.  This tiny dog had eight babies, and they seemed to be growing at a prodigious rate.

We had to assume Lucky had been bred by a large dog. Knowing there was a difficult, if not impossible delivery in the offing, she'd been dumped along our road by her original owners.  It wasn't medically practical to let her carry them to term, nor to let her deliver them, so she was quickly spayed.

Today, Lucky has joined our hilltop, giving Tinker Bell our chihuahua, and Beau our aging boxer, company.  Tinker and Lucky love to chase the rabbits and squirrels.  But Lucky is amazingly fast.  We're pretty sure she is at least part Jack Russell Terrier.

And of course, Tinker and Lucky sleep on the bed with us, burrowing under the covers for comfort.  Beau crawls up there some nights, but usually sleeps on a pad in front of the closet.

Somehow, Lucky doesn't seem quite sufficient, but Unbelievably Fortunate doesn't fit on a name tag well.


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