Three years ago on a sunny Labor Day afternoon, my husband, Jamie, and I decided to take a motorcycle ride. When returning home, we took an alternate route that took us down a country road alongside a lake. We always avoided taking this way as two years before my husband had struck a deer on his motorcycle that resulted in him being hospitalized for three days with three fractured ribs and a lung puncture.
We put our fears aside, as something drove us to go that way that afternoon.
We were just about at the end of the lake road that intersected with a major roadway linking country towns when I heard Jamie shout: “Hey, get out of the road, little dog, you’re going to get run over!” I immediately asked him to stop and turn around, which he did. I hopped off the motorcycle and saw the little dog heading toward the highway. I called to it, and immediately the dog crouched down as I bent over to pick it up.
The dog resembled Toto, made famous in 1930s movie “The Wizard of Oz.” I looked around to see where it might have come from, and knocked on the door of a neighboring house. No one was home. At that point, we wondered what we were going to do with the dog, since we couldn’t leave it there alongside the road; it could have been hit by a car or left to the coyotes that roamed the countryside.
After some deliberation, we decided to take it home.
Mounting the back of a motorcycle really requires a balancing act. My husband sits straddled on the bike, holding it upright as I put one hand on his shoulder and the other on the back rest, and then I’ll step on the foot peg with my left foot and swing my right leg over to straddle the seat. This was not going to be easy while trying to hold onto a dog. We thought that maybe if my husband held the dog while seated on the bike, I could try and straddle the bike like I always do. Bad idea!
As it turned out, there was a ditch that ran along the roadway that leveled out a little at the end. Jamie rolled the bike into the ditch to give me more clearance. With one leg braced against the opposite side of the ditch, he held the dog while I gingerly slid over the seat trying to keep the balance of the bike. One wrong move, and we all could have tumbled — but to our astonishment, it worked! I was finally sitting straddled on the bike. My husband passed me the dog.
Then it occurred to us that we had to somehow get out of the ditch with all three of us remaining on the bike. To this day, it’s still a blur how we made it out of the ditch. The only thing I remember is the bike slowly nudging forward and then with one gentle throttle Jamie maneuvered us out of the ditch. I think my eyes were closed through the entire process, as that’s the only thing I can remember.
I held the little dog in my left arm securely while holding onto Jamie’s waist, and the little dog kept its left paw against my husband’s shoulder. It didn’t move or flinch the entire way. We slowly made our way home, which was approximately 10 miles away. Once there, we determined the little dog was a female, which was good since we had another dog that was a male. We called her a “Lucky Lady,” since we made it home without any trouble.
We noticed right away she had a very foul odor, even though she was shaved fairly close to her skin. She wore a pink halter that was on upside down, and it was so tight and must been on for so long that we had to cut it off to give her a bath. Where the halter had been, it colored what fur she did have pink.
The next day I took her to the veterinarian for examination. I explained the odor — that I could not get rid of it. The veterinarian discovered that her ears were swollen inside, one to the point of closure. They took her back and rinsed her ears out, and informed me that there was lots of black “gunk” inside, probably due to allergies. They gave her an allergy shot and follow-up medication. The odor disappeared.
To this day you could not have asked for a better companion. We don’t know why this little dog came into our lives — not yet — but she follows me into every room, sits and waits by the door when I leave, comes and rubs up against me, looks at me with loving brown eyes, and she speaks with excitement when I come home.
My husband says perhaps it was to give her a better life. She is a Lucky Lady.
