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| Lou's dog as a pup |
The glasshouse across the road is not usually of any great interest to anyone - it’s fairly nondescript and has nothing in it but a stack of straw bales - but it was the scene of a minor miracle recently.
My neighbour Lou, has a very old dog named Gail, who, when her master is away white baiting, sits patiently on the front lawn waiting for his return.
8 weeks ago, Lou came home from a day on the river to discover that Gail had gone. He and his wife searched and searched, thinking the 17 year old dog had wandered off to die under a shrub somewhere. Everyone in the neighbourhood joined in the search which lasted several days, but there was no sign of Gail. Until today, when my son Adam, hauling open the jammed door of the glasshouse in question to get some straw to mulch his newest potato bed, was able to confirm the whereabouts of the dog - and she was alive! Somewhat subdued and very thin, but alive! What she’d eaten during her incarceration, we can only guess - mice? moths? sprouting barley? Luckily for her, there was a sizable hole in the roof to let in the rain and she must have kept hydrated by sucking on wet straw. She been in the glasshouse for 8 weeks, a period that included the huge spring snowfall that brought so much devastation to the farmers of Southland and hadn’t made a sound, or at least sounds loud enough to alert the neighbourhood. The owners of the glasshouse certainly couldn’t hear her - they were away in the U.K. the whole time.
Gail is at home now, having her first bowl of mince for 8 weeks and perhaps reminiscing about her imprisonment, though from the happy look on her face, I’d say she’s forgotten it already.
5 comments:
I wonder if a human would have had the same power of will. I would love to see before & after photos.
A human would have kicked in one of the panels and escaped Bio :-)
I suspect we are so soft that one night in the snow would do us in.
Quite a tough dog that one!
A teenager would have died when their cell phone ran out of juice.
The will to live diminishes rapidly when they can't text.
To think of all the hot drinks we were sinking during that snow haha! Would have been a great opportunity to retrain her onto a vegetarian diet - she would've eaten anything.
We are wondering why there was no doggy-doo in the glasshouse Nick None at all!
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