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had we not had a tracker on him
Monday, November 28 2016
This morning Gretchen took the dogs on their normal walk and all seemed to go well from her perspective. She went south down the Stick Trail and then cut over to the Farm Road via the Chamomile Headwaters Trail, and Ramona stuck with her for the entire walk. Neville, however, disappeared near where Gretchen turned onto the Chamomile Headwaters Trail. She didn't think anything of it, but I was watching remotely using the Whistle web app, which logs position data from Neville's GPS-and-cellular-transmitter-equipped collar. According to my tracking, he went off across the Valley of the Beasts (to the east), returned to the Stick Trail, and started heading for home on his own. But then he suddenly and dramatically headed down the Chamomile ravine, and his GPS dot showed him actually on Dug Hill Road just above the bus turn-around. It being hunting season, hunters tend to congregate down there, and when they're drunk and bored there's no telling what they'll shoot. Then there was the matter of the road. If he hadn't learned his lesson from the time he was hit by a car, that was a not an especially good stretch of road to be standing in. Three minutes later, the next update showed Neville still on the road, maybe 50 feet downhill from where he'd been. That wasn't very far to have moved in three minutes. At about this time, Gretchen and Ramona were returning from the walk. I loaded Ramona up in the Prius and drove down to the bus turn-around. But when I got there, Neville was nowhere in sight, and he didn't respond to my calls. So I went back home. Whistle now showed him quickly coming homeward through the forest. When he arrived, he was completely normal. Had we not had a tracker on him, we wouldn't've had any idea of his adventure, and we wouldn't've worried at all.
Neville's adventures today, as tracked by his collar, ending with him very close to home. The tracker indicates Neville actually crossed Dug Hill Road, though GPS is inaccurate enough for that not to have been the case. It seems more likely that he got to the road and decided, due to his recent bad experience with crossing a road, not to go into it.
I tend to eat burritos the day after I make a pot of chili, and today was no different. Unfortunately, we're out of sour cream (the vegan kind, of course), though it's not as important to me as it is to others.
Tonight after Gretchen went to bed, the dogs kept getting worked up about things they heard outside. Several times Gretchen heard some crazy dog out there that may have been a coyote, though it was also possibly that creepy little yappy dog that's been heard down at our downhill neighbors' place. In any case, Ramona eventually disappeared for what seemed like a large chunk of the night. Gretchen became worried and went out to call for her, but Ramona didn't respond. It turned out that Ramona had been on the green carpet in the first floor office the whole time with an uneaten dead rabbit. When Gretchen saw this, she was horrified of course, but not in the way that Ramona had feared. Ramona was shivering, apparently nervous that whatever she'd done with this rabbit (either killing it, which seemed unlikely, or bringing it into the house) would make us angry. Gretchen threw the rabbit off the east deck (it was still limp) and eventually called Ramona upstairs to bed. And once Ramona learned she wasn't in trouble, she quickly returned to normal. She didn't even seem to miss the rabbit, which by now she might've regarded as a more of a curse than a blessing. But when she eventually finds it again down in the brambles, you can be sure she won't be sharing it with Neville.
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