She Brought Me Her Worst Born
Posted By Randy on July 11, 2010
Once upon a time my business included operation of the dispatch centre that handled calls for the Lunenburg-Mahone Bay Police Service and five Lunenburg County fire departments. A regular event was somebody losing track of their dog, or someone calling in to report that they had a stray in their possession. The logistics of these calls led me to the decision to have them brought to me for assessment and then, if the dog in question wasn’t unmanageably aggressive or in need of veterinary care, I would take them in and hold them for 24 hours pending the owner turning up. After 24 hours the plan was for the dog to be transported to the SHAID animal shelter but in the end that only ever happened once. In every other case the owner called, could positively ID their dog, and a reunion was orchestrated without delay.
One of those calls marked the start of a lengthy relationship between me and a promiscuous mutt named Shadow. We met while I was working a shift as Duty Dispatcher, through a phone call to the police from an exasperated man who lived on the third floor of an apartment building in downtown Lunenburg. As soon as I picked up the phone, and before the caller even started speaking, I could hear a loud chorus of yowling that, as it turned out, was coming from a dog that had climbed the fire escape to his door, and was now demanding that she be let inside. The man told me that his prowler was a female black Labrador Retriever type dog that he believed had recently had puppies because her teats were quite prominently pendulous. He said he liked dogs but couldn’t let her in because he had two cats of his own. I dispatched a unit and, within ten minutes, met Shadow for the first time.
She smelled like low tide, was wearing a grungy leather collar with out of date Municipality of Lunenburg tags, and wanted me to wear her for a hat. Full body wagging coupled with excited, non-stop vocalization that ran the full range from howling to high pitched yipping – she was one excited girl! It took a while before she came to realize that I was not going to permit her to climb up one side of me and down the other, but even after she calmed down, any attention I gave her started her ramping up again. My own dogs, of which I had three at the time, thought she was nuts.
This all happened on a weekend evening, so consulting anyone at the offices of the Municipality of the District of Lunenburg that had access to their dog license records wasn’t an option. Luckily though, the Town of Lunenburg bylaw enforcement guy thought he recognized Shadow – whose name I did not yet know – as belonging to a couple that lived in the First Peninsula area which is a rural and farming community just across the Back Harbour from Lunenburg. While close to the town, this was still quite a yomp for a dog to make just to molest some poor bugger on the third floor of a downtown apartment building. Anyway, I started calling the people involved, finally made contact, and learned that yes, this was their dog and yes, she was a mother of five. I learned her name was Shadow and arrangements were made for her to be picked up when the wife of the owning couple got off work at one of the local grocery stores.
About two weeks later, Shadow was found rummaging around the compost bin around back of Lunenburg’s Knot Pub. When she saw the police car this time she ran up to it, body wagging and yowling, and all but threw herself into the back seat as soon as the door was opened. Stopped at the end of my driveway, she saw me walking toward the car with a leash and REALLY went crazy! It was like old home week for her. Two things were obvious – she was very happy to see me, and she couldn’t express it enough! I took her in, reintroduced her to my Pack, and notified the owners who, as before, picked her up after work.
A little over a month went by. Then one afternoon I heard my dogs barking at something and looked out the window from which vantage I could see the interior of my fully fenced yard. They were all clustered around the gate barking, wagging tails, and sniffing at a black dog that was giving them the same treatment. You guessed it – Shadow was back, but this time she had obviously decided to bypass the middle man and come straight to my door. I had a long talk with the owners before giving her back. While Shadow showed no signs of being fearful of them, I was beginning to think she was running away from something. We talked about her litter of pups and I learned that of the five in the litter, three were still in their possession but looking for homes. I made spaying Shadow a condition of her return and, to their credit, they honoured the deal. I also came to know that the wife’s mother was left in charge of the dogs and the two children of the family while the couple were at work, and that Shadow was quite a bit smarter than she was.
One evening about a week later, I had just let my dogs out to pee when I heard the usual welcome chorus. Sure enough, Shadow had returned, but with a difference. Her usual mode was to launch herself through the gate as soon as I opened it and greet me with her customary enthusiasm, but this time she stayed outside the open gate and stood looking at me wagging her whole body, ears down, eyes a bit squinted. Instead of entering the yard she turned away from the gate and approached the green compost cart at the base of the driveway where she then stood alternately looking at something that was behind it and then back to me. I came out of the gate and walked over to see what she was trying to show me and discovered a skinny white puppy, quivering in confused fear at my sudden appearance. He made no attempt to escape as I picked him up and, as soon as I did, Shadow ran happily to the gate as though a weight had lifted from her mind and began leaping about wanting to be let in. It was business as usual.
During that visit Shadow gave her puppy every indication that he was now my puppy. A deal was struck with the owners for me to adopt him and I named him Dusty. He’s 13 now, still going strong, and the memory of how he got here, the trust that Shadow put in me, still brings tears to my eyes.
Shadow continued with her social calls every few weeks, and it became less a question of her running away from something than it was of her running toward something. She simply wanted some Randy time. By this point her owners and I knew each other well and I began to allow her to stay overnight. The following morning she would happily jump in with whichever family member came to pick her up and we’d be good for another three or four weeks.
On 21 January 1999 I was working a dispatch shift when calls began coming in that two dogs had fallen through the ice on Lunenburg’s Back Harbour, the body of water that separates the community of First Peninsula where Shadow lived from the Town of Lunenburg itself. Pete and Martha, the two of Shadow’s pups that still lived in the same house with her, had nearly made it across the ice when Pete went in. Witnesses reported that Martha stayed with him, circling as he struggled to get out and barking excitedly at people on the shore until she herself slipped in. This story was related in detail in my article on the Golden Mountain Dog Solutions blog titled A Blast From the Past so I’ll leave you to follow that link and refrain from expounding on it here except to say that Pete and Martha were the only dogs I helped in those days that ever went promptly to the SHAID shelter, and their rescue marked the first ever operational deployment of the Lunenburg Fire Department’s brand new “Rescue Alive” sled. Finding them lovable and happy during their recovery stay at my house, it came as no surprise to me that they weren’t at SHAID long before being adopted.
In March of 1999 I bought a house smack in the middle of Old Town Lunenburg, about five blocks away from my previous residence – the one Shadow knew so well. It took her until June but one afternoon I heard a racket out by my front gate and there was Shadow, obviously delighted to have found me. From that point, her regular visits continued. As with the previous place, my office/dispatch centre was still attached to my residence so there were staff present 24/7. Dog savvy was part of their training and everybody came to enjoy her seemingly inevitable visits.
A little over a year later, Shadow’s family moved further away from Lunenburg and her visits stopped. I never saw her again, but her legacy lives on in the LFM Pack as Dusty – once the runt of her litter, now a runt no longer. A treasured gift forever.
I remember when good old Dusty was dropped off. He was such a fun loving and devilish little pup all rolled into one. I got many kisses from him, it was as if he just couldn’t give enough.
I recall one of the times that Shadow stopped by she went and ate every morsel of dog food and promptly took one of the biggest dumps I had ever seen in the middle of the office. LOL!
Ah, those were the days Randy!
Man, if I only had a buck for every time I wanted to take a huge dump in the middle of that office.
[…] as one who has been professionally involved in the enforcement of animal welfare laws, and who is still professionally involved in rehabilitating dogs and training their owners to […]
Great story. I swear dogs know and see things that we cannot. They are better than us.
You nailed it Gary. It’s said that, if people were birds, only a very few would be smart enough to be crows. I think something similar can be said of dogs – only a very few people have the sensitivity, the innate decency, and capacity for steadfast loyalty to be dogs.
[…] Dusty frisking in the snow. In the time since this picture was taken, Dusty has slowed down a lot. It’s a bittersweet thought to realize he probably will not see another summer. […]
[…] written of Dusty at length in my 11 July 2010 article called She Brought Me Her Worst Born, and if you haven’t read it, then I invite you to do that now. There, I told the story of how […]