The Fugitive of the Roundabout
In which a shock-collared dog is sighted at the roundabout, a posse is raised, and the goats are suspected of complicity.
She was first sighted at the roundabout, which is where every great drama in this neighborhood is eventually staged. A resident, visibly shaken, reported that "this dog literally almost got hit," that it wore nothing about its neck but a shock collar, and asked whether anybody knew whose dog this was.
Somebody did. Everybody did. Thirty-six comments later it had been established beyond reasonable doubt that the dog's name is Dobbs, that she lives on the farm whose fields our streets were laid upon, and that she has done this before. Many, many times before.
"I've picked Dobbs up a half a dozen times since I've lived here," testified one neighbor, in the tone of a woman who stopped counting at six only because it seemed impolite to go on. Another reported that the dog had lately been confined to the back screen porch, "and she still finds a way to get out." No screen in Sumner County, it seems, can hold her.
Some dogs are lost. Dobbs is merely elsewhere, by choice.
What followed was a manhunt of considerable scale for a dog of modest size. The Deputy announced that he was "driving around with the owner now," and asked that anyone who found her hold her and call. Sightings came in from Rockwell Drive, from Snapdragon, from Pebble Run, each one a few minutes stale, as sightings of the truly elusive always are. On an earlier evening two emissaries from the rental office had recovered the fugitive from the dog park and driven her home, only for the farm's grandson to arrive and collect her at the very same moment, like a prisoner exchanged at a border crossing.
By the following day she was out again.
The commentariat then turned, as it must, to forensics. The collar, proposed one experienced hand, often "needs a new battery." This is a theory of escape this paper finds entirely persuasive. Dobbs is not defying the fence. Dobbs has simply noticed, before anyone else, that the fence has run out of charge.
And here the investigation took a darker turn. A diligent archivist produced a post from two years ago, when "some cows were out." It was then recalled that on the eighth of this very month a resident had written, in some alarm, "Looks like their goats are out!"
The cows were a test. The goats were a rehearsal. Dobbs is the operation.
The Dispatch makes no accusation. We note only that the farm was here first; that its livestock have now breached the subdivision on at least three documented occasions; and that the subdivision's entire defense consists of a few residents with phones, a spare lead in the glovebox, and the non-emergency number. If this is a slow reconquest, it is going well.
At time of publication one resident had asked, a little plaintively, whether the dog had made it back home. She has. For now.