This is a story about attempted escape, potential conspiracy, intrigue, and finally freezing, shit-footed justice. Strap in, folks. Grab some popcorn.
Picture the scene. It is Christmas in upstate New York, and I am staying at my parents’ house with my wife Randi and our dog Steve (pictured at top right). My parents have a large black lab named Coal, and he and Steve constantly run around the backyard without incident. But Christmas night was a bit different.
My parents had gone to bed, and I was about to do the same. Randi was on a couch downstairs, and I took the dog out to….you know.
a. The Setup
As I let him out on the porch, he walked down the steps and immediately peed.
b. Making a Break for it
Steven then sprinted to the far right corner of the yard. Originally I thought that he was trying to get rid of some of the ham he’d eaten, but after yelling his name, whistling, and snapping, I realized that poster of Rita Hayworth was part of his escape plan.
As you can see, my parents have a pool, and the area around and leading up to said pool is concrete. Since I was in shorts and a tee shirt, barefoot, and it was almost midnight on Christmas, I ran down the path to see where he was. It’s hard to see in the above picture, but the letter “b” is resting on a fence. When I got to the fence, I could hear his tags jingling, but couldn’t see him. I knew he’d escaped.
I had some choices. I could jump the fence and try to find him, or I could wake Randi up, knowing that he always responds to her voice.
I woke up Randi.
We both ran outside, barefoot, and I pointed her to “c”, a gate on the fence. We both ran to the gate and yelled for Steve, and because it was her yelling, he ran over to us. We apprehended the escapee. But the story isn’t over.
Earlier I mentioned that my parents have a big black lab. Well, big black labs leave very large, um, deposits on a lawn. And they freeze and become very hard. Randi and I ran about 15 yards through a minefield of frozen dog shit in our bare feet to get our stupid escape artist Corgi that night.
We then had to go into the house, stand the bathtub to wash dog shit off of our feet at 12:15 all while being quiet to make sure we didn’t wake my mom who had to work the next morning.
Of course, the dog was smiling the whole time.
After interrogation, we came up with a couple of scenarios to explain the escape:
1. Steve planned to escape and then run away with Randi. See, he was the only one that forbid our wedding, as Steve wanted to marry Randi. In fact, in his Christmas card to Randi, he photoshopped my head out of one of our wedding pictures and added his own:
2. He’d been planning his escape the whole time. The entire time he was outside running around with Coal, he’d been looking for weaknesses in the perimeter fence. Though he’d found the perfect escape route, he wanted to wait for the cover of night to make his move. He knew that his night vision was better than ours, and he took advantage of the mismatch.
3. He saw an animal, and took off after it. Steve firmly believes that if he was off leash, he could catch any squirrel regardless of whether the squirrel was up a tree. This was his big chance, so he had to take it.
I’m not sure what story to believe, but we’ll be sending our reports to the disciplinary committee and he’ll likely spend some time in seg-u.
