jdmklein | Max's story

Max lost us this afternoon out in the desert.

That old saying about the color of the roof of a dog's mouth being an indicator of the animal's intellligence has not yet met Max.

We took him for his run. He snubbed the camels royally. We stopped so he could drink several times during the run. We checked his tongue to make sure he wasn't overheating.

We parked the car and put water out beside it for Max and began our leg of the daily trek. Max started to follow but got side-tracked by something interesting in the sand. Master and i continued our walk. We reasoned that as long as Max could see us, and we him there was no need for him to stay close to us. And we were doing a huge circle kind of thing so we were never more than about 400 meters away from him at any time.

We got our first 20 minutes out of the way and were on the opposite side of our circle when Max tired of whatever it was in the sand. While we were walking, Max often looked up to find us. He has horrid abandonment issues. When it was time for him to come to us, he hadn't seen us make the curve. No trees were in the way, nothing between Max and us but air and sky and sand. He started down the path he knew we had taken.

i said to Master that Max was going to go the full circle to get to us, and not cut across the diameter. Master laffed and called to Max. But we were down wind from him and the words went off in the other direction. Max got to the curve in the circle and lost our scent. We must have been just out of his range of vision.

He stopped and sniffed the air, trying to locate us. i waved my hands and hat and called to him but he didn't look in my direction and couldn't hear me. And then he started for home. Master hot-footed it through the circle and back to the car, while i gimpily hot-footed it toward Max, calling to him every step of the way. i know we were no more than a football field away from him because the poles we use to mark our walk are 300 meters apart and both Max and i were between the same two sets of poles.

i called and waved my hat. When Master got to the car He honked the horn. Max must have heard that, because he stopped and cocked his head. i kept moving toward him. Finally he saw me and came kicking up a sand storm toward me. He got to me about the same time Master got to us. We didn't have to talk to him twice to convince him to get into the car.

i really felt badly about what happened because for a dog, he certainly has issues related to the first few weeks of his life. He hasn't left my side all night. He nearly got me a couple of times trying to stay close. Now he is snoozing on his couch, but one eye is open and one ear has the radar thing going. Poor baby. To celebrate the fact that he found us, we stopped at McDonald's on the way home and got him an ice cream.

The people who work at the McD's we stop at all know him. They must have sensed something was wrong. We didn't even have to place an order. The girl at the drive-up window looked out, saw it was us, and asked, "Three ice cream cones?" We paid and drove to the next window. There the boy gave us Max's cone first. How do i know it was Max's? He said, "This cone is for Max." The cone was the same size as the cones we got, but there was about twice the amount of ice cream in his cone than in ours. Lucky dog.

i wonder what dog's dream about.