When I was about a year old, Mom and Dad started talking about getting a dog. They were getting settled in and had lots of property to keep a dog happy. It turns out they didn’t have to look far. . .
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| One day, in the middle of a pouring rain, a black dog showed up. He was quite friendly and seemed hungry. Mom scrambled up some eggs and ham for the dog. He wolfed it down extremely quickly and looked expectantly at Mom. She made him another plate of eggs and ham, which he again wolfed down. |
After she made it clear that he was done eating, the dog walked over to the flower bed, turned around a couple of times and curled up for a nap. He seemed set on staying.
Mom and Dad put an ad in the paper trying to find the dog’s owner. The dog was very well behaved and knew basic commands. He was also house and yard broken (he would only relieve himself in our woods.) He certainly seemed like he had been owned by someone. Mom and Dad even wondered if he had been training to be a guide dog. While we waited to hear a response for the ad, a neighbor agreed to keep him on her property with her dog, Sammy.
No one ever claimed the big black dog. Someone may have dumped him on our country road, but we were surprised that someone would have done that if they had taken the time to train him. That’s the thing with strays; you never know their complete story.
Since we had already been talking of getting a dog, we decided to keep him. Mom and Dad named him Noah since he had come to us in a rainstorm.
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| The vet thought the dog was between 2 to 4 years old, so he was young but not quite a puppy. He turned out to be the perfect dog for our family. He was very laid back, and rarely ever barked. He was so laid back that he used to let me—a toddling one-year-old—use his head as a step-stool to climb onto the couch! |
One day shortly after we found him, Mom took Noah on his first walk. He was generally well-behaved but he had no idea how to walk nicely on a leash. Mom came back from the walk with leash-burned hands. She signed him up for obedience classes so that he would learn how to heel better. He did very well and graduated at the top of his class.
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| But he was not without his “moments.” Being a “country dog” he basically roamed the surrounding properties during the day and came home for dinner. Thankfully, none of our neighbors minded his visits. Noah loved visiting our neighbor’s cattle ranch. On one of his roams, he had some kind of tussle with one of the barbed wire fences on their property. He ended up with lots of cuts and had to make an emergency trip to the vet on a weekend, where he received lots of stitches. On the ride home, he managed to pull his stitches out. Back he went to get a cone to keep him from ripping his stitches out again. |
In the movie “Up” they call this “the cone of shame.” That’s definitely true! When Mom took Noah on a walk with his cone, they passed by Noah’s friend, Sammy. Noah stopped and slunk around to the other side of Mom so that he would be somewhat hidden from Sammy’s view. Silly dog! And I haven’t even told you about the time he chewed Dad’s slipper, or the time he “accidently” thought Dad’s foot was a tree. . .If I told you about all the times Noah got into scrapes, this blog post would be miles long!
Over the years, Noah became a constant companion for us kids. Whenever we went to play outside, he would follow us around the yard. In the last few years of his life, he sometimes reverted to his “country life,” even though by then we had moved. We kids would look around and realize that he wasn’t in the yard. First we would check across the street to see if he was visiting his “girlfriend,” a Weimaraner named Molly. If he wasn’t there, we would try shouting to see if he came trotting down the street. Half the time, he’d still be dragging his leash behind him. I wonder what the neighbors thought when they saw a dog with a leash without a human behind him!
If all that failed, we would climb into the van and go looking for him. One time, we found that someone had tied him to a fire hydrant. He was calmly laying there as though he was waiting for a bus!
When Noah was about 10 years old, we had a very tragic experience with him. Josiah was only about a year old and had been crawling around the floor. He went up to Noah, who was asleep, and pressed on his abdomen. The dog yelped in pain and whipped his head around. His teeth caught Josiah’s face and tore several large gashes in his skin. We quickly called several of our neighbors to come over and watch the kids while Mom and I took Josiah to the ER.
As a 10-year-old, that trip to the ER stuck out in my mind as a nightmare. My little brother’s face was cut up badly and bleeding and we had to wait for the doctor to arrive. When he did, I couldn’t stay in the room while they stitched up his cuts. It was too difficult. Even sitting out in the hallway was hard because I could hear him crying. A wonderful nurse who was probably in her 50’s came and sat on the floor with me and we just talked. It was a big comfort to me.
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| It is only by God’s grace that Josiah didn’t have damage to his eye. The dog missed his eyeball by just a couple of millimeters. In time, his wounds healed and eventually his scars may disappear. |
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| We had 10 days after the incident until we had to put the dog down. Although the bite was not vicious and the dog was just as kind as he always had been, we found out that the cause of the bite was a large tumor in his side. Josiah had pressed on it just right and caused him sharp pain. We would have had to put him down eventually, as the tumor would have continued to grow. |
Although it was a very sad way to lose the dog, we are still grateful for the many wonderful years we had with Noah! He was a very special dog, and I haven’t met one quite like him. I will always have fond memories of him!
Next week I’ll share the story about the first rodent addition to our family: a hamster named Scooter.
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