What started out as an uneventful eventful day turned into a fiasco when the new mother of a litter of five brand new puppies vanished. Just vanished.

I was going down to check my chickens and she acted like she wanted to go out. Okay, I thought, she’s been inside all day and her puppies had full bellies. So I let her out. I took care of my chickens and went to locate Pearl, who popped up from down past the shop. I did my due diligence and made sure there wasn’t a surprise puppy down there, and Pearl headed up towards the house. I was close behind her, but just needed to grab something on my way. I took my eyes off her for all of three minutes. And she was gone.

I looked everywhere. And I mean everywhere. I looked for about forty-five minutes before calling my husband, who was up north getting grain. And I kept looking. I took the ATV out and looked, as I said, everywhere. Calling, shouting, scolding, and finally melting into an angry, crying, but still functional mess.

I figured she’d had another puppy in her and went off somewhere to have it. I remembered the elk carcass a mountain lion dragged away, up on top of the ridge and north a ways, and the mountain lion scat I saw closer to home. We’ve had some good sized coyotes getting rather bold. And then the sun started going down.

If it could be gotten into or under, I looked there. And looked again. And Brad got home and we looked again. And then she appeared out of nowhere from by the house, pretty dirty and looking guilty again. We had looked under everything. Except the front deck. We didn’t even know a dog could fit under there. But she did. And sure enough, we could hear a puppy squealing, not near one side or the other, but under the very center of the deck.

So basically we had to partially take the deck apart, which was harder than it should have been, to rescue the miserable, cold little girlie, and thus the entire ridiculous and beautiful family was reunited. Everyone is warm and dry and bellies are full, tight as little drums. Four little girls and two little boys.

All’s well that ends well, I guess. But Pearl is kind of in trouble.