Yesterday, I went to Congaree Creek Heritage Preserve to find my next blog entry and, perhaps sadly, I did. I had gone as far as I usually go, which is to say as far as the the trail runs along the creek. I turned around and had come a few minutes worth of the way back when I heard the sound of feet behind me, or rather paws. A largish black dog with white patches on the neck was following me. If I turned around, he barked and feinted, but whenever I resumed walking, he resumed following. He had no collar or tags that I could see, though he didn't let me get close enough for a thorough examination.
He followed me all the way back to the parking lot. Eventually, he quit barking when I turned around to check on him, but he certainly never drew closer. He stuck to the trail, though, even when it made pointless meanderings through flat land and he could have easily took short cuts. As such, he was a better hiker than most people I know.
As I got closer to the trailhead, he dropped back a long way, and I thought I'd lost him. But he was just being a dog, investigating a smell or something, and caught me up again. At the parking lot, there was a pickup truck with a small empty flatbed trailer large enough to carry a Bushhog. There was no one there and no logo or anything on the pickup. Hopefully, it was a contractor for DNR (that is, the South Carolina Department of Natural Resource) who had brought his dog and knew how to whistle for him when it was time to go home.
However, having little confidence in this possibility, I tried to lure the dog into my car with the idea of taking him to a no-kill shelter. He was way too wary for this, unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your point of view). So I found a coffee cup on the ground, ripped away enough of the styrofoam to make a vessel a muzzle could fit in, and put most of the rest of my water in it. Hopefully he drank from it in preference to the large mud puddle nearby, but he wouldn't go near it while I was there.
I had forgotten to bring my cell phone. I tried to find one of the no-kill shelters to ask them how to proceed, but either they had moved or were very well-hidden. So I went home and phoned instead. The person answering the phone indicated that they don't make pickups and if anyone (for instance, DNR) did so, they would scan the dog for a chip and would only bring it to the shelter if the chip said it belonged to them. (In other words, that would be a dead dog, but I thought better of saying so.)
Regardless, I called and left a message with DNR to let them know that there was a stray dog on their property. As it's a (or an) historical preserve rather than primarily a nature preserve, it's possible that they wouldn't be too interested. It's even more probable that they don't have the resources to chase down a stray dog. Anyway, I'm sad to think that they might take him to the county shelter, where he'd be very unlikely to survive. So on the whole, the idea that they might not bother with him strikes me as an optimistic one.
I also alerted the other no-kill shelter of his existence through a post on their wall at Facebook. Maybe that will prove another possible route to his rescue.
I wish I could have persuaded him to come with me, but because of the small size of this apartment and the fact that our fence was knocked down by a falling tree, I couldn't keep him here anyway. I'm hoping against hope that his owners come looking soon and find him. He was an awfully nice fellow.
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