Maine Woods

We lost another neighborhood dog this week. The owner of Boon, a middle-aged yellow lab, and Sadie, a crazy young german shepard, and I were just setting out for our weekly walk on Thursday. She brought along Sadie, and the first thing she asked me was if I had seen Boon in the last few days.

I remembered seeing him last on Saturday morning. We were still laying in bed, sleeping in a little because we were to have a long night coming up, and we noticed barking outside the cracked bedroom window. When I went down and got a cup of coffee, I went out to our front porch and my first thought was, Hmm, that's unusual, kind of, for Boon to be laying in the middle of our dirt road, yelping like that.

But I didn't go up to investigate. I said, "Go home, Boon!" like I always do.

A short time later, I saw that he had wandered off, down the road away from home. I knew this because I still heard him barking, almost yowling. I assumed he was chasing something. I was wrong.

So, as my neighbor and I and the german shepard are rounding the corner at the bottom of the hill, and still discussing the missing dog, since Saturday, and I shared with her my observations from that morning, we are casually scanning the woods on either side of us as we walk. And out of the corner of my eye, up on my Dad's property, I see something whitish that I had never noticed before. She stopped, too, and said, do you think? I said, I doubt it, but let me just run up there real quick and check.

And as I got closer, my heart sank.

It was Boon. Dead.

We called her husband, who was home that day, and he came down in the truck and picked him up.

We assume the dog was hit by a vehicle, sometime between 7:30 and 9:00 a.m. I feel terrible for not listening to my gut and going up to investigate the yelping dog that morning. Sadly, he probably was too injured to have survived, anyway. My neighbor said she and her husband had gone out for a walk to call for him on Saturday afternoon around 1 p.m. and didn't hear the dog barking, so all we can hope is that he had perished by then from his internal injuries.

We'll never know what really happened or who hit him. It just sucks. We live on a dirt road, and this the second dog of theirs that has been hit by a car!

Last night, I had trouble sleeping, thinking about all of this. It all feels a little like a Stephen King short story, honestly. Because, there is more involved, and it has to do with our "psycho" mail delivery driver. But, I think I'll stop here and let you imagine what you want with that!

R.I.P. Boon the yellow lab. You were a good doggie.

"Stephen King's Maine Map"