stAllio!'s way

samhain the dog ran away last night.

i was chillin' in the attic a bit before 8pm. geoff was on his way over, to hang out and have barry do some work on his computer.

suddenly i heard three gunshots. they were loud & booming. no mistaking them for anything but three pointless gunshots going off in the near-ghetto. i shut off the stereo and went to look out the window in case i saw anything. i didn't, so i wandered on downstairs. barry was in the living room looking out the window, having heard the same thing. then we tried to let samhain in (he had been outside in the back yard).

there was no sign of him in the back yard. my immediate reaction was that someone had shot him; maybe he was barking and they were trying to shut him up, i thought. but there was no body...

we went out in the front yard to look for him. it was raining outside: freezing rain. the police were also showing up around this time too, to investigate the gunshots. i talked to a couple of them about our lost dog and where the shots sounded like they came from, but there were no dogs in sight (and at most 5 minutes had passed, so it wasn't like he had time to get far (so we thought). this was around the time when geoff arrived; with us outside looking for a dog, police cruisers in the neighborhood, and officers sweeping the area with flashlights looking for evidence of the shooter.

barry drove around the neighborhood off & on for an hour or more. he heard reports from neighbors on our street who said they saw him running but "one of them was like 5 or 6 blocks up"... if it was samhain, he was really spooked. (he's always hated loud noises, so although we don't know how he could've gotten out of the yard, the predominant theory is that he was startled by the shots and took off running.) he has no collar either, & i rather doubt he has one of those big-brother-style tracking chips either.

dad went out driving around looking too, with no luck, despite dad being sick (but that's another story).

eventually barry came home, feeling defeated. by this point samhain had been missing for an hour and a half. things were not looking good. we've all heard stories about dogs who find their way home across great distances, but samhain was never all that familiar with the neighborhood, and it was probably 20 degrees or below last night. he has a lot of fur but how much does that really help?

the only positive side was that somehow the baby did not wake up during all this. that would've made the search a lot harder.

by this point samhain has been missing a bit over 13 hours. right now our main hope is that he finds his way back today somehow, or that he got picked up by animal control sometime in the night and we only need to get to the right shelter to find him. there's always a chance.