Quite a Scare

We thought we lost Rhys. Yesterday, T was getting the toys out of the garage for the kids to play with and hadn't tied Rhys to the rope we keep in the yard (because it is not a fully enclosed yard) because he was doing his business. If he gets a chance to be loose in the front yard, he loves to run off down the street; which is very scary because there are fairly busy intersections on either end of our block. But in the back yard he is usually very good, tying him up is really just a precaution.

Her back was never even fully turned away from him, and she only took her eyes off the yard for a minute to open the garage and pull out the toys. But suddenly he was no where to be found. She quickly ran to the front of the house and up and down our block. No sign of him. At this point she's starting to get frantic, and calls J to tell him what's going on. She puts the kids in the house and expands the search to include one block in either direction and still no sign. J thinks that T should get in the car and start driving around. Not a huge fan of this idea, T calls her parents who are bound to have been in this situation before and asks what to do. They suggest calling the local shelter and police station to let them know that our dog is missing and then to print off photos of Rhys and start walking all around the neighborhood.

As T was looking up the phone numbers for the police station and animal shelter she heard Rhys' cry/whine. She ran outside to track it down and couldn't hear anything but the birds chirping. Ran back inside and listened again, and there was no mistaking that she heard his whine and it sounded like it was coming from directly beneath our bedroom window.

He had forced his way through some lattice and gotten under the house. He sounded freaked out and stuck. Not knowing anything about crawling under houses (and being highly anxious about what else might be crawling under the house) we decided that T should go pick up J from work and he would go under the house. We were lucky to be just at the beginning of rush hour traffic (and for some reason its always less busy at the beginning of the week). When we got back home the neighbor had already gotten home from work and heard the whines and was about to crawl under the house himself (we live in a duplex, and apparently they could hear him directly below their bathroom, through their vent). He loaned J his light and J crawled under the house. We were all so relieved when Rhys came barrelling out of the opening a short time later; a bit shaken but otherwise unscathed.

Evidently he had fallen into a waist deep hole under the house. Which is something of a blessing because we were worried that he was caught on something and might hurt himself struggling to get free, and/or that he would get free while T was going to pick up J and he maybe would run away in search of us.

So it was a happy ending to a very scary and stressful episode. Both kids asked for Rhys to sleep with them that night. And when it was time for us to go to bed we did take him in to sleep on B's bed, very happy to be with his people.