So… the dog’s owner turned up late yesterday afternoon. For the sake of this post, we’ll call him Fred. The dog’s name is Cutie (pretty close to ‘Suzie’, which would have been my choice).

Cutie had been given to Fred by a workmate. It was agreed that the workmate would bring Cutie to Fred’s place to see if she could easily become acquainted with his other, larger dog. But instead, the bloke turned up at work with Cutie and Fred had no other option but to take her home.

Cutie was with Fred for the time it took him to drive her home. As soon as he opened the car door, she was off like a shot. That was a couple of months ago.

Yesterday, as soon as she saw Fred with a leash in his hand, she squeezed through the fence palings and disappeared into the gathering darkness.

Fred winced when I told him we’d been feeding her pork, chicken, milk, eggs and a few rice crackers with butter and Vegemite. Like John (see yesterday’s comments), he probably thought we’d be a hard act to follow. He asked whether we had any dog food and after I said we didn’t, he set off for home to pick some up. He left me with the leash.

After Fred had gone, I scoured the property calling out Cutie’s name. I even poked my head into the spider-infested underside of the house, half expecting to find her cowering beneath the warm brick surround of the wood heater. Nothing but cobwebs and a few left-over building materials.

On his return, Fred exchanged the soft pink lead for a long chain and handed over a bag of dog biscuits. We chatted about what a difficult and neurotic dog Cutie is. After a while, Fred said he wasn’t even sure he wanted to keep her.

Nevertheless, he said that he planned to place another ‘lost’ ad in next week’s paper, just in case Cutie was still on the lam.

Then we hatched this plan:

If Cutie returns, I’m to corner her somewhere she can’t escape and attach the chain to her collar. Then I’ll phone Fred to come and pick her up.

If Cutie hasn’t returned by the end of the weekend, I’m to phone Fred and he’ll come round to pick up the chain and the dog food. In theory it sounded fine.

Later, my partner suggested that perhaps it would be better for Cutie if we just feed her whenever she turns up and allow her to become more settled, less nervy, before we send her back to Fred.

There’s a lot of ‘ifs’ in all of this but I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.

On such a cold, damp, foggy day, I hate to think of the emaciated little dog wandering around the fox-infested countryside, searching for home and something to eat.

The next time we visit town, I’ll make sure we buy some dog meat.