Back in 2013 I was working at a park with a small lake. One summer evening I’m setting up for a campfire program on the beach and I notice a dog swimming across the lake.
Normally I would have immediately sought out the owner of the dog to ask them to leash their pet or even issue them an animal-at-large citation–it’s illegal to allow your dog to roam untethered on public land, and it’s also just a terrible idea here, where it might get into conflict with other dogs or with wildlife. But I’m setting up for my program, so I’m a little busy, and I decide to wait until I’m done with that.
As time goes on I notice the dog isn’t just swimming around, it’s actually fetching things from the shore on the far side and depositing them on the beach nearby: abandoned tennis balls, plastic bottles, fast food cups, other miscellaneous trash. I’m bothered that he’s unleashed but I’m also inclined to let him do this public service just a little bit longer before I bring down the law.
Before I know it, guests are showing up for my campfire and I’ve got to sign them in. By the time we sit down on our camping chairs and start toasting marshmallows, I notice the dog is among my guests. Normally I would also tell the owners that not only does their dog need to be leashed, we also don’t allow pets at our programs. But right now I’m in the middle of telling the kids how to blow out a marshmallow that’s caught fire, and that’s taking up all my attention, so I forget about the dog for a minute. For a few minutes.
People are having a great evening and the end of the program sneaks up on me. Up to this point, the dog has floated casually around the campfire, graciously accepting ruined marshmallows and sand-covered Graham crackers. A little embarrassed I’ve let it go on this long, I finally ask the family the dog is currently mooching cocktail weenies from if they could please leash him.
“Oh, he’s not ours,” they answer.
I ask the group at large if the owners of this dog could get him on a leash. Nobody comes forward. I look for tags on the dog’s collar: there are none. This isn’t anybody’s dog. This is an opportunist. He is a free agent and he has been since before I showed up at 5pm to set up the campfire.
Obviously I can’t just leave him in the park. I’m the last employee there and it’s well after dark now. So I extinguish the fire and put the supplies in the lake shed and bag up the pile of trash the dog has collected and, resignedly, open the door to my car and tell this muddy, marshmallow-sticky, lake-water-smelling dog to get inside, which he cheerfully does. I send my housemates a text telling them, “bringing home a dog. sorry. can anybody buy dog food please”
I arrive home twenty minutes later to find my housemates have bought a leash, a new collar, and a large quantity of dog food. They walk him while I draw some bath water because I can tell he’s going to want to sleep in the bed and I am not letting him anywhere near my sheets until he’s clean. When my housemate returns from walking him, we feed him some dog food and I take off his collar to prepare him for a bath. The collar is faded and threadbare and looks older than the dog himself.
My housemate notices that, written on the inside, which is much drier and cleaner than the outside, there is writing in faded Sharpie: the word “PUCK,” followed by a phone number.
I call it, excited to do a good deed and reunite this dog with his owner, who must miss him terribly. Someone on the other end picks up the phone.
“Hi, I found your dog!” I say.
When the woman on the other end finally responds, she doesn’t sound relieved or thankful, she sounds confused. She says, “I’m not missing a dog.”
I’m worried I misread the number, but I venture, “Puck? I found him at [the park].”
“I’ll be right back,” says the woman, and sets down the phone. When she picks it back up a couple minutes later, she sounds almost irritated. “He must have jumped out a window. I’ll be right there.”
Ten minutes later we’re giving her a leash and a collar and kibble and she’s dragging Puck down our front walk while he wags his tail and grins back at us like this is a typical Friday night for him.
And that’s how I met Robin Goodfellow and fed him dog food.
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