(A couple of heart warming ladies share more than just a love and a concern for defenceless animals. I was doing some freebie handyman work for a local shelter when an impressed vet told me their story)
Teresa Howard scoured the hot, almost molten landscape one last time, her squinting eyes straining against a blinding, furnace like sun.
"Let's not give up just yet," she begged.
Isabel Dobaldi sighed at her pleading words. "We have three other calls to follow up on. And all of them are in town. We're not going to get to any of them if we just hang around here all day. It's been four hours already and nothing."
"Please, Issy, please?"
Isabel watched her lover's eyes carefully, melting at their oozing distress. "Okay, half hour more, but if we don't find the pups by then, we're outta here, deal?"
Teresa smiled. "Thanks Issy, not a second longer, promise."
Teresa scampered off into the tall but dry brush quickly, beating at the browning vegetation with a long stick, hoping to scare the hiding, terrified pups out into the open.
Up on the hillside, some three hundred yards away, the pup's mother slumped onto a flat rock, her whole body trembling in fear at the two strange women, coming once more into her territory to beat the brush for her eight, cowering pups. The mother hoped with every fiber of her canine being that the two human women wouldn't uncover her vulnerable, helpless offspring. Four of her litter of twelve pups had already died due to the brutal heat and hungry snakes. The howl of coyotes, not too far in the distance, let the terrified mother know that the merciless animals with tearing jaws had picked up on the puppies yummy scent.
"Did you hear that howling?" Isabel shouted to her partner.
"I heard it," she said, almost whimpering. "We're either gonna find the pups this time out, and get them out of here, or else they'll all be devoured by nightfall."
The two animal rescue women had come out to this section of the Texan plains every day for the last four days, after a local man, passing on his motor bike, reported seeing a dozen or so pups following their mother into the bush. Undoubtedly they had been left there to die by some heartless owner who didn't want the aggravation of explaining to some far away shelter why he had to abandon them due to a lack of money for dog food and a lack of money for vet bills. The owner no doubt felt it far easier to just dump the mother and her helpless pups in the desert where they would die quietly and quickly. Out of sight and out of mind, but then, as fate would have it, the motor bike, joy riding over a roller coaster like nature trail, had spotted the abandoned brood.
"If only the mother knew we weren't trying to hurt her or her pups?"
"If only dogs could talk," I spoke up for the first time, mopping congregated, greasy sweat off my brow.
"Thanks for driving us out here again," Isabel said to me. "Our rust bucket kept breaking down, and we didn't have the money to fix it."
"That's quite alright," I tell her. "As a fledgling, struggling reporter, looking to get a foot hold in the media, being out here with you two gives me the chance to strut my stuff, so to speak, out here on the national stage. I'm very interested in the area of dog dumping, and so you girls give me true and extremely interesting stories to write about. Although a lot of them are also truly gut wrenching. Do you think that mother will let you guys capture it?"
"It isn't hungry enough yet. It only got dumped by its owner less than a week ago. We've set out food and water each time, and yet it won't come near until we're gone."
"So you think it is getting the stuff you leave behind, then?"
"That's the other thing. We're just not sure. Other animals, just as desperate, could be getting to it before she does. She is absolutely terrified of us hurting her pups. Obviously she has no idea we're just trying to help her, and we've got to catch her, and find her babies before those coyotes do."
"Issy, come quick! I've found them."
I follow Isabel running, and soon come across Teresa emerging from the brush with four pups bundled in her folded arms.
"They're really trembling, they're just so afraid."
There was suddenly a barking, followed by some snarling as the mother dog approached from off the cliff side.
She wasn't a very big dog, and was obviously a lot more afraid of us than we were of her. Isabel turned to face the mother dog, then sat on the ground, letting her come up to her and lick her pups faces. Isabel reached into her apron pocket and pulled out a handful of dog food, dropping it on the ground for the mother. She approached it warily, but, succumbing to a gnawing hunger, began plowing it down.
"Would you mind getting a bowl, with some water, Peter?"
"Right away," I agreed, turning on my heels and heading back to the truck, grabbing a metal bowl out of the back seat, then putting some water in it before scampering back over to where the mother dog was taking turns licking her pups and wolfing down dog food. I sat the bowl in front of her and she went wild, lapping at the water as though it were life and death.
"Wow, is she ever thirsty."
"I'll say, let's get these pups out of the sun and back to the shelter. They're so damn cute, they'll be adopted in no time."
Isabel takes the pups from Teresa, and Teresa marches back off into the brush where she emerges with four more squealing pups.
"There are three dead ones back there, looks like the heat, then some blood and a snake trail leading to a den. Looks like one got taken that way."
"Eight out of twelve. I've seen worse," Teresa managed, reaching out to give her partner a moist loving kiss on the lips.
"What was that for?" Isabel asked, blushing because I had been watching.
"That was for staying that little bit extra so we could find the pups. We saved a lot of canine lives today."
"Although there are those in society," I said, "who might say the dogs are better off dead out here. And that they're a nuisance."
"Surely you don't mean that," Teresa whispered, caught off guard.
"Oh, I don't think that at all, don't get me wrong. But I was just making the observation that some folk are real animal haters."
"I'd like to lock every one of those human bastards up in a feces filled cage for months without food and water and see how they like it," Isabel spat back, her angry eyes smoldering.
"You hear that dog? You got a lot of people willing to stand up for you," I said, patting the mother dog on its head, who had amazingly succeeded in both demolishing the pile of dog food and lapping up every last drop of water from the half-filled bowl.
XXX
The early morning sun was rising.
"It'll be another scorcher," Isabel noted.
It was my last day with the girls before I was going to head on back to Maine, and start writing stories and news broadcasts from all the material I'd gathered from Teresa's and Isabel's gusty animal rescue operation. I admired greatly, their life saving exploits, out here in Texas, a mere one and a half hours from Dallas.
