Fremont

The pick-up is grinding up the first hill on the Highway towards San Lucas, and so was this skinny dog. Head down, slow gait, skin and bones, walking in the ditch. “We’ll pick him up on the way back” said Xenii.

We’d noted that he was close to the Fomtex foam mattress factory and figured he might have got as far as the first gas station by the time of our return journey. We slowed down and started trying to spot him in the weeds as we passed the gas station. No dog. No dog in the weeds near Fomtex. Turns out he’d turned around, presumably looking for a secluded place to lay it all down and die. And there he was – in a culvert under an entrance to a road-side property.

Xenii jumps out, crosses the traffic and walks back to be with what we suppose is a dog at his last fence. I head on to Km 40, make the U-turn, grind back up the hill to the culvert.

And there he is. We were calling him Fomtex at that point, only changing the name later out of respect for the survival instinct and the nobility of this young male dog with probably more than a bit of Labrador in his ancestry.

He’d found this culvert, crawled in, and as far as he was concerned he was waiting for the end. I go back to the truck to get a muzzle and gloves – turns out we don’t need them. Xenii coaxes him out of the ditch – which is when we see he has a nasty abcess in his throat (a bite? an infection? the reason for his being turned out onto the Highway?) – and he trots into the carrier cage like he understands exactly what’s going on – which he probably did.

Back at Hound Heights Fremont (ex-Fomtex) becomes the model patient, quickly displaying his characteristic nobility, and quickly recovering from the abcess in the throat. A perfect candidate, we think, for a Dr Jim transfer to the lifetime home in the good ol’ USA.