We Visited Smith Street

Yesterday, on an unseasonably warm November afternoon, Mason and I stopped by Smith Street with a bag of Kibbles ‘n Bits (Dawn’s favorite) in our trunk. The women of Smith Street – Bernice, Sandra, and Martha – had finally asked for our help.

We discovered that Dawn, a feral dog we’ve been trying to catch for six months, had her second litter at Sandra’s house, behind a shed in a pile of tin and cinder blocks. Someone had shoved hay around the den, slung a tarp over the top.

Reaching the den is a tight fit, wedged between the garage and junk, so we may have missed a few but Mason and I counted ten not twelve pups. Some were all black, some black with brown maws, all whining because we messed up their nap. At five days old, each pup fit in the palm of my hand. They couldn’t have weighed a pound.

After assessing the situation, I knocked on Sandra’s door and bluntly asked for permission to walk on her property until we catch Dawn. Sandra, a fifty-something year-old woman wearing a salt and pepper ponytail, told us point blank that Dawn wasn’t her dog. Dawn was a stray. By the end of our ten-minute conversation, she even gave us permission to park in their driveway.

“Good luck catching her. Nobody’s ever touched that dog before,” Sandra said.

As Mason and I drove down Smith Street, Dawn came trekking up the road, bloated boobies swishing side to side. I stopped the car next to her, rolled down the window, dog and woman less than ten feet apart. We stared at each other for a full twenty seconds.

She was so close.