Having enjoyed a taste of freedom, Lulu the dog has been escaping a lot lately. Where she thinks she is going is something only she knows, but whatever the attraction, she has been determined.
This is something that old dogs do. A brown Lab that lived down the road from us was a roamer, often making it up to the Amagansett I.G.A. before being corralled. Main Street in East Hampton had a basset hound nicknamed the Mayor, for its daily walks into town.
Letting pets move around freely is a thing of the past, traffic being what it is and even the odd dog thief about. When I moved back into my childhood home in 1998, among the first major tasks was installing a four-foot-high wire fence around the yard with gates that swing closed on their own. But dogs are smart, most of them anyway, and Weasel, the Lab mix, figured out how to open the latch on the path to the beach. Lulu, a small shaggy thing not tall enough to do anything of the sort, learned to bide her time, and lurked by the driveway gate for an opportunity to make a break for it.
And so she did, on New Year’s Day. Without anyone noticing, she made her way along Cranberry Hole Road some distance before she was scooped up by several 20-something friends who took her to where they were staying and gave her a bath. Somehow, we were eventually connected on Facebook and made the retrieval, although the rescuers seemed suspicious that we let her run and seemed not eager to give her up.
Even though we kept the gates well locked, she continued to slip away, once being taken into custody by town animal control, another time returned by a driver who phoned the number on her collar.
It turned out that raccoons had made a hole in the fence to better reach the compost pile. Lulu had found the breach, deep in the bull briars. The middle child and I closed the gap. Lulu has not let on if she is disappointed or not, but as she lies snoozing near me now, I suspect she is still dreaming of life on the lam.