Bruce and Susie still had a couple more weeks before closing up their house in Baja and heading back to LA. Thistle was adjusting well, and was still spending her nights in the side yard, with the cage open so that she could come as go as she pleased. The side yard had windows that looked into the living room, and she had no problem leaping the four foot height to sit on the window sill and stare at the two of them as they ate dinner or watched TV.
Then, she discovered Urchin’s dog door. Urchin is Susie’s tiny, TINY and now ancient Yorkie. For the most part the two dogs just ignored each other, and Thistle, at 9 lbs and standing 12” tall looked far too large to fit through the tiny hole that Urchin went in and out.
But, somehow, being part monkey and part Houdini, she managed it, and one evening Bruce and Susie were surprised to be joined on the sofa by Thistle as they were watching a movie. That was end of having to stare in side windows at night – you just come IN rather than LOOKING IN.
Since there was no way to leave the dog door open for one dog and not the other, a new routine was established, and Thistle was really settling into a new life and beginning to trust people.
Then came the day that Bruce was gone, and Susie had to leave for a couple of hours. Thistle’s only real issue seemed to be abandonment, she wanted to know where Bruce, and especially Susie were at all times.
When she realized that everyone was GONE, she must have panicked. When Susie got home, no Thistle, so then SHE panicked! She walked the neighborhood, she called, she drove further out around the neighborhood, then finally took one more walk.
As she went by one her neighbor’s about a block away, the gardener called out to her – “Senorita, su perro aqui?” “your dog here”? The gentleman had seen the funny looking little dog in Susie’s yard a few days earlier and when he saw what appeared to be the same dog running down the street, he had scooped her up and locked her in the neighbor’s yard that he was working in.
My sister could not believe that the dog she had gotten out of that yard. Even the coyotes don’t try to get over that huge fence. For a couple more days it was a mystery, then she saw Thistle doing something quite amazing.
There is a huge, and wonderful piece of driftwood sitting in one corner of the patio yard. We had found it a couple of years earlier and had dragged it out of the water with the pick-up truck, and it had taken all four of us to get it back to the house, where we artistically positioned it in the corner of the patio, near the wall.
Well, there was Thistle. She jumped up on the piece of driftwood and walked to the tallest spot on it. Then she leaped from the driftwood to the narrow lip at the top of the cement wall, from that vantage point she looked up at the wrought iron that topped the wall by another 36” or so and was contemplating starting her climb, when Susie dashed out and called her down.
Mystery solved – but from then on, until they left a few weeks later, they made sure that Thistle always knew where one of them was, so that she wouldn’t repeat her “great escape” act and go out trying to find them.
A week or so later Bruce and Susie packed everything, including the two dogs into the car and began their journey back to the States. As long as you have the proper papers (veterinarian , etc.) getting your dogs across the border usually isn’t too much of a problem, and Patrick had made sure that we had everything that we needed.
And that’s just about where her “tail” of rescue ends. A few days later the whole gang headed north for Oregon. Susie told us that Thistle was a VERY nervous passenger, running from window to window, and they had to keep a very close eye on her whenever they opened the car door, she was ready to jump out and escape, although by the second day she was beginning to calm down. We have speculated that perhaps the only time she had ever been in a car before was when she was being taken off and dumped somewhere, but it is something that we will never really know.
And so she arrived – scared and scraggly. The picture on the left was taken during the first week of her arrival in the hallway leading from the main showroom to our warehouse at Loose Ends. She was clean, but that’s about all you could say – tufts of hair sticking out at various angles, and an almost bald tail! That bit of neck jewelry was a gift to Thistle from Susie, worrying that she might get lost again.
And here her rescue story ends. She arrived, we fell in love all over again, and she has now been with us for 13 months. She goes to work with us everyday, hangs out in my basement studio while I work, and, of course, sleeps with us at night.
Oh yea, there will definitely be more follow-up stories about this little person!
