Day Three.

This is so hard that I think I can feel my heart breaking as I type.

My husband and I have been out for hours, leaving 'lost dog' fliers at the local veterinary offices, pet-boarding facilities, the supermarket, the hardware store, the dog park, and we even went to the police station and the local newspaper.  Savannah's picture is all over our friends' Facebook pages, and the pages of the local rescue organizations.

Now it's up to the puppy gods and to Savannah.... she has got to either get herself near enough to a person so they can look at her ID tags, or she has to find her way home.  This morning I walked up and down our road, all the way up to the main highway. I called out Savannah's name and then stopped to listen, hoping to hear a barking in return. Well, I got lots of barking, but only from the dogs of our neighbors. I lost count of how many times I yelled out Savannah's name this morning.

I know that Savannah must have been terribly frightened when that mega-firecracker-thing went off on Wednesday night, but it's hard to believe that she could have run so far away from here that she has lost all sense of where she lives.  But that's what I think has happened. And with everyone around here shooting off guns left and right, every time Savannah heard a stray gunshot, she probably got up and started running again, making her more and more lost.

As I type, Sweet Pea is sleeping in Savannah's bed. He stayed away from that bed for the first day and a half of Savannah's "missing" status.... he would walk right up to the bed and sniff it, then jump on one of the chairs to take a nap. Yesterday afternoon, Sweet Pea walked into Savannah's bed and curled up and went to sleep, and he's doing the same thing right now.   I'm going to leave Savannah's bed right where it is in the breakfast room, for at least another week. I think Savannah would come home if she were still around,  but I'm beginning to think that she isn't in this area anymore, and she could even be in the next town or the next county by now.          

My husband placed an ad in the local paper, and we've given out an extraordinary number of fliers, with help from friends and neighbors. All of us have driven up and down and around these hills, looking for a 65-pound puppy named Savannah whose fear of loud noises prompted her to bolt and run, and keep on running.

The bruises I got on Wednesday evening when Savannah pulled me down to the road are now turning a glorious shade of purple with splashes of yellow. I look like a rainbow, a broken one.   And that's about how I feel: broken.

We're supposed to have rain showers this weekend, and I'm hoping beyond hope that Savannah's hiding place is good and dry. She doesn't like thunder and lightning and I'm also hoping that the weather gods don't send an entire arsenal of weather into our hills.

It's killing me that I don't know where Savannah is. I don't know if she's safe, I don't know if she's un-hurt. I know absolutely nothing about her physical location but I do know that if we get her back, these circumstances are going to impact that puppy's personality. And that's going to be another puppy hurdle to get over, but we will, if given the chance.