A Penny Saved There is this little dog who comes around. Her ears are out of proportion to the rest of her. As if, as a friend put it, "That is a big dog with a small head and body." Actually I am pretty sure she is part Chihuahua. But she is about the size of a beagle. We don't know what her voice sounds like because we have only seen her use her mouth to eat, eat, eat. Her ribs protrude and so do her hipbones. She began wandering over to our yard a couple of months ago. Now she has been here and feasted a few times. Our encounters with her end when she turns and runs out the gate toward what we suspect, but hope is not, the place where her puppies wait. Her teats are hanging and the fur around them is matted. It could be because she grooms herself, but it could also be because she is nursing. Honestly? We hope she doesn't have puppies because if she does they are likely starving. A dog this thin can't possibly lactate. She is a wild dog and only takes a step toward us if there is food on the ground she can reach without coming too close. She is beyond skittish, not anything close to friendly, but her expression says, "can I trust you? will you be nice to me? " She jumps back when we put the food bowl in front of her. She is nowhere near ready to join our pack, and still we wait for her like someone waits for a reluctant suitor to call on the phone. Today is Valentine's Day and we are too lovestruck to leave the house before dark. We've even named her: Penny. She is copper-colored. White blaze on the chest and white tips on her little paws. She has coyote eyes. If you have been following this saga on Facebook then you know what she looks like. Anyway, here we are again, waiting to save Penny. We have been advised by local dog rescuers to follow her but we have not yet had that opportunity. We have followed her footprints to an abandoned cabin nearby. But there is no indication that this is where she lives. I am guessing it's is a short shady stop on her long trajectory when she leaves to look for food. She shows up here about every other day. Yesterday she was here and ate two fried eggs, a can of dog food, some kibble, a few biscuits, and a huge hambone that she carried off with her when she went out the gate. Would we do the same for a suffering human stranger who crawled in on all fours off the blank desert? I don't know. Kip might but I wouldn't. Humans can speak, and, when they speak, they say some pretty horrible stuff. And there's always a hidden agenda with humans. Sometimes not so hidden. As in, "Make America Great Again!" Or, "New York Values." And forget about what people do to animals. It is heartbreaking. This is what happened today. Valentine's Day. Penny came over for lunch today and feasted as usual. She was eating some kibble when the scent of frying eggs made her stop, look up, and sniff the kitchen air. Kip was frying two eggs for her. She has had six eggs so far this week. Kip hand feeds them to her. I am sure she will be an insufferable table-beggar once she is our dog. Anyway, she gobbled her eggs and walked over to the stove to look for more. "Those are good. They come from over here somewhere." She seems to know that Kip is the wielder of fried eggs. She hung around our yard for a while and then she was out the gate. We decided to follow her to wherever it is she runs off to every day after her feast. We started off after her but she was of course way too fast for us, weaving in and out among the creosote plants and leaving very little trace as she is so light. After she disappeared, we followed her tracks the best we could across the sand. Wherever the sand was soft, we could see her tracks. But we had to double back a few times to find her prints again when we lost them on the hard desert crust. At the bottom of the hill we followed the arroyo with its smoke trees and burrowed embankments. We inspected an old sofa and determined that this was not where she lived. Eventually the tracks in the sand led us to a typical Twentynine Palms Outback compound: rusty old 70s and 80s model Ford and GM trucks lined up in rows (no old Toyota trucks; they are still running...), three or four trailers in the final stages of decay, an old homestead cabin you can see right through, a water tank, nameless piles of junk, and a little pre-fab house with a shed where someone probably lived and was probably watching us with binoculars. "We should get out of here," we both said. Suddenly, a pack of dogs came running full speed towards us. As they came closer, we saw that they all looked just like Penny. Almost exactly. Except they were not as thin and some had thicker fur. They stopped and sniffed and wagged, then a man stepped out of the cabin door and yelled, "DOGS!! DOGS!!" That was how he called them back?? They didn't have names? Well, one of them did because Penny was among that pack. She is the smallest and the hungriest, and Kip says she is the runt. Her owner gets up in the morning and throws a bunch of food down for all the dogs and she probably doesn't get any of the food. So this little dog scrambles up through the chollas and chaparral to get some kibble and a fried egg or two from us. "YOU JUST OUT TAKIN A WALK?" The man yelled at us. "Yes!" Then Kip said, "We've been feeding a stray dog; we're just looking for her..." "NOT HERE," yelled the man. Well, now we know where Penny hangs out at night. We know she has the protection of a pack and we know that the person who owns her does not care if she lives or dies.. We could hear him yelling and the dogs yelping as we walked away up the wash. The last time I wandered out on the sand looking for a dog it was right after we moved here, and Luna had gotten out. I ran after her in the 100-degree heat and brought her home. What to do about little Penny? Maybe we'll keep feeding her until she decides to live with us. She might. Today she jumped up on the couch and sat there for a while, watching us. I wish we could get all of those dogs away from that man because he is not caring for them. But especially Penny. She is very resourceful, though, to have found saps like us. She would certainly be safe with us. At least I think she would. As I write this, coyotes are howling just beyond our fence.