A puppy in the middle of the street

I was returning home from running a few errands one afternoon last week when I turned onto a residential street not far from where I live.

A puppy was wandering around in the middle of the street, perhaps bored, perhaps curious about something, perhaps clueless about where it really was. I am not an expert on dog breeds, but it looked like a terrier.

I thought about how many drivers would have believed it was a pitbull and as a result cared not a whit about whether they hit the dog or not. But I also thought about another animal that got loose in a roadway on a December morning many years ago now.

Her name was Frosty Flyer, and she was a perhaps the finest racing quarterhorse Dad ever raised. She showed remarkable promise in training and in a few races, but hated starting chutes and was eventually brought home to be a brood mare. With her blood lines and pedigree, we hoped she would deliver several quality foals. She was pretty high-strung, but I loved to watch her run.

With several horses to feed and tend, we leased a wheat field across the state highway from our homestead for the animals to graze. They loved nibbling on the winter wheat, and one of our chores during the day was to lead the horses over and back, watching for breaks in the traffic so the animals could cross safely.

Horses are very bright - so bright they belong in any conversation about the smartest animals on the planet. We kept the horses that grazed on the wheat in a pen north of our long sheep shed. A day or two before Christmas, we had to work in that area with a tractor. I opened the fence and Dad drove the tractor inside the area.

Flyer and another horse spotted the opening and bolted, intent on savoring more of that succulent winter wheat across the highway. There was no way to close the opening quickly. They ran west from the pen to the driveway and darted north out of view.

Seconds later I heard brakes squealing and a sickening thud. Flyer had been hit by a pickup pulling....a horse trailer. The driver later told us that Flyer had started across the road, hesitated as if she realized she shouldn't be doing that, and was heading back toward the driveway and safety when she was hit. Her injuries were so severe she couldn't be saved. I still remember her struggling to get up, unable to do so because of a shattered leg.

Dad did the only thing he could.

Devastated, I walked into the shed and wept - in part because I was convinced it was my fault, and in part because we'd just lost perhaps our best horse.

"It wasn't your fault," Dad said when he found me. "There wasn't anything you could have done."

I'm sure he was right....but that holiday was stained - for me, at least - by Flyer's death. The celebrations of the season were tempered by our loss.

I thought of Flyer as I watched that puppy frolicking carelessly in the street. It looked well-fed and cared for, its coat clean and shiny. Someone obviously loved that puppy very much.

I slowed my car to a crawl as I neared and passed the pup. I didn't want someone else to go through what I did years ago, with Christmas knocking on the door.