I haven’t posted much (or at all) dur­ing these last few weeks. The rea­son is, that I haven’t had the time or the heart. Four weeks ago this evening, we came home from work and our dog Scully was not in the yard.

We spoke to some neigh­bours who had seen her that morn­ing run­ning in the street and tried to call her over, but she’d been pan­icked by the thun­der and light­ning and didn’t respond. We rang the after hours ranger and the local vet and drove around all the places she’d last been seen. I was con­vinced that when the rangers office opened the next morn­ing, I’d call and she’d be there.

The next morn­ing I rang the ranger as soon as they opened, but they didn’t have my dog. I rang all the neigh­bour­ing coun­cils — noth­ing. Vets. Noth­ing. I left work early and posted notices around the local shop­ping cen­tres and dropped fly­ers in let­ter boxes around my area.

We did the same thing the next day, and the next day, and the next. Notices in all the papers. Posted on an Aus­tralian lost pets forum. Bugged the rangers. Vis­ited the pounds myself. Calls started com­ing in. Peo­ple had seen a white shep­herd Mon­day after­noon, Tues­day after­noon, Wednes­day. Promised to try and grab her if they saw her again. Then noth­ing. I made posters and plas­tered them on street lights in my sub­urb and those nearby.

The third week, there were a lot of promis­ing calls in an area a good fif­teen min­utes drive from us. We turned our poster assault on that area, door-knocked, flyer-bombed. Got an address where this dog was seen. It turned out to be a male, not my dog. Got out of the yard a lot.

Then on Fri­day, Dave took the call we’d been dread­ing. Some­one had hit our dog with their car, on the free­way at night, a cou­ple of days after she dis­ap­peared. There was noth­ing they could do to avoid her. They’d called local vets but obvi­ously not the same ones I had, or per­haps they didn’t put two and two together, white shep­herds are unusual and often mis­taken for other breeds.

So that’s it. The rea­son why I haven’t had time to post. Or felt like post­ing. We’re mov­ing into our new house this week. I picked the block because it was oppo­site a park, and I thought that would be great for Scully. We’re tak­ing deliv­ery of our new kit­tens next week. I picked the breed because they’re known for stand­ing up to and get­ting along well with large, bois­ter­ous but sweet-natured dogs. Every photo I look at has a white ear or a tail tip or some­thing in it. I miss her an enor­mous amount.