Part two of this column will be published next week in the 11.06.19 edition.

 A few years back a black lab showed up at our property. JD actually lived at our place before we built the house. We called him JD (short for John Doe). Each evening he would show up and we would feed him. As the house was being built, he made his routine inspections. The sheet rock installers always changed shoes before starting their work. One day a shoe came up missing. JD was nowhere to be found. On another day a strip of sheet rock tape had been pulled off the wall, again no JD. When we moved in, the dog would show up every evening to be fed. The next morning he would be gone. We thought that he must have a job somewhere. Every day the routine was the same.

  We took JD on a competitive trail ride. As we drove down to Fort Rucker in Alabama, the dog exhibited a strange behavior. Every time we went under an overpass he would duck. He stayed in the horse trailer while we rode and we let him out around the camp in the evenings. On the last day of our ride JD decided to go for a walk. A long walk. I saw him about three hundred yards away in a large field. I started calling him, but he kept going. I began envisioning him as a Fort Rucker resident. Later that evening, he came back to the camp, so he got to take his bridge ducking trip back home.

  One day I came home from work and there was blood all over the garage floor. I found JD ln the corner with bite marks and torn flesh all over his rear. He was hurt pretty bad. We loaded him up and took him to the vet. She kept him a couple days and pieced him back together. When we picked him up, she said,” I don’t know about you, but I am mighty proud of that dog’s butt.”

I put JD in a horse stall to recuperate. After about a week, I got a call from a neighbor asking if I had seen the black dog. I told him the story and explained that JD was about to be turned out. He stated that he had been keeping him up during the day and turning him out in the evening. All this time JD had been living a double life. So the neighbor kept JD and I kept the vet bill. Now all we needed to do was find out what had attacked the dog.

  As we discussed this situation with neighbors, we found that JD was not the only one that this had happened to. There were a couple reports of dogs being killed along with a report of a missing dog. The immediate consensus was that it must be coyotes. My wife Bobbie called the Department of Natural Resources and they sent a warden to investigate. While not impossible, it seemed unlikely to be coyotes. They are generally hunting for food and not prone to expend energy attacking something that they did not plan to eat. Coyotes are blamed for many things that they do not do. We set live traps along the creek and baited them with chicken. We caught nothing.