your dog to make good decisions by
giving her a safe amount of freedom
and not always interrupting her natu-
ral behaviors,” Quann says. “We want
owners to help their dogs but not
micromanage them.” The bottom line,
she notes, is if a trip will be more stress-
ful with your dog, leave him or her at
home.
I knew Susan questioned whether
I’d done enough to keep Merle safe.
My possible carelessness gnawed at
me, too, so I called our longtime vet
and friend, Charlie Meynier, owner of
Vail Valley Animal Hospital, to try to
get some closure. He assured me I had
done everything I could to save Merle.
“He crawled into that cave to secure
shelter, which is typical for a dog in
distress who is on the verge of dying—
they hide and hunker down,” he said.T
hree weeks later, on July 8, a
real estate agent named Dana
Dennis Gumber was preparing
a listing in East Vail, less than a mile
from the Deluge Lake trailhead where
Merle and my journey had started
off. She noticed a ragged-looking
dog near the property’s deck and as-
sumed he belonged to the landscap-
ers working on the complex. But when
she returned to the house two hours
later, the crew had left and the dog
was curled by the front door. Gumber
had noticed him limping earlier, and
now she saw that he was filthy, weak,
and skeletally thin. She ushered the
dog into her car, then took him to herEagle-Vail home for food and water.
Miraculously, Gumber found that
the dog still had a collar. That after-
noon, she left a voice mail on my cell:
“I have Merle. Please call me.”
I’d left town a few days earlier for a
work trip to Austria. I got the call and
FaceTimed Susan back home immedi-
ately, where it wasn’t yet dawn. Neither
of us knew what the message meant.
Susan assumed it was a sick prank,
but she agreed to call the woman back
that morning. A few hours later, we
had an answer: Merle was alive, Susan
said. “I’m getting him this afternoon.”
When she got to Gumber’s house, she
collapsed to the floor as soon as she
saw Merle, gently stroking his battered
body. He seemed to recognize her,
though his wandering eyes made her
think he’d suffered some brain damage.
Susan drove him to the Vail Valley
Animal Hospital, where emergency
veterinarian Rebecca Hall found that
Merle had two detached retinas, a
punctured lung, facial lacerations,
and sores on his hind legs. He had lost
about 12 pounds—almost a third of his
weight. His stool showed that he’d sur-
vived on pine needles and berries. He
was tattered, but, remarkably, he didn’t
need stitches and none of his bones
were broken. Dr. Hall was amazed that
Merle had walked away from falling so
far. He had hunkered down in a cave,
likely gone into a coma, then woken
up and, seriously injured, covered
20 miles in 20 days to return home.
“You don’t hear a lot of stories about88 february 2019
Reader’s Digest Drama in Real Life