An unusual thing happened today

I went walking with the dog in the mountains, which given my schedule almost does count as an unusual thing, certainly not as usual as I would prefer, but it is not what I am aiming to discuss in this post.

What was unusual was that Chuck ran away from me!  He looked quite guilty while doing it.  There is a place where we normally stop for me to put on his leash, and he came almost up to it, but just out of reach, and when I called him to come over he gave me a guilty look out of the corner of his eye and ran around me and off down the road.

I decided to stay where I was and wait for him to come back to me.

I waited and waited.

Eventually another man and dog came up the road and I asked if he had seen Chuck, which he had, but quite a long way down the hill, so I went on following him.  Got around the corner to meet a bigger street to see a flash of his tail as he went down a narrow overgrown little walkway.

It was at that moment that I remembered that his girlfriend is in heat right now.

Ah ha.

I had no trouble locating him busy and happy!

The resident (male) German Shepherd didn't seem overly fussed about Chuck, ah, intruding on his territory, but wasn't too happy to see me.  I had little choice but to go into their yard though and get Chuck, and the Shephard sounded like there as a lot more bark than bite.  I have also gotten quite used to large angry sounding dogs and have at this point a pretty effective tone of voice for deterring them.

Chuck fortunately was busy enough in his work (cough cough) that he was not hard to catch!

I was worried that she'd come all the way home with us though.  Fortunately one of the owners then appeared and shooed her away as I left.

When I got home, Chuck sang a wooing song for some time afterwards while I laughed at him.

Here it is: