To. The. Moon. ALICE.

So we've got a little time on our hands. I got a call from one of the stakeholders, saying they wouldn't be in until sometime mid-day tomorrow. There's bread in the breadmaker, it unexpectedly rained like hell overnight, and I got to thinking 'let's take an afternoon walky, and see how our friends' new culverts are holding up; see if there's any new erosion. By the time we get back, the bread'll be done.'

So we bee-lined down the slope, across the wash, up the opposite ridge, and right across till we got to the cliff. This clif isn't exactly Everest, right? I mean technically it's a cliff, but there are lots of places even I can get up and down it. So I didn't think anything about it, just looked for a likely place to go down.


Ghost can pretty much sprint up and down any surface in the desert, no matter how vertical. Magnus does pretty good. Fritz, not so hot. Little Bear, of course, is still learning. Plus he's got those stumpy little legs.

So I wasn't very surprised when he got a few feet down in the rocks, got scared, and started yelling for help. (This post isn't about Little Bear.) I coaxed and called, and he refused to budge another inch. Crap, this was holding us up. I looked down to the meadow between the cliff and the wash: Ghost was already down there, of course. To my surprise, so was Fritz. I was stuck now; LB wasn't moving, so Magnus and I went back up and walked along the top to find an easier way for Little Bear. This post still isn't about Little Bear.


We find a spot he finds acceptable and head down. This is taking time - truth is that it's taking a lot of time, and this was supposed to be a quicky. I'm getting a little annoyed. Ghost joins us halfway down, and we all go to the meadow together.

Fritz is nowhere to be seen. I wait for him for a minute, and start to call. Wait some more. No Fritz. Fritz has disappeared like the earth swallowed him.

If Ghost pulled this, I wouldn't give it a thought. He does it all the time, and he always knows where we are even if I don't know where he is. I don't worry about Ghost. But Fritz has never, ever pulled this. He always stays pretty close to Magnus, and Magnus always stays close to me. But now he's just gone. I'm starting to worry. I search and call, search and call. No Fritz.

After maybe a half hour of this, I'm starting to freak. They're all my boys; I don't love one more than the other and it'd kill me to lose any of them. And Fritz can be such an idiot; he may have gotten himself into real trouble somehow. What the hell am I going to do? He just isn't here!

There's a dim possibility he took it into his head to go home. Either way I'm afraid of losing the puppy, who's getting pretty tired anyway. I'll go back home, lock the boys in Gitmo, lose the rifle, get some water, take the bread out of the maker, and go back myself. No way I'm calling it a day until I find Fritz.

Of course you know what happened next. We went back up the cliff, across the ridge, and I'm heading back down toward our loop of the wash. And who should I meet but...


And he's all like "What?" And I don't know whether to hug him or wring his neck. Y'know, this isn't the sort of thing you should do to a guy with an AK47.