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was Neville swallowed by the woods?
Saturday, June 22 2024
location: 940 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY
As you may recall, I have a 120v Ryobi-branded hammer drill that experienced brush failure last weekend. In an effort to replace those brushes, this weekend I'd brought a pair of brushes that were nearly the right size. They were a little thick in one dimension, so I used a grinding wheel to slim them down enough to fit in the spring-equipped brush cages in the drill. When I powered it up, the hammer drill seemed to work great, though it seemed to be throwing an unusually large number of sparks out off it commutator. With this drill working, I was able to do the aggressive sanding necessary to smooth away the rough edges left by the chainsaw on my new stool I've been working on, the one made from a block of white ash. Unfortunately, for whatever reason the new brushes survived for less than an hour. I don't know how they failed, but after I'd done most of the sanding, the hammer drill ground to a halt and refused to spin after that. I should mention that it was raining while I was doing this, so I was forced to do my sanding in the basement. That meant I probably inhaled an unhealthy amount of wood dust. But lung health is not something I've made much of a priority in my life.
Later the sun fitfully came out from behind the clouds and Gretchen and I decided to go down to the lake. Along the way, we saw Charlotte leave the trail, tracking some creature whose trail she could sense. Neither she nor Neville ever made it down to the dock. While Gretchen dove into the lake and went for a swim, I paddled to the beaver dam at the outflow and noted how low the water was at it. There had been a lot of rain last night and this morning, but the lake is so big that it takes time for all that runoff to refill its top few inches. (I could hear the roar of water running down the steep rapids above its main inflow along the south lakeshore.)
Back at the cabin, I was doing various sedentary things up in the loft area and beginning to worry about our dogs, who still had yet to return. At some point I thought maybe I could hear them barking. So I set off on foot towards the backwards cliffs along our boundary with Shane, which is where I'd thought I'd heard the barking coming from. This time I went a little further south into Shane's parcel to get a better sense of it. In so doing, I found a second small ravine running parallel to the larger one that forms the backwards cliffs. Wow, Shane's little seven acre parcel sure is rugged! If he ever builds a dock on the lake, getting down to it and back is never going to be a pleasant experience. I made it down to the lake and then back to our dock without ever hearing any barking dogs. So I walked straight back uphill to the cabin, walking along an east-west alignment where I want to make a trail some day, as it would be a faster route to the lake than our existing trail.
Using various leftovers, Gretchen assembled a delicious bean & kale pie on a "crust" of polenta. Not long after we'd eaten, Charlotte arrived. She looked fine, but she was acting weird (I would say she seemed a bit sheepish and perhaps a little spooked), which made me wonder Neville had experienced some misadventure in the woods. I decided to walk the dock trail in hopes of catching him as he slowly made his way cabinward, vastly outpaced by his spry young sister. But I got all the way to the lake without ever seeing him. Again I returned to the cabin using that east-west alignment.
I told Gretchen my concerns, so she thought maybe we could have Charlotte lead us to wherever Neville happened to be, since she likely knew better than we did where he was. With Charlotte leading the way, we walked down the dock trail calling for Neville and periodically asking Charlotte, "Where's Neville?" She led us off trail into the woods along the alignment I'd been walking and then started running, getting our hopes up. But she was just chasing a chipmunk or something. She didn't get that we wanted her to take us to Neville. (I'd had a good experience in the past getting one dog to find another, but that was Eleanor and the dog being found was Ray & Nancy's old dog Suzy.) Eventually we gave up on Charlotte giving us useful information. Gretchen headed back to the cabin and I walked along the cliff line, looking to see if perhaps Neville had fallen and was in a crumpled heap at the bottom. Later I did another survey of the cliffs nearer the cabin.
It was getting late in the day, so Gretchen and I were out of other ideas, so we decided to go for a drive up and down Woodworth Lake Road. (We managed to get Charlotte to hop into the car with us; this might've been the first time she'd ever done this without Neville also getting in the car.) Perhaps Neville had found something deliciously non-vegan at the redneck camp. We looked out both sides of the car as I drove in hopes we'd see his large white form pop into view. But it didn't. We ended up pulling into Ibrahim's driveway to ask if he or any of his family had seen a dog matching Neville's description. They were all out on the deck and said they hadn't. Then the two kids wanted to play with Charlotte. They thought she might run after a stick they'd throw like other dogs, but all Charlotte would do was walk up to a stick they'd dropped in front of her and carry it away to chew on. Though we were stressed out about Neville, the conversation was pleasant and we arranged to come back tomorrow for a tour of the latest state of the inside of Ibrahim and his family's A-frame.
The sun was setting and fog was rolling in, but I made one last foray down to the lake to look for Neville. At the dock, the fog was so thick that one could only see a fraction of the way out into the lake. I thought I might kayak around the lake looking for Neville, but with visibility so bad, I decided to just walk along the lakeshore north of the dock and then back to the cabin on the trail that switchbacks up through a set of cliffs. I called and looked for Neville, but he never materialized.
Back in the cabin, Gretchen and I sat around feeling glum as the outdoors became cloaked in darkness. At this point we were down to two theories: either Nevile somehow got lost in the woods (which seemed unlikely) or he'd injured himself in a way that made it impossible for him to drag himself home. The thought of him being hurt and lonely in the woods was terrible, but if he could come home, why hadn't he? I was already bracing myself for his loss, though Neville just disappearing was never going to give us closure. It's one thing for an old sick cat to vanish and quite another for that to happen to a reasonably healthy dog. It made me understand better why the widows of POWs are so interesting in retrieving the remains of their lost partners. "What if Neville never comes home?" I asked, and Gretchen was horrified at the thought. If he didn't come home tonight, she said we'd be staying at the cabin at least one more night.
I felt a sickness in my stomach, so I eventually decided to go lie in bed while Gretchen researched options for dog tracking technology to prevent a day like today from ever happening again. Since most of the Adirondack area through which the dogs wander does not have any cellphone reception, I told Gretchen to look to see if any trackers utilize LoRa technology.
As I lay in bed staring at the ceiling (I had the light on), it occurred to me that there might be a third possibility for why Neville hadn't come home. Perhaps he'd found something so amazing that he couldn't bring himself to leave it. Neville loves to guard food resources, keeping particularly great finds all for himself even if they're far too big for him to eat on his own. Something just snaps in his brain and he can't make himself stop guarding, even when he really knows he should. I came out into the great room and proposed this idea to Gretchen, and it gave her some hope. It was the first such hopeful idea we'd come up with in this whole ordeal. We decided to both take diphenhydramine so we'd be able to sleep tonight, since without some sort of chemical assistance we'd likely be tossing and turning all night. Gretchen then resumed reading her book and I went down to the basement to do some more sanding on my white ash stool.
Not long after that, I heard an excited stomping on the floor upstairs and Gretchen yelled down to me that Neville had arrived! I ran up the stairs, and sure enough, there he was. He looked perfectly happy, if a little exhausted. Gretchen prepared him a bowl of kibble and we fawned over him as he snorted down his food. We were never going to take Neville's presence in our life for granted again! Charlotte also seemed initially happy at Neville's return, though she also seemed a bit wary, as if something bad had happened between them in the woods earlier today. If Neville had been guarding something (which now seemed like a certainty), perhaps this had involved being mean to Charlotte. That would explain her weirdness when she returned this afternoon.
Dark clouds coming in from the west over Woodworth Lake this afternoon. Click to enlarge.
The glassy surface of the lake later this evening during one of my many hunts for Neville. Click to enlarge.
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