Lost and found

Maya is back home tonight, safe and apparently quite well.  I believe it was four weeks ago this weekend that she escaped from the kennel.  I've seen her at least half a dozen times since then but was never even close to catching her.  She's fast, this is a rural area, and she would just run off into the woods.  There have been a lot of sightings of her, many phone calls, but no one was ever able to get close to her.

We carried her home in the trap and carried it
indoors before letting her out.

In a crate in my office.  She seems content.

 

Finally a couple weeks ago the sightings of her were back on our side of the river, within a half mile from home.  I borrowed a live trap and set it up at a friend's house where she had been seen.  After three nights, nothing.  She has been terrorizing the garbage cans along Courthouse Road, living as a scavenger.  On Saturday we were contacted by another neighbor who had seen her feeding on their garbage and running along a creek near their house. 

 

She's only going outside on a leash from now on.

She's still scared but she will touch and be
touched once she's on a leash.

We took the trap over there and I actually had a pretty good feeling about it.  They don't just put their garbage cans out on the road for pickup.  They keep the garbage about 20 feet off the road next to their driveway, so it's always accessible to a scavenger.  We set up the trap in the morning and then went by in the evening and covered it with a canvas tarp.

 

On Sunday morning we went by the check.  I could see that the trap door was closed as soon as we turned in the driveway, but we could have caught any dog, a raccoon, or even a cat.  It was Maya, however, laying there rather calmly.  She had eaten the bowl of canned and dry food that we had used to bait the trap.  Surprisingly, she looked good.  Although she had been rather emaciated the last time I had seen her, she now had gained weight, even more than she had when she left.  She's been eating well on neighborhood garbage, someone's been putting out dog food, or she's been feeding on a dead deer in the woods somewhere.  Whatever it was, she had found a food source and it was keeping her in the area, finally giving me the opportunity to deploy the trap to good advantage.  The girl has got some survival skills, I'll give her that.

 

 

It's too early to write a "happily ever after" ending.   There's still a lot of work to be done and I'm far from certain of the outcome, but at least we've got another chance, and at least she's not living in the wild anymore.