Well, you see we are feeding out some sheep for the Arizona National Livestock show in December, I think I've mentioned it before. So Chris usually feeds it its morning and night feedings and I do the afternoon one. Chris takes the dog out with him in the morning and evidently after he fed it the dog started screwing around and he had to go after her. While doing that he forgot one VERY important thing. We'll get there in a minute.
So I was getting reading to go work at Kid's Club at our church, something I do every Wednesday. I took the dog out of the back yard to let her do her thing before I had to put her in her kennel, and when we went out, I planned on feeding the sheep. I discovered that Chris didn't chain the gate shut (since he had to chase after the dog) and it was wide open and the sheep was gone. Nowhere to be found. I quickly called Chris to tell him what happened, and since I was in a hurry to get to kids club, I didn't have a whole lot of time to look around for him. I knew he had been gone for a while because he hadn't eaten all of his feed for when Chris fed him at 6:30.
You see, we have a lot of the neighbor's dogs that roam through our property. I thought for sure they busted through the gate and chased down the sheep and had their lunch, courtesy of our checkbook. Chris swung by in the middle of checking on his turkeys and drove all around, down by the tracks and all through our vineyard, and nothing. No sheep to be found. Chris had been having the week from hell anyways and this was just the icing on the cake. Poor guy was sick.
This all happened on Wednesday.
Thursday evening Chris was working a little later than usual, so that gave me some time to finish up what I was doing in the backyard. Fighting off the dog, so I could dig a hole to plant a new tree. Evidently she thought it would be way better to attack the shovel, making it very hard to dig a hole without chopping her paw off. Anyways, while I was in the backyard, a truck pulled into our half circle driveway and the guy got out of the truck and came to the gate to our backyard. I had no idea who this guy was or what he wanted. This is how the conversation went:
Him: "You guys have a sheep, right?"
Me: "Yeah, but he got out."
Him: "I found him."
Me: I'm thinking "This guy is going to tell me he found him the the field over by his house all torn apart by dogs and being eaten by vultures."
Him: "I have him tied up to my tractor in my backyard"
Me: "WHAT?? REALLY??" I almost jumped over the gate and hugged the guy. Seriously.
Him: "Yeah, he was just wondering around and I caught him and tied him up."
Seriously, people. There are still nice, honest people out there. I could not have been more excited. You have no idea. Come to find out this guy lives at the end where our street dead ends. He said they were going to town and would let us know when they got back and we could come pick him up. I immediately called Chris screaming that the neighbor found the sheep & it WASN'T dead!! So when he got home, we loaded up the popper and headed down the road.
Yesterday, I made them a batch of cookies and we took 'em over to their house last night. They invited us in to sit down. We met his wife and their two daughters. Truly amazed that the sheep was still alive.
It was nice to meet some of our neighbors, but we couldn't have definitely done it under different circumstances. That's for sure!
Sheep is doing well & Chris won't ever forget to chain the gate shut.
