The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Rosebush

We took a walk through our neighborhood Sunday afternoon, and as we were making our way home, my girlfriend suggested we detour down a little-traveled street parallel to ours. We were approaching a house with a fence made of vertical bars around its perimeter when we saw a little dog running toward the corner closest to us. It started barking in a hoarse, pipsqueak voice, running from point to point along the fence, clearly rather put out by our presence.

We laughed a little. We both love dogs and comment on whichever ones we see when we're out. This one was some kind of bizarre mix, like a Yorkshire terrier crossed with a poodle or Brussels Griffon. It was really small—note more than eight pounds—and had curly hair that got in the way of its eyes. The little guy was a strange-looking dog, so we continued to laugh a little.

As we were passing by the fence, my girlfriend said to him, "Oh, you're so cranky!"

He redoubled his efforts, bounding around the front yard, barking up a storm, ricocheting off the fence and generally being pissed off. As we got toward the center of the fence, we were at our closest proximity to him. This infuriated him, and he turned to spin up another furious protest...and ran through what looked like a severely trimmed back, possibly dead rose bush. His barks turned to screams as a branch broke off and stuck to him.

Our smiles immediately dropped. He was yelping and still running around the yard, stuck between a V of branches with thorns on them. "Oh my god," my girlfriend said.

I tried to beckon the little dog over to the fence so I could try to remove the branch, but he wasn't having any of it. He was utterly panicked. We looked to see if anyone inside the house was coming out. Nothing. The screams were loud enough to start drawing the attention of the neighbors. We looked around and shrugged our shoulders, and I thought I was going to have to try to scale the fence to help the little dog. He ran around the corner of the house, still screaming bloody murder, and then it stopped.

"I guess someone in the house got him?" my girlfriend said, I think trying to convince us both.

"I hope he's not dead," I said.

We walked on, unable to really do anything about the situation. By the end of the block we were already chuckling about it, but we still felt bad.