“I wouldn’t believe it if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes,” Zeiler says. “It’s just crazy.”
It happened last month. Zeiler, who lives in the Mission Valley, about a mile from Post Creek and four or five from St. Ignatius, says he was sitting on his front porch one evening while his two dogs, and his stepdaughter’s dog, played in the yard.
“I went inside to get a cup of coffee, and when I came back out the older female and male came up and sat by me,” Zeiler says. “I heard something that didn’t sound right, and then these two started barking at the sky.”
Zeiler went into the yard and scanned the horizon.
“And I could see a bird packing the other damn dog away,” he says.
The bird, he believes, was an owl. The dog, he knows for sure, was a Miniature Pinscher, or “Min Pin.”
“I ran in the house and grabbed my shotgun, and got back out in the yard before I realized if I shot the bird, I’d kill the dog,” Zeiler says. “So I just watched the bird fly north and west, and out of sight.”
***
All three dogs in the yard that day were Min Pins. The one carted off by the owl was Montana, a 3-year-old, 10-pound female belonging to Zeiler’s stepdaughter Bobbie Jo Wheeler.
The other two, Buddy and Daisy, are Zeiler’s. Daisy is Montana’s mother.
“I was devastated,” says Wheeler, Montana’s owner. “She’s like my kid.”
Zeiler searched for Montana with no luck. About 10 days later, his nephew saw a flier someone had put up at Rod’s Harvest Foods in St. Ignatius.
The people who put up the flier had found a Min Pin in their field.
“They found her by a haystack, about 3-1/2 miles from me,” Zeiler says. “I guess it took them three or four days before they could get her to come to them so they could even feed her and take her picture for the flier.”
Wheeler wasn’t convinced until she saw Montana. “I thought, ‘no way,’ ” she says. “I’m not that lucky.”
What exactly happened that led to the owl and dog parting company no one knows, but Zeiler believes it’s entirely possible it happened in flight, and Montana tumbled out of the sky and happened to fall into the haystack.
What he is sure of is that, after connecting with the dog’s finders and making arrangements to pick up Montana, Zeiler loaded Buddy and Daisy in his vehicle and took off.
And before he got to where Montana was, he’d lost Buddy.
Zeiler says he was having trouble locating the place where Montana had been rescued, and pulled into a dairy farm where he knew the owners.
“I had the little male on a leash, and he saw a cat or something and jerked the leash right out of my hand and tore off,” he says.
Buddy was gone in an instant. They looked and looked and looked. Partway through the search, Zeiler left and picked up a relieved Montana.
“She had one scab and a puncture mark right below it, but other than that she was fine,” Zeiler says.
They returned to the dairy farm, where Zeiler searched high and low for Buddy, calling out his name and whistling for the Min Pin, until 2 a.m.
“I finally gave up, went home and slept for three or four hours, then went back,” he says. “I drove in up by the barn, got out, whistled and yelled, and heard one little yip.”
He found Buddy inside the barn. His leash had gotten hung up on a chunk of concrete, ending his cat-chasing adventures, at least for the time being.
And so they were all, finally, reunited, a week and a half after one dog was carted off from a yard and flown away, hanging underneath an owl, and a day after another was enticed away by the sight of a cat.
“I wouldn’t believe it if somebody told me a story like that,” Zeiler says, and he’ll understand if you choose not to.
“But that’s what happened,” he adds.
Montana’s a different dog now, according to Wheeler.
“She had a big-dog personality,” Wheeler says. “Now she’s very cautious. It made her realize she’s just a tiny thing.”
(Missoulian - May 31, 2014)
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