"We have your Siberian Husky"

Said the friendly voice from the Humane Society. The chip the vet had put in worked. So we drove down to get our dog. On the 45 minute drive I was thinking about so many things...How did he end up at a shelter 32 miles from our house? Was he ok? Had his health deteriorated from the heartworm? Would he remember us...After all we only had him for a few days. But something inside me knew this was our dog...the whole time he was gone I couldn't shake this thought.

When we arrived we asked how he ended up here. They said that a lady not far from our house had been keeping him, she apparently 'collects' stray dogs. She was going to keep him but her son saw my post on Craig's List explaining about his heartworm status. She could not afford the treatment so her son convinced her to turn him in to the shelter.

I must say we were annoyed that she had not taken him to any vet to be scanned for a chip when she first found him. They do it for free. and it would have meant he could have started his treatment earlier. But when they brought him out of the kennel he was well fed and flea free!

I can't say he ran up me for a heartfelt reunion but he seemed to remember us and after all that he had been through I didn't blame him for being a little reserved.

And so we brought him home. And as you may have guessed, he was the best dog in the world. In our world anyway. He seemed to understand that he had found his forever home and through his whole life he seemed grateful. Sometimes it was little things like suddenly blocking my path with his body to stop me from stepping on a big centipede. Other times it was just him showing his trust by standing next to me as I held a running garden hose, as he was very afraid of hoses and water being sprayed at him.

After he recovered from his heartworm treatments and was cleared we had many adventures on our walks together. We found all kinds of weird stuff...eels in trees...a complete pig skeleton...and one time some sort of skeleton on the beach that was like nothing I ever saw before.  We saw live things too... Hawaiian Monk Seals,   mongooses and oh so many feral cats.

One time a man at the park where we frequently walked asked if I would take two million dollars for him, of course the answer was a rock solid NO!

How did he get such an extraordinary name? When we brought him home for good we tried to come up with a name that reflected his situation and that he could live up to. So we choose the Hawaiian work 'Moku' which has several meanings in Hawaiian, one being 'safe harbor'. We wanted him to know he was safe, now and forever. We used to play ball in the yard in the evenings and Moku would run like the wind...I say the wind but it was actually more like thunder. His mighty paws thundered on the ground. And So he became Mighty Moku Thunderpaws.

More about our adventures and Moku's life in future posts.