I'll admit it. 

Seven months ago, my life was pretty darn perfect. I lived on a rual hillside of a mountain in warm Puerto Rican sun. Since, I am not good at maps, so I'm not entirely sure where in Puerto Rico I lived or what cities were nearby. But I DO know that there was this river.

Man, that river.

That river was my first home. Every day it was my job to run down to that river and make sure at least SOMEONE was making good use of it. It was as if nothing else in this world existed besides me and that river. I would swim all day back and forth and back and forth just reveling in the sensation of the cool water rushing past me as I tried to keep up (Incidentally, this river is also where I developed my need for speed, but more about that later ...). 

The river is also where I saw the Nice Ladies for the first time.

The Nice Ladies (I never learned their human names) always came to wach me swim. I could hear them laughing at how silly my behavior was while splashing around in the water trying to catch the little fish swimming at my feet. But I didn't care. I just knew how to have fun and they didn't. 

One day, the nice ladies tried to approach me. At a young age, I became very skilled at assessing people's threat level. I was always able to quickly tell if someone was kind, or if they were coming closer to me to harm me. After watching these Nice Ladies watching me for a few days, I knew they meant me no harm. A couple of times, I heard some of them say that I was an older dog with "a nice disposition" and that I was "the perfect dog for adoption." They also referred to me as a sato, which is slang in Puerto Rico for stray dogs ... at the time I had no idea what these words meant.

After a few days of watching me, the Nice Ladies came down, I'm assuming, to play in the river with me. I tried to show them how to use their tail as a rudder as while swimming, but they were more interested in petting me. One of the Nice Ladies gently took my head in her hands and looked inside my mouth. She appeared to me counting my teeth (I don't think she had quite perfected the art of assessing people's threat level). 

Then one day, everything changed. 

I remember waking up next to my friend, Chique (I'll talk about her in another story, but here is her picture), in an abandoned barn we had turned into our bedroom for the night. I always loved waking up early in the morning and still do. Chique was a late sleeper, so I had to deploy a few of the tricks I learned to wake her up. I yawned loudly and made an exaggerated stretch in Chique's direction and "accidentally" poked her with my paw (as an aside, this works wonderfully for your hands that feed you too). This woke her up and soon we were off, racing down to the river.

Right before we broke through the clearing by the edge of the river, I felt an imbalance. Something didn't smell right, something just didn't feel right. When we got to the river, I saw the Nice Ladies and realized that feeling must have been them. But I noticed that they were holding what looked like the vines from the trees Chique and I used to run past. 

One of the Nice Ladies, the one that looked in my mouth, took on of these vine-like things and put it on my back. When I didn't shrug it off, she carefully and slowly wrapped it around my neck. Not tightly, but loosly just behind my ears. I didn't feel threatened, so I didn't try to run or try to take off her vine. Afterall, the Nice Ladies always brough Chique and I something to eat. I figured, if I let her put this vine on my neck, she would give me a treat. The Nice Ladies also put a vine on Chique and they seemed to want us to walk with them to a path to the left of the river. Since there might be food at the end of this little routine, Chique and I followed them. 

When we came to the end of the path, all I saw was a big white truck. 

And that was the last time I saw my special river.