The prisoner.

Yesterday morning I was sitting at my computer (like I do 19 or so hours a day, it feels like) when I heard something fairly large (and alive) fall or jump into the sunken basement window a few feet away from where I was sitting. I've seen just about everything in this window: frogs, toads, lizards, salamanders, shrews, opossums, mice, rats, at least one rabbit, squirrels, etc. What I had this time was a white, long-haired lap dog of some sort. Great.

I went out to try and get the damn dog out of the hole without having it bite me. When I came to the window I could hear it growling. The window is less than three feet down and this dog was less than a foot tall. I quickly made friends with the dog and got it out of the window. Then it wouldn't leave.

At first the dog more or less ignored me, but it wouldn't go away. I assumed it lived around here somewhere, but I didn't have a clue where. It didn't have a tag. It didn't even have a collar.

Later when I came back home from an errand, the dog was sitting on the bench on the front porch waiting for me. I should of just ignored him/her/it (too much fur to tell) and went into the house, but instead I went and rubbed the dog's head. (I'm a sucker for animals, what can I say?) Then I made the even bigger mistake of letting the dog in the house briefly. He got really excited and ran around sniffing everything in sight. I caught him, put him outside in front of a bowl of water, and ran back to get in the house before the dog caught on. The dog chased me back to the house. I made it stay outside, but then it started scratching at the door. I went back downstairs, hoping the dog would leave.

Occasionally I would come back upstairs and look out of the windows to see if the dog was out there. It was. It just wouldn't leave. So I stayed in the rest of the day, held prisoner by a dog that probably weighed about seven pounds.