Nothing ever happens to me, I was thinking, after spending weeks having little more to report than frozen corn works better as an ice pack than mixed vegetables (not as lumpy). Maybe I'll stop writing this diary, I was thinking, because I've nothing to say. I promise not to think that anymore, it's bad luck.

Yesterday was a herding practice day. I was packing up to go, with a long list of errands to fulfill on my way home, when I heard a panicky muffled bleating from the goat pasture. Thinking that Melba had her horns caught in the fence again, I went to look, but Melba was standing there calmly chewing next to Snowdie. Where was Tule? I could hear her cries for help but she was nowhere in sight.

She was nowhere in sight because, in her goatly wisdom, she had decided to crawl under, yes under, the new, as yet un-backfilled retaining wall, and was trapped underneath a quarter-ton redwood log in a space which would be not uncommodious for a ground squirrel, but was amazingly small for a goat. I yelled for my husband, and together we levered the log up enough for me to grab her and make her back out. I heaved a big sigh of relief, we chocked up the hole she'd got into, and off I went to Gwen's.

At Gwen's, my reluctant intuition that I was at the bottom of the next hill, herding-wise, solidified. Bonnie and I were competent as long as we stayed at the beginning level. But our basic skills were not good enough for us to progress. Bonnie wasn't rating light stock well, was slicing and even splitting on her longer outruns, her flanks were sometimes flat and sometimes short. These were easy to compensate for when fetching tame stock, but when I tried to start her driving, or working more challenging stock, things fell apart in the most frustrating way. I knew I had to figure out how to go back and fix the bad habits before I could go forward. But, I didn't really know how.

Feeling somewhat discouraged, I drove toward home in a reflective mood. I stopped on the way home to buy shampoo at one store, strawberries from a roadside stand, and then took a detour into downtown Santa Cruz to the farmer's market for vegetables and peaches. This is a big, popular outdoor market right in the middle of a bustling little city, and I was happy to find a parking place only a few blocks away. The morning fog had burned off, it was now sunny, so I left the windows half down.

Returning heavily laden with groceries, I looked into my car and then did a double take. No Bonnie. She had never jumped out the window before. Oh my God. I whistled, I called, I walked up and down and around the block. No black and white blur galloping down the street, back to me. Nothing.

Then followed a terrible hour and a half. I stopped a police car and the meter maid and all the children and dog walkers and street musicians and beggars and anyone whom I thought would notice a loose dog, and gave them my phone number. I drove and walked and called. I picked up my daughter at school and sent her and her friends around the downtown on their bicycles. I printed up lost dog flyers and got a handful of pushpins and got ready to paper the neighborhood with notices. The only bright spots were that she was both ID tagged and microchipped, that she was in an area of slow, not to say clogged, traffic and many pedestrians, and that her nature was not such that it was likely she would panic or hide. I have no cell phone and no way of accessing phone messages at home--part of my backwards, Luddite way of life I now cursed myself for.

Finally I got hold of my husband, who listened to our phone messages and reported back that indeed, someone had left a message about Bonnie. He got his address--a block from where my car was parked--and I went to fetch my dog back.

"I knew she was too nice a dog to be running loose like that", her rescuer said. He was a very kind person with a genial, aged Labrador. He was impressed with what an intelligent, socially adept dog she was, and even wanted to know where he could get a dog like her. He had fed her and combed her morning-of-herding burrs out; Bonnie was not only none the worse for wear for her little adventure but seemed to have enjoyed herself thoroughly while I was losing years off my life. She had been loose for probably about five minutes, and had gotten about twenty yards away from my car. I thanked this good Samaritan over and over, but he only said, "What else could I do, with a face like that?"