Give those dogs a bone: pets rescue woman

Published: January 26, 2007 | 5403rd good news item since 2003

Just minutes before, Mary Katherine Truluck was walking her 1-year-old Brittany spaniel, Maggie.

The grass was wet from a recent rain, and Maggie caught the scent of a deer.

“She went real low to the ground and started going fast,” Truluck recalled while sitting in her living room with her dog on Thursday.

Maggie jerked at the leash, and Truluck lost her footing on a hill. She fell, breaking her left shoulder.

“She knew when I told her what was wrong,” Truluck said of Maggie, who started barking.

Truluck was afraid to get up and her husband, Dan, wasn’t home.

Meanwhile, Jack Hurt was sitting at the computer in his Wessell Road home with Lucy by his side. Suddenly, she ran to the back door barking for Hurt to let her out.

Truluck said Lucy came over to the fence where she had fallen, and she told the dog to, “Go get your daddy.”

Lucy knows what “go get” means, and Hurt said she could sense the urgency of the situation.

“She went tearing back to the house just as fast as she could,” Truluck said.

Lucy typically barks once when she wants to come back in the house.

“This time when she came back, she was still barking furiously,” Hurt said.

Hurt opened the door, but Lucy didn’t come inside.

When he stepped onto the back deck he heard Truluck saying, “Jack, please come help me.”

“It all happened so fast,” Hurt recalled.

He ran outside and found his neighbor sitting on the wet ground in a remote section of her back yard, not visible from the street or nearby houses.

Hurt put Maggie inside the house, helped Truluck to her feet and then called 911 and Dan Truluck.

The dogs have been friends since the Trulucks brought Maggie home the week before Thanksgiving.

Lucy speaks to her human neighbors whenever they’re out in the yard and enjoys playing with Maggie.

And when a neighbor was in need, Truluck said, the dogs’ friendship and communication was what helped her out of a scary situation.

“(Lucy’s) a real good watchdog,” she said. “They’ve trained her well.”

Published in Animals and Rescues
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