Six-Inch Nine-Patch

 

When Brian Spies’ 10-month-old German shepherd went missing, he assumed she’d become someone’s lunch. “We have bears, mountain lions, coyotes, foxes,” Brian said, speaking of their home in the forests near Lake Tahoe. Any of those animals could have been responsible for Luna’s absence. Brian asked his friends to keep an eye out for his dog, but he didn’t hold out much hope. Then, more than a day after Luna’s disappearance, Luka Bogdanovich was driving down the road. “I looked left,” he said, “and I see something 25 feet up a tree. I’ll be darned. Holy cow – that’s a dog!” Luka called Brian, who showed up with an extension ladder. “He kind of reached up and grabbed her, and bear hugged her,” Luka recounted, “Walked down the ladder with no hands, as carefully as possible.” Luna’s happy to be back on solid ground. “If she ever gets lost again, we’ll look up,” Luka says, “because she can climb trees.”