When my dogs escaped, I learned the true meaning of neighbourly love

Poet and artist Frieda Hughes’s pet huskies escaped through an open gate – and panic set in

GATE

Rescue huskies can be unpredictable, kill sheep,

Eat ducks, dismantle pheasants and smaller dogs,

And will run for miles if loose, forgetting home as if born of wolf,

All as easily as slipping through a gate unbolted from the inside,

Left open wide by a contractor working on power lines at the roadside.

He’d climbed the six-foot fence in order to unlock

All its reasons for being otherwise inaccessible, while trespassing,

This gate offers no entry from the outside;

No handle, no clue that it is not an immobile fixture,

But now my dogs had escaped.

Driving up and down the road, my voice carrying across the fields

Like a plaintive siren, I prayed for the safety of sheep,

Rabbits, squirrels, cows and horses.

My head rattled with the emptiness of my lost dogs.

Their absence was as sharply felt as an unexpected death.

And then, as suddenly as they were lost, they were found

In the arms of two different men.

The dog tags had been read

And the dogs were waiting at the end of a phone call,

Ready to come home again.