Riley

Hi Judi,

I don’t know if I ever told you this, but the night before we came to meet Riley (then known as “Fox”) I had decided to cancel the meet. We’d been searching for just the right dog for a few months and we’d recently had a very bad experience with a large German Shepherd at another rescue. I was really afraid we would make the long drive and have yet another disappointing experience. What would be the point in driving three hours only to face yet another heartbreak? What if this, too, was the wrong dog for us? Surely we didn’t need to drive that far just to find that out, there were other dogs closer to home we could meet and adopt. My heart just wasn’t in it any more, memories of the previous experience were still fresh in my mind and I was at the point I felt that maybe we just shouldn’t do this at all.

My husband is an over-the-road trucker and when he called me on his way back that night, I told him I didn’t want to make the trip anymore and that I was going to call you in the morning and tell you to adopt him to one of the other people on the waiting list for him. Something told him we needed to meet this dog. He really felt we needed to do this, he wasn’t giving up and talked me into following through. When morning came, my heart still wasn’t in it but we made the trip anyway. I held the picture of Fox that I’d copied off the Internet (above left) in my hands all the way up there. I kept looking in his eyes and the sadness in them was just so overwhelming it brought tears to my eyes, but I just could not allow myself to get my hopes up.

We arrived and chatted a bit and then it was time to meet Fox. We watched out the window as you brought him around the front of the house and my eyes widened and the tears began to flow. I looked at my husband and he was teary-eyed, too. Fox was the absolute most gorgeous German Shepherd we’d seen in our quest to find our new furkid!

You brought him in the house, he made a circle around the room, sniffing everything in his path as we sat and watched in awe. Then he stopped and sniffed my husband, not paying him a whole lot of attention and crossed the room to me. He sniffed, laid his head in my lap and looked up at me. The look in his eyes said “Can I come home with you, please?” I looked up at my husband, crying my fool head off and he said “I think you just found your dog!” When you said we could adopt him, I thought I would burst! We filled out the paperwork and talked with you some more and then we took our boy home. It was one of the happiest days of my life.

We found out very quickly he had been taught some awesome manners. He knew the basic commands, was housebroken and crate trained. He never once tried to climb of the seats in the car, always staying in the cargo area of my SUV like a perfect gentleman and he made himself at home very quickly.

We re-named him Riley and he and his “sister” are the joy of my life! When we tell people he’s a rescue originally found as a stray, their comments always include something like “How could anyone have let this boy get away?” People stop us on our walks all the time and tell us how gorgeous our two furkids are. We literally can’t go anywhere without someone complimenting them. We are so very proud of both of them. When Riley was about a year old and before Nissa came to live with us, a man offered me $2,500.00 for him and I told him “He’s not for sale at any price!”

Here is a picture of them at Gramma and Grampa’s taken after they went swimming (they’re still slightly damp). I remember what Grampa said the first time he met Riley (we didn’t have Nissa yet). His words were “So, you finally got yourself a real dog!” Gramma absolutely adores them both!