Doggie, the stray dog with super sixth sense

As the construction of our vacation home in Alwar (India), near Sariska Tiger Sanctuary was in progress, Jeet, my wife heard a loud cry of a small stray dog out on the road. What she saw horrified her. A man, holding the dog from his ears, after giving a couple of rounds in the air, threw him on the ground. He had presumably punished the dog for chasing his pigs. The dog got up and ran towards our house straight into the arms of Jeet. She immediately took the dog on her lap, patted him and gave milk to drink. Since that fateful day the dog continued to come every day to get the love he got from us, and the food we so fondly served him. By and by Doggie, as we named him, had become a part of our family, staying in the house the whole day and leaving late in the evening to sleep with his family of stray dogs. Indeed, he enjoyed the best of the two worlds, his own free world of stray dogs as well as ours, as our very loving pet dog. In his fraternity he was a filthy rich fellow who was never worried for his next meal, and wore woolens in the cold winter days, hand knitted especially for him by Jeet. All other stray dogs gave him due regard for his riches, as we found on our walks when he could cross through the territory of other stray dogs without any fear or a fight.

Animals are known for their sixth sense to smell a coming calamity. Doggie had it super, as we experienced one day during our walk. Doggie was with us when we decided to go for a walk, longer than usual, up to the scenic lake some miles away. We had hardly covered half the distance when Doggie stopped and would not move a step further in spite of our repeated calls to come. We continued to walk thinking that after stopping for a while he would run to catch up with us. But what we saw next compelled us to discontinue our walk. Doggie was sitting right in the middle of the road, ready to let a car or a truck run over him if we did not return immediately. Panicked for his life, we let Doggie prevail and returned home.

Next morning when he came, we gave Doggie an extra warm hug and gourmet meal, made specially for him by Jeet. The morning newspaper had reported that a tiger had walked out of the Sariska Tiger Sanctuary in search of new territory and was last seen in the vicinity of the same scenic lake that Doggie did not let us make it to during our walk. The forest guards were still frantically looking for the tiger, while we thanked Doggie for using his sixth sense to save us from the likely encounter with the ferocious king of the forest at large.