After placing her onto the shoulder, I went back to retrieve her insides from the asphalt, so the carrion eaters, ravens and such, wouldn't be surprised while feasting and meet the same fate she did. I reached down to pick up the first piece from the lane. A shock went through me...as I realized it was an unborn puppy! It wasn't her insides on the road at all, it was the life that had been inside of her! The first little one had been run over, so I quickly moved it to the shoulder. I picked up two more, both were unopened amniotic sacs. I checked them for life... but, there was none. Too much time had elapsed, they had drowned, suffocated, or were killed by the impact. The last sac was further down the road closer to where the mother was first hit. This pup was obviously ejected first and was mostly out of the sac. I could hear a faint squeaking and I saw all four of the little boy's limbs in the air slowly moving, as I approached. This little guy had taken his first breath when his mom had taken her last...

I picked him up and looked him over, he responded as I touched him. I blew a breath on his tiny wet face, and he reacted by wincing his little nose and brow, this one is alive I thought to myself. Feeling his little paws and legs, he seemed in one piece, and okay. I quickly pulled out my pocket knife and cut the sac away, and cut his umbilical which we tied later. I ran with him in my gloved hand, over to the car and handed him to my wife. I hurried back over to double check, to make sure that everything was cleaned from the road and checked the other pups again, making sure they were not playing possum, it was not to be. I arranged the pups around their mom as if they were nursing and looked into her still life like eyes, with a stroke of her brow, I gave my unspoken promise... then I ran back to the car.

We had a couple of gallons of home town spring water with us and my wife was busy cleaning the little fella up... She inspected him from his nose to the tip of his tail. He didn't even have a scratch!

He obviously went through one "heckuva way to get borned," to use an extremely appropriate country colloquialism. We spent the next two hours driving to the closest town and gathering up all kinds of puppy supplies, everything from some Puppy formula, which was all we could find. A dropper, some towels, a baby bottle for a kitten, the smallest one we could find, since he was less than 7 inches long from the tip of his tail to his nose, and maybe 6 ozs in weight! My wife determined that his squeaks were sign that he had good lungs, and his heart was strong, and it was obvious he was as hungry as hungry could be. Getting him to drink his first two teaspoons of puppy formula was easy and he was soon fast asleep inside my wife's cupped hands. He took to the little rubber nipple like a pro...

He ate strong from his first feeding, and made hardly a peep the remainder trip... he slept with the girls, curled up on the pillow nestled in their hair... and saw the sights with us, mostly asleep snuggled warmly inside our Daughter's sweater. He was the life of our vacation...