I could hear the wife yelling at the blind masked heeler from the front door, her voice getting more desperate with each shout.

We've been getting concerned over the masked heeler's hearing. As she lost her vision, she seemed to be able to aim herself precisely by the sound of your voice. A simple shout, and she'd start on a beeline towards you. But lately, warning shouts just seem to confuse her, making her spin in circles or start wandering right and left, hoping her feet can find some surface she recognizes.

So by the wife's third desperate shout, I was rushing past her out the front door in my underwear, afraid I might have to rescue a blind heeler from traffic.

But no, she was again just whirling around on the front sidewalk, her muzzle high in the air, apparently unable to find her way back to the house.

The heeler, that is. Not the wife, who was more modestly standing in the doorway in her nightgown.

I had to grab her by the shoulders and steer her towards the front walk and steps. (The heeler, not the wife.) Safely inside, we both had worried looks on our faces as we pondered a possible future with a heeler who might be both blind and deaf.

"She just wouldn't get away from the back end of your truck," the wife fretted.

Oh. Well. There's a dead deer in there, I explained.

No wonder the heeler didn't want to come in.

Worry averted.