Sometimes I wonder at the intelligence of this pup we have brought here to the farm.  About 2:00 this morning, I hear what I think is the coyotes going through.  This is not uncommon as we have quite a few coyotes here in Floyd.  Then I hear Shadow(old dog) barking like crazy.  Still not uncommon as he does not allow the coyotes to come to close to the house.  After this my sleep induced brain makes out another sound.  Jasper (young dog) in great distress.  I open the upstairs window but cannot see him, however, his distress is getting louder.  Hubby gets up and we quickly run outside to see what is going on.  Jasper has somehow managed to get in the pond.  However, he cannot get out because of the ice.  He is whimpering so loud and struggling to get out of the water with his front paws, however they can’t get any traction on the ice.  We have no idea how long this had been going on before we were awakened but he seemed to be pretty tired and definitely very scared.  I run back up to the house and get a long pole.  George uses it to break the ice on the edge but it was frozen so thick he couldn’t do much good.  Finally he has some success.  He takes the pole and pushes Jasper down the edge of the ice until  he gets to the closest place to the ground.  The pup is still struggling to get out but can’t.  I lay down flat on the ice and stretch forward and manage to grasp a front paw and pull him out.  He was extremely grateful and extremely cold.  We brought him into the house and dried him off as best we could.  As a special reward for all his hard work (and ours) he stayed in the house the remainder of the night to warm up.  I think he liked that part.  Here is another picture showing more details.

This entire adventure took about 1 hour.  We are very thankful for the warmer temperature last night.  This would have been terrible with below zero temps.  We are also thankful Jasper seems okay, as we have all come to love him.  Well, that was our night.  God Bless.