Escaped Shih Tzus Caught on Berriedale Road

Aaron Smyth was coming down Berriedale Road on his morning run, a little before first light, when he saw two small dogs on the footpath ahead of him, a short way up from the corner of Wallcrest Road. The road was already carrying the early traffic into Hobart, and one of the dogs, Duke, was darting along the kerb at its edge, stopping and starting at every passing set of headlights. The other, Henri, had found a discarded takeaway wrapper on the nature strip and showed no interest in going anywhere else.

Aaron caught Duke first, though not at the first attempt. The dog treated the chase as a game and dodged him twice along the footpath before Aaron cornered him against a fence and scooped him up. Henri did not move from the wrapper and was lifted with no resistance at all. Both dogs wore tags giving an address at 2 Wallcrest Road, the house on the corner whose back fence ran the length of that stretch of Berriedale Road.

He carried them round the corner and knocked. Luke Smith answered in a tight-fitted shorts, half awake, and had not known the dogs were gone. Jamie Greyson had left early for a shift at Vaucluse, and the dogs had been out in the back garden as usual. The two men walked the fence line together in the half-dark and found a loose paling behind the woodpile, pushed out at the bottom, with a gap just wide enough for a Shih Tzu to squeeze through onto the main road.

Aaron had lived at number 27, further up Wallcrest Road, for only a few weeks and had never spoken to Luke before that morning. He came back down the hill that afternoon with a hammer, a handful of nails and two offcuts of timber, and fixed the paling while Luke held the dogs at bay and talked. Luke asked him back for a beer at the weekend. Aaron, who did not usually accept such invitations, accepted.