Fred was a stray beagle pup picked up on South Main at the old Towery's Mini Mart in the late spring of 1982. He was around 4 months old at the time he wandered up to me as I was pumping gas one early evening. I noticed he had no collar or other identification, and he seemed to be lost and desperate. He also looked hungry, so I gave him a piece of my Slim Jim sausage, which he promptly wolfed down. After clumsily climbing into the car with me, he sat calmly in the passenger seat until we arrived at the house west of town. It took no urging to get him to exit the vehicle and he followed me everywhere I went. Come nighttime, he was given a bed of old rags on the back porch. To my surprise, he took to it and didn't whine or howl during the night. He seemed to enjoy the freedom of living in the country, and loved to roam the creek and the woods across the road. One thing I noticed that distressed me was that he would suddenly barrel off across the road to the woods on the other side, seemingly unaware of the danger the highway presented. This was likely due to his young age and inexperience. I spent several weeks attempting to instill a healthy fear of the highway into him. But, even so, on my return home from work on an afternoon in August, I found his crumpled body lying on the side of the road at our property. By all appearances he was struck by a vehicle in one of his sudden urges to dash across the road to the woods, as he had done many times before. I buried him across the road in a thicket of wild plum and hedges where the interior had been hollowed into a small clearing. The site now sits in the back of someone's yard, as a housing development was built on the acreage many years later.