The Rodriguez family was preparing for a night of spectacle ahead of Silverton’s widely anticipated Fourth of July fireworks show when trouble came a sniffing.
Tanner Rodriguez was sitting in the bed of his father John’s truck, accompanied by two blue heelers ‒ Oakley, his dog; and Luna, John’s dog. He said he doesn’t know what caught the pair’s attention, but something spurred them into action and they leaped from the truck bed and darted away.
A pedestrian managed to catch Oakley before he got too far. But Luna, tapping into her cattle dog lineage, took off in a sprint. She was gone.
Luna, 2½, weighs 27 pounds, is energetic and “fast like a cheetah,” and “has a bedtime like an old person” ‒ she gets up early and go to bed early, Tanner said. She’s also a mama’s girl, and spends her days back home running through the fields with her mother. She often checks on her owners, not wanting to be separated for long. But something Tanner can’t put his finger on was different on July 4 in Silverton.
The Rodriguez family didn’t know it in the moment, but it would be a full two weeks before they’d be reunited with Luna.
Unbeknownst to them, Silverton happens to be home to a man with a knack for catching lost dogs. Just shy of a full year ago, Silverton resident Jimmy Keene II reunited Konni, a Belgian Malinois, with the Jaxon family two weeks after it was frightened away during the 2024 Fourth of July fireworks show.
In September 2024, Keene came to the rescue again. With the help of a group of compassionate community members, Keene recovered Ludo, an 80-pound black Labrador retriever that injured its paws on descending Ice Lakes Trail with its owners, and carried him 1½ miles down the trail to the Ice Lake Trailhead.
Over the past two weeks, Keene and Tanner had been tracking sightings of Luna reported by Silverton residents. Keene said it was challenging at first because there weren’t any patterns in Luna’s movements.
He set up trail cameras donated by two individuals, placed a pressure box trap loaded with Vienna sausages outside his home, and took to the streets to catch Luna’s attention. He laid out a series of irresistible liquid smoke and kibble trails that led back to his home and waited.
Meanwhile, Tanner was going about town, day after day, visiting locations where residents had reported seeing Luna. He laid eyes on her several times, but he had no chance of getting close enough to capture her before she was off again.
“Is she alive? Is she having fun?” Tanner said. “You come home and (you’re) missing that energy from her.”
Keene’s trap worked the first night he placed it ‒ in a sense. Unset, the trap attracted “every fox in San Juan County,” as seen on Keene’s trail cameras, he said. But there was still no sign of Luna.
On Friday morning, Keene checked his trail cameras again. More foxes. But around 1 a.m., Luna appeared on the recording. She ate, and then went to her kennel, which the Rodriguez family left with Keene, and curled up among old T-shirts carrying her owner’s scent. She slept there for three to four hours before wandering off.
“She came here, she ate, she left, she came back and she went to sleep. So now maybe we have a pattern of her coming here,” he said.
Worried that a marathon being held in Silverton over the weekend would scare Luna off, he decided to make his move. He baited the trap again, set it and waited. Sure enough, on Friday afternoon, Luna wondered into the trap, triggered it and was captured.
“It's the most frustrating thing, because you have to have a ton of patience. So it’s super frustrating. But as long as there’s a good outcome, it’s so rewarding to reunite pets, you know, the fur babies, with their loved ones,” Keene said.
Keene said something snaps in a dog’s mind when it’s separated from its owners and lost in the wild. It’s like its instincts kick in, and it doesn’t recognize its human family. But after capturing Luna and letting her rest in her kennel, which he covered temporarily to let her be alone with her owner’s clothing and scent, she calmed down.
Tanner said the moment Luna saw him, she grew excited.
“When we walked through the door she looked at me and knew exactly who I was,” he said.
Keene said six unleashed, free-roaming dogs in Silverton were frightened away by fireworks the evening of July 4. Four of them returned to their owners that same night.
A labradoodle was found by its owners on Kendall Mountain the next day. It would take two weeks for Luna to be captured, even though frequent sightings of her made clear she was still in the area.
“The dogs probably do well at home with some fireworks on the front porch, but the repercussion off the mountains, it just booms really loud here, because the mountains are so high,” Keene said.
cburney@durangoherald.com
