First came Clank the Beagle. We were thinking about getting a dog soon after we purchased our house.

 But we weren’t sure of the timing or even where to get one. Then a friend from work asked if were interested in helping him save a beagle. A stranger gave the beagle to my friend’s wife in a parking lot and ask she find a home for it.

 My friend gave me a week to think about it. After that it would be off to the humane society. Two weeks later, he still had the beagle. So we decided to scoop him up. We knew the moment he came running from the back of the house that this dude was doing to be great.

 So we named him Clank and took him home, where he quickly proceeded to take over.

Fast forward several months, as the cold December weather started to hit. I was walking Clank at midnight in an dark retention basin.

 I was on the phone at the time so I wasn’t pay too much attention to what he was doing. But I couldn’t help noticing when he stopped dead in his tracks and wouldn’t budge when I pulled on the leash.

I looked back and saw him sitting down, sniffing something wiggling in the grass. I asked my friend to hold and used the cell phone to light up the grass.

 There was a newborn puppy yelling for help. It was the strangest thing I had ever seen. I honestly didn’t know what to do. My first thought was that it was going to die anyway so I should leave him alone. But I just couldn’t. Not with Clank sitting there.

 So I called Amanda and we sped off to the emergency vet. The little guy was laying in a towel on Amanda’s lap the entire way. He would fall silent at times, scaring the heck out of us. Amanda touched him a couple times to let him know we were there. He was smaller than my hand.

 Each touch resulted in the little guy crying out. I took it as a sign that he wanted to live.

We got the emergency vet and they sprinted him to the back. The attending nurse thanked us for saving him and assured us that the Humane Society would pick him up in the morning.

She seemed to assume that we wouldn’t want him. We did.

 We took ownership that night and left him there for observation. I’m convinced they did everything they could to keep him alive because they knew he had an owner.

 We returned the next morning to the news that he was hypothermic the previous night and heading toward a certain death. He fought all that off, though, with the help of great ER doctoring.

It was in that clinic that we named him Ratchet.

 We then took him to our vet when they kept running fluids into his body and eventually took over by bottle-feeding him every two hours, 24-hours a day.

The rest, my friends, is history. He was 9 oz that night and two steps away from death. He is now tearing through our house with Clank and showing signs of a long life.