Sheila Thompson first noticed the absence of her little poodle ‘Lucky’ at about two in the afternoon on May 8. Lucky was not prone to wander off.
“They’re always there,” she says, of Lucky and the other dogs owned by Sheila and her husband Wilf.
A search of the neighbourhood turned up nothing. A call the next day to the M.D.’s dogcatcher was equally as fruitless.
At about 6:00 p.m., Wilf went to the back yard to do some barbecuing for supper. That’s when he noticed a small hole in the ground.
Sheila says the ground had sunk a bit in that general area over the years, but not so much as to cause alarm. They’ve lived in the house at 2738 2nd St. in Widewater for the past 13 years.
Sure enough, when Wilf fished around in the hole with a hooked pole, he found Lucky, dead from drowning.
Investigating, Wilf and a friend started digging.
“They found a hole about six or seven feet square,” says Sheila. “It had about a foot of dirt on a plastic liner,” over top of it. The liner was supported by three big timbers, with plenty of space between them. Underneath was a water-filled pit several feet deep, with wooden sides, evidently a former septic tank.
“We had no idea it was there,” Sheila says.
Sheila figures if a five-pound dog could fall through, a child could have fallen through just as easily, or even more easily. And that’s pretty scary.
“There could be others around this area,” she says, advising anyone with any sort of depression in their yard to “get a probe and check it out.
“It was our dog, but it could have been one of my children or their friends.”
The Thompsons plan to fill the hole with dirt. Sheila wishes whoever covered it in the first place had taken the trouble to do the same.

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