I had a horrible fright yesterday evening. Five minutes after Chai came in I noticed red paw prints all over the floor. About 100 I think. My heart sank. Chai must be injured. Julio helped me catch her, and all 4 of her paws were red.
What?
I examined her as best I could while she squirmed. None of her paws seemed painful to touch, she was just annoyed at being manhandled.
I ran warm water in the hand basin and we dunked her front paws in it. She didn’t like that at all, but it got the worst off. The water ran red, but a purply-brown red. Not blood.
Not paint either, because there was no noticeable smell.
Whatever it was, I didn’t want Chai licking it off and swallowing industrial quantities, so I washed her back legs too. Not easy, so I only got the worst off again.
And then Julio mopped all those paw prints off the floor while I cleaned up myself, the basin, the walls around the basin and the wheelchair. It was one of those jobs where you think you’ve finished and then you find some more. And some more. And some more.
We were just finishing when Carlos came home. How do men do that?
In the morning, I kept finding more red paw prints, but Chai was fine.
When I opened the front door I could see incoming paw prints. The trail led off the tiles onto the concrete, up the ramp to the pavement where I couldn’t follow. I got Julio to look. The red paw prints were almost invisible on the red pavement, but he tracked them heading up the pavement towards the infant school.
Yesterday I saw people painting the school before term starts. Yes, the same shade of dark red, so that mystery is solved. And Carlos tells me that paints are water-based these days to reduce pollution, and therefore non-poisonous. And you’d hardly use poisonous paint on an infant school. So all is good. But it was quite a fright.
