A brush with demise in the bog ordeal

In the Boy Scouts, they teach you to always be prepared. This time, I was not.

We were in Crows Woods, a sprawling forest in Haddonfield with a network of dense marked trails (nice) and places you would not want to venture (mud, vines).

The trouble started when Andrea, my wife, said, "It's a groundhog." The nadir: When I was hip-high in mud, bleeding from thorn scratches.

At the sighting of the groundhog, our dog, Cocoa Bear, vanished, but of course we knew where she went. Before long, she was racing through a bog. We called and called, but the barking became more distant.

With a few choice expletives, I started pushing my way in her direction through the dense vines. Two things became clear: Most of these vines had thorns that could more accurately be described as small spikes, and there were parts of the reddish creek water I would have to wade through.

My shoes became waterlogged and caked in mud. Immobilized by woody vines up to my chest, I couldn't get a shoe high enough to step on them, and there were others at shin level that were too low to crawl under.

At one point, with my feet deep in a sinkhole, I sagged backward onto my butt - and realized I couldn't get up. There was nothing to grip - no sapling limbs within reach and nothing solid to push against. Somehow - I can't remember how - I righted myself and kept inching forward, usually. Sometimes I had to back up and try a different direction.

At times I would sink so far down the mud reached my hips, a predicament that made me realize I might never get out of there. Would I one day be a skeleton in the iron bog? Become like the perfectly preserved prehistoric victim of human sacrifice in a peat bog in Denmark or the giant land mammals in the La Brea Tar Pits? They would find a person and a dog as though suspended in amber and think: There has to be a story here.

With every step, I moved farther from comfortable suburban life - in tony Haddonfield, of all places - and deeper into the brutal realm of untamed nature. I was wearing a T-shirt, shorts, and sneaker-style Rockports. What I needed was hip waders, a sturdy jacket, and, above all, a machete.

What I really feared was leaving Cocoa Bear out there. Like a typical hunting dog - she is a Norwegian elkhound - she would never give up. If I didn't find her, she would be out there all day.

I yelled back to Andrea, "I'm trapped, I can't move." She would say, "I'll call the police, I'll call the fire department," but she didn't have her cell. In any case, was the fire department really going to drive a truck into a bog? How would the police feel about rescuing an able-bodied man from a swamp after he let his dog off the leash - a violation of the rules clearly stated on a sign at the park entrance?

Eventually, after glacial progress marked by worse epithets, more cuts, and heavier mud (my shoes were now like magnetic iron boots in a sci-fi movie), I could see through the hellishness a gray Nordic dog - our dog.

She was fighting with the groundhog, which was backed into some tree roots, lunging at her like a rattlesnake. I got her by the collar and attached the leash.

Then we had the reverse of my original trek, but worse now because I had a dog on a leash pulling like a freight train in random directions. Releasing her would have led her straight back to the varmint.

Deliverance came as Andrea gave me a hand, and I heaved myself back up onto solid ground.

Now my shoes were the weight of anvils. I staggered like Godzilla down the path toward the car. Although I was beyond caring, nobody saw that I was covered in red mud and blood, my clothing saturated in red swamp water.

It would all have to be burned. Even the dog collar and leash. (Turns out everything but the shoes and T-shirt could be saved.)

As for my body, I still had traces of mud on my legs after a long, soapy shower. And then came a special treat: rubbing alcohol being applied like the surface of the sun to all my cuts. I hadn't realized it, but even my back was bleeding. By some miracle, my face and neck were spared, and I had not blinded myself in the only eye I have that still works.

Cocoa Bear had a better outcome: She had no cuts on her face from the fighting. I figure the woodchuck doesn't, either.

Somewhere, though, I picture that groundhog telling the tale to his friends about how this monster tried to kill him and then this even bigger monster came and took the first monster away on a leash.

It won't happen again, little guy. No more off-leash in Crows Woods.