I learned through the CSC listserve of a transport of a very pregnant stray English Pointer someone had found but couldn't keep who was going from Council Bluffs, Iowa, to St. Louis, Missouri, to OnPoint dog rescue (400 miles). The transport was broken up into approx. 60-mile legs. All that switching off of cars is a lot of stress on any dog, let alone an already stressed very pregnant dog. So, I told them that I would do the whole trip. This was on Wednesday, and the transport was scheduled for Saturday. On Thursday, the pointer had her puppies...nine of them. We decided to go ahead with the transport because of some urgency on the part of the sender. So, I headed out for Council Bluffs, Iowa, on Friday at about noon. Council Bluffs, Iowa, is like a suburb of Omaha, Nebraska. I have never been to Nebraska! So, I went Friday night to the Holiday Inn in Omaha. They said there was bad weather expected, but I figured it was just rain, and I could make the 15-mile trip to Glenwood, Iowa, where I was to pick up the Mama and her puppies and make it by 7:00 a.m. by getting up at 5:00 a.m. and leaving as I got ready. The bad weather turned out to be a major winter ice storm that greeted me on Saturday morning. I did take a coat, but I didn't even have gloves or an ice scraper with me, and the ice coating on my car was easily a quarter of an inch thick or more. I walked down the sloping parking lot of the Holiday Inn to the BP gas station and bought a scraper and a pair of brown cotton gardening gloves. It was a lot of fun going down to the BP because I could just stand still and slide to the station. Guess what? Sliding down was a whole lot easier than sliding back up. If someone at the Holiday Inn could have just thrown me a rope, the 15- or 20-yard trip back would have been a lot easier. I made it back up, scraped the windows, and hung out until 9:15 when it got above 31 degrees and left. Once I made it to the major roads, the trip was pretty good. I stopped in Glenwood, IA, and the nice woman, Donna, and her son who had taken in this poor little pregnant stray pointer brought her and her nine puppies to me. Kansas City, Missouri, is roughly the half-way point of my trip, and sort of the point at which the temperature got decent and the ice discontinued. Up until that point, I had to make the trip on occasional ice with mostly my windshield wipers on high speed to keep up with the freezing rain. They had named the pointer Sadie. Sadie was a very sweet dog who was skin and bones still although Donna and her family had already fattened her up some. She was filthy, but was so happy to have a soft blanket in my back seat to lay on. I had put my small suitcases behind the front seats and had made a folded three-blanket den for them to lay on like I always did for my beagle transports. Two-day-old babies are incredibly tiny; much smaller than a beagle. They kept rooting around trying to find a faucet to drink from, and they kept falling into the floor and beside the suitcases. There was the obvious gap between the suitcases, but I had put the blanket on it trying to hide it. I usually found two or three of the escapees down in that hole. When Mama and babies are sleeping behind you on your right as your driving, and you hear a baby crying in the floor on your left, it's not a good thing. And, they would cry like someone was sitting on them and crushing them. It was usually just one out of the nine, so it was statistically insignificant, but there were just so many of them. I was stopping every four or five exits and just pulling across to the on-ramp and stopping with my flashers just to pull the group together and do a head count to make sure no one was suffocating under some blanket. It got dark about 5:00, and I made it to the pick-up point around 7:00. Candis (with OnPoint rescue) was so glad to get them all safe and sound. I passed on to her Donna's very big thank-you hug for taking these sweet stray babies and trying to find them a home. When we pulled the babies together and did a head count, there were eight, one baby was missing. I pulled out the three blankets, the two suitcases, my coat...no baby. Had he fallen out at some rest stop when I walked Mama? Suddenly, I saw the empty Dasani bottle I had pitched in the front floor move. Baby had fallen to the floor in the back, crawled under the passenger's seat to the front, where he had crawled into one of the rolled-up towels I had taken for drying Mama after her potty walks. God, I love rescue; it is clearly what I came to earth to do.