I was doing some work in my living room on Friday when I saw a dog run across my porch. When I opened the front door to investigate, he bounded into my house like he owned the place: Hi! I’m a dog! Is this your house? Wow! I love it!

He trotted into the kitchen, checked out our laundry room, and then ran up to the second floor to explore. When he got bored with the second floor, he came back down and looked at me like he wanted to know what we were going to do next.

“Good dog!” I said to him, petting him behind the ears and rubbing his belly as I tried to make out the name and number embroidered into his dog collar. “Good boy!”

The collar said his name was Timber, and when I said it, he looked up at me as if to say Wow! You know my name? That’s amazing! How did you guess?

Then he wagged his tail and jumped up on the couch while I dialed the number on his collar. No one answered, so I left a message then texted the number to say that a very friendly dog was in my house. By then he was back in my kitchen, so I took a picture and sent it along.

I figured I’d hear from the owner fairly quickly, so I sat down and resumed my work, and Timber took a spot on the floor by my chair and curled up at my feet.

After some time passed, however, I started to worry that I wouldn’t hear back. Maybe the owners were at work, I figured. Or maybe this was Timber’s Lassie moment, and he’d gone off to get some help.

So I went online and did a phone number lookup. It turned out that the address listed for the phone number on Timber’s collar was a mile-and-a-half away. Odd, I thought, but not impossible, so I went down to my basement to look for a leash, planning to walk timber back to his owner’s house. Assuming, of course, it was, in fact, his owner’s house.

Timber followed me down to the basement and into the cramped utility closet where I thought I might have an old leash. As soon as I found one and showed it to Timber, he got incredibly excited and gave me a wide-eyed look: OH. MY. GOD. You like walks, too?

I put on my jacked and stuffed my pockets with plastic bags just in case.

It was a fairly quick walk, and Timber was a good dog. He only pulled on the leash once, when he saw another dog. And it turned out that bringing the bags was a good idea, as I made good use of one about half a block from our destination.

“Hi,” I said when an older man answered the door. “Is there any chance that this is your dog?”

“No,” he said. “I don’t have a dog. He’s cute, though. Does he have a dog tag?”

“There’s a number on his collar,” I said, leash in one hand, bag of poop in the other. “That’s how I found your house.”

Neither of us said anything for a moment.

“It says his name is Timber,” I volunteered.

“Did you say Timber? That’s the name of my daughter’s dog! What’s the phone number?”

I told him the number, and he invited me into his house while he called his daughter. Again, no answer. He offered me a seat, and we chatted for a bit. He’d worked in education, and both of his kids had gone to the same college I went to.

He told me where his daughter lived, and the address was about a block away from my house. Apparently she’d registered her phone at her parents’ house.

I volunteered to walk the dog home, but the man said he’d watch the dog until his daughter got back.

Everything checked out as far as I could tell, so I took Timber off his leash, and he went off to explore the man’s house.

“Is that poop?” the man asked, nodding at my bag.

“Yes,” I said. “It’s poop.”

“Oh, let me take that!”

“Thanks,” I said. “I appreciate it.”

We said our goodbyes, and I gave Timber one last scratch behind the ears. On the way home, I texted the number again to let his owners know where he was.

The walk was a little bit lonely, but it was a beautiful day and I couldn’t keep from smiling.