My block is a canine thoroughfare, from slinking Greyhounds in plaid jackets to fluffy red Pomeranians. I watch the parade of kids and dogs throughout the day. But one Sunday the face of a woman caught my eye from the kitchen window. The woman was struggling to carry a big black dog and clearly in trouble.

The dog was limp, spilling over her arms like an upside down bowl. She set him down on the sidewalk. He could stand although his spine seemed strangely arched. Obviously, the woman needed to rest.

My tea kettle whistled. I turned off the burner and went to check the woman and the dog. This time I could see blood on the woman's hands so I launched out my front door. A quiet neighbor from up the street was also pulling his car up toward the woman. "Is your dog hurt?" I asked. "Can I call someone for you?"

The woman turned teary eyes to me, drops of rain glinting on her dark brown hair as she crouched on the wet sidewalk.

"I just need to get my dog home. She's under a vet's care. I tried to carry her but she just got so much worse. This gentleman said he would help us."

"What do you need?" I asked them both.

"A towel if you have one," the woman said. "If you have a towel I can wrap her head so that she can't bite me again, and something to wrap my hand so I won't bleed on this gentlemen's car."

The blood was hers, not the dog's.

That quiet Sunday morning I'd starched and pressed the linen napkins that belonged to my grandmother and replaced them on the bottom shelf. Now I pulled everything off the shelf to find the largest towel then knocked over travel shampoos while searching for the kit from my daughter's Red Cross Babysitting Class. I grabbed hydrogen peroxide and cotton balls, then ran back down the stairs, still in bare feet and flannel pajamas.

The woman wrapped the towel around the dog's bowed head, covering his face as though for a facial. "If you could just put on a tourniquet," the woman said. "I have a friend who's an EMT. I'll call him the minute I get home."

So I pulled out a length of white, white gauze and wrapped it tightly around her bloody wrist and then up her arm, my fingers trembling.

"I'm wrapping it up the arm because you have another wound there," I told her.

"Is it bleeding?" she asked, the only time that she sounded concerned about anything but her dog.

I looked at the marks in the white skin of her under arm and the way blood had pooled darkly just beneath the surface. "Only a tiny bit," I said.

By my bare toes, the dog's large nails twitched on the concrete as its body shook. I wrapped the last lengths of gauze with extra tautness and then tucked in the end. "Thank you," she said.

From my porch I got a small rug to drape over the shivering dog. The neighbor Tom stood by, waiting for direction, his car door open. "You know what," the woman said, "If you wouldn't mind going to my house to get her muzzle that might be best. It's just a few blocks."

"I'll get paper for the address," I said and ran back to the house. Just inside the glass storm door my cat sat watching as fiercely as if my life depended on it.

Before he left Tom took an umbrella from his car and unfurled it, wide and red. "No reason to sit in the rain," he said handing me the umbrella. "I'll be right back."

So the woman and I sat together, our faces on either side of the handle. "What's wrong with your dog?" I asked, not so much to know, as to distract the woman from her distress while we waited.

"She has a bulge between her spinal discs," she said. "This happened last week, she went all stiff, but that time I was able to get her home. She seemed so much better this morning. I thought we could go for a longer walk. I tried to carry her but she's almost fifty pounds. I had to rest and then she got really bad. She's in pain."

"Your dog didn't mean to hurt you," I said.

"I know," she said, but her eyes filled with tears again, guilt and pain as visible as the dog's tremors.

"Is your dog going to get better?"

"They don't know," she said.

When Tom returned the woman knelt and lifted the dog; the animal gangly and dog-like again, instead of drooped. Tom put down the rug and the woman maneuvered herself into the back seat, the muzzled dog in her arms. I folded the umbrella and shook it. Tom gave the towel to the woman. "I'll bring these back," he said to me. He pulled the car away very slowly. Then I was alone on the street, my heart racing, discarded cotton balls on the sidewalk.

As I watched the neighbor's car turn the corner I remembered a day that I was returning to Ballard from Highway 99, down the steep hill on N. 39th to Leary Way. Traffic was inexplicably stopped but ahead I could see a long semi slightly askew in the uphill lane. Finally cars began to creep forward; closer to the truck there were people standing and an object in the street covered with a cloth, a black tail protruding. As I drew closer a woman leaned toward my open window to say, "The truck driver accidentally hit a dog and he's terribly upset."

That was when I noticed a man leaning his head and arms on the side of the cab door, his back heaving and his sobs audible. Slowly the cars crept past the scene. No one honked, the line of cars was stately, as dignified as any funeral procession, some of us crying for the dog, and some of us crying for the man.

Peggy Sturdivant writes a series on neighborhoods for CrossCut.com and also writes additional pieces for the Seattle PI?s Neighborhood Webtown: http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/ballard/ Her e-mail is atlargeinballard@yahoo.com.