A very old stray {The Old Fella Story}

I used to call Max "The Great Digger" because of what happened one summer. I had left Max and Willow one day to go to work. Now, Max, like any self-respecting German Shepherd, was a pretty good digger, and we often entertained ourselves with lively games of "Dig and Fill" (Of course, he did the digging, I did the...well, you get the idea). He would actually get excited and jump around whenever he saw me come out with the shovel. I had no idea just how far it had gone, however, until I returned later that day. Usually, I was met at the door from the garage into the house by both dogs, but this time there was noone to greet me. I called upstairs but got no response. I walked up the steps into the living room, but there were no dogs. Called out their names. No dogs. Opened the door and looked out into the yard. No dogs. Walked back into the bedrooms. No dogs. At this point, I started worrying that they might have jumped the fence. Finally, I walked outside onto the deck and checked the yard more thoroughly, then walked down into the yard, calling them. Just as I walked by the area underneath the deck, a very dirty German Shepherd came out from a hole underneath the deck followed by a surprisingly clean blue Greyhound. Max had dug a "den" underneath the lower deck that reached from the bottom of the deck steps almost to the yard gate. It looked like something from the movie "The Great Escape". I was laughing too hard to be upset, although it took me days to fill in the hole. Afterwards, I placed anything I could find to block access, even put in a concrete pad on part of the underdeck area, but he continued to try to dig under the pad. The only thing that eventually stopped him was the DM he developed in his later years, but I know that he personally taught Dash everything he knew about digging. So far, though, Dash has not dug any escape tunnels, but then he never was a particularly good student...unless, of course, you believe that the way "out" is straight "down". :B