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A little more than a year ago, I wrote about Hannah, the coonhound my husband and I recently had adopted.

Many people responded to that column, which included descriptions of her separation anxiety-fueled destruction of our newly purchased home. So I thought I'd update readers on life with "Hurricane Hannah."

Let's just say a miracle came to us this winter in the form of a chain link fence. Hannah had been miserable inside her crate. When we left for work and school, my husband and I would lock her into it to save her from hurting herself and doing another $1,000 worth of damage to our house. In her mind, not only were we "abandoning" her -- we weren't even letting her vent.

Before I left for work that first day our backyard fence was complete, I placed her doghouse on the ground and carefully arranged a blanket inside. Hannah ducked in, quickly sniffed around and came out again. She looked at me, pointed her nose to the sky and gave a short, happy howl. "That's all I wanted, mama," she seemed to say.

She didn't climb over the fence -- for about a month. Then her siren call, the scent of cats, became irresistable.

My husband got the phone call. Hannah had been tracking a cat around the block for about an hour. She chased it into the crawl space of an elderly couple's home. They heard her tail slapping the bottom of their house and a muffled, yet loud, baying.

A group of neighbors had chased and sweet-talked her for about an hour before one of them could grab her. I drove home to pick her up and baked the neighbors cookies to thank them. Although thoroughly embarrassed, I was appreciative to Hannah that I made friends with some of my new neighbors.

She didn't try climbing over the fence for a few days, so one night we risked going to dinner. We returned about 9 p.m. to an empty yard. Then we listened for it -- the baying of a hound who'd been trained to hunt.

Our ears led us around the corner to a house where the "cat lady" had lived. The neighborhood strays were accustomed to being fed there, and although the woman had moved out, the cats still came around.

For an hour, Hannah was hunting a black cat, and we were chasing Hannah. The fight moved to the house's crawl space (I suppose these cats don't expect a city dog to seal-crawl under to follow them). Finally, Hannah moved near the trap door leading to the crawl space and my husband was able to grab her collar. Her fur was matted with clay and cat scratches covered her face and body. She was ecstatic.

That weekend we bought an electrified wire and my husband ran it along the inside of her fence. Don't worry -- the voltage isn't strong. My husband touched it to test it. Several times. But it is uncomfortable, and after a few escape attempts, Hannah has decided to stay in the yard.

After 15 months, she's starting to trust us, and has become a love bug. She likes to cuddle and put on a show, pawing her face and stretching. And I have to say her goofiness charms me. When she's napping, her mouth stays closed but her tongue hangs out.

If I oversleep, she'll spring onto the bed. Being a brute, she used to whack me in the face to wake me, but now she's learned that a few gentle taps on my stomach or chest is enough.

And although we sometimes use some unsavory words to describe her, we've finally fallen in love with her.

We know Hannah will give us more stories to tell.

Recently she started digging holes along the fence line.

Jamie Kennedy Jones' "pack" also includes a rescued 10-year-old hound dog named Wilbur, who has given the family little trouble. You can contact her at jamie.kennedy@news-record.com or 449-4610.