Editor’s note: Bob Flaherty, a longtime author, radio personality and former Gazette writer and columnist, launches a regular column today called “Chance Encounters” in which he writes about our neighbors going about their daily lives.

EASTHAMPTON — Can a young dog, abused and abandoned, find his calling on a nearby bike trail?

Manhan Rail Trail. 6:14 a.m.

You’ve come across a bear or two on this iconic roadway, and coyotes, and zig-zagging chipmunks and turtles the size of luggage. What you don’t expect to see is a dog, a big muscular thing, all tongue and teeth, hurtling right at you in full gallop.

You barely notice the woman cycling parallel to the dog. “Hi,” she smiles, as she wooshes past you on the left side, the dog on your right, which is when you see that the dog is running on the strip of mowed grass at the side of the trail and not on the blacktop itself. And they’re traveling this way, at the same velocity, same distance apart, all the way to the Route 5 trailhead.

Now here they come back, their positions on the trail swapped.

Yes, you’ve seen dogs fetch balls and catch frisbees, but the ones who step out of dog-hood and into the rules of a human-controlled world have long held awe.

Meet Amy Mason of Easthampton’s New City neighborhood and the exuberant Buddy, age seven months. “He wears an E-collar, the leash of the 21st century,” says Mason. “It feels like your cellphone on vibrate. It makes him pay attention.”

OK, but you still have to plant the idea in his head. How to you drive home this sort of behavior in an animal that was born to chase bikes, squirrels, fire trucks and cats up trees?

It was his idea, Mason insists.

“I used to walk him but he’s a runner, and strong. I like basset hounds; they’re about my pace,” she laughs. “But I love riding my bike. I bet if I ride he’ll run with me. As you can see, we come early in the morning, with no distractions. He starts whining about 5:30 and it’s get up and go.”

When the Manhan experiment was first launched in early spring, Buddy ran on the pavement behind Amy. Not a good match for either. She had trouble keeping an eye on him, and he soon realized it was more fun to run side by side, and found to his delight that the grass was easier on his feet. It didn’t take long for the dog to comprehend that the lane separating him from his trainer was not his to enter. The E-collar is there to reinforce but rarely, these days, is it needed.

“Some people think he’s intimidating. You hear people say: ‘He should be on a leash!’ But he is on a leash — you just can’t see it. He’s not interested in other people; he’s interested in his own little world,” Mason says.

And when there’s a break in the action, Buddy’s little world expands. He leaves the trail for an impromptu romp in an adjacent hayfield.

Buddy’s behavior at this point is not unlike that of a guide dog for the blind — once the harness is removed, or in this case his traveling companion is talking to some stranger with a notepad, he then becomes a snuffling, springing, all-out dawg, poking at holes and snorting the scents of all manner of critter.

“He thinks we’re off duty,” smiles Mason. “He likes the break. I push the button, sometimes he just looks at me: ‘Why? We’re not moving.’”

Second chance

The broad-shouldered Buddy is a rescue dog, from Tennessee, but gives the impression that he’ll be pretty good at rescuing too someday. Confident, friendly. The mix of breeds is hard to pin down.

“Not sure,” says Mason, watching the dog cavorting in the high grass. “What we know is that he was tossed out of a moving car at a gas station. Still has a scar over his eye.”

She and friend Patrick Shannon picked up Buddy in Connecticut, back when they were a couple.

“We dated and now we’re just best friends, figuring it out,” says Mason. “After two divorces we found each other but we rushed it … we’re slowing down.”

The Buddy part of the arrangement has Amy doing the morning workout, Patrick the evening.

Buddy’s brainpower along with his zest for every waking moment endeared him to his humans quickly. Mason’s cats hate him. “But he sure loves them,” she laughs.

Away from pets and bikes, Amy Mason is well-known to area schoolkids. “I’ve driven a school bus forever,” she says. “It’s fun and I love the kids. I started when my son was in kindergarten and my daughter in first grade. They rode with me to Easthampton High, always had fun. Now they’re adults, it’s been that long. Maybe it’s time to do something else,” she laughs.

To that end, Mason’s venture, Peroghies Gone Wild, featuring her hand-crafted delicacies sold direct to consumers, is picking up steam. She plans to have a food truck up and running by next year. Buddy, in his role as taste-tester, has deemed the “Pupperoghies,” made expressly for his species, to be the cat’s patoot.

It’s how you treat ‘em

The affable Mason prefers to stay out of her city’s politics and the superintendent fiasco and all. “You don’t know what to believe. I have close people on both sides of so many issues. I’ll go on Facebook and you can tell me that two and two equals ten and I’m at the age where I’m not gonna argue with you.”

“All you can do is try to do good and be kind. If people would help their own communities more instead of all the blaming, it’d sure be nicer. ‘HEY, OVER HERE!’” she calls to Buddy, who bounds to her side like a western star’s horse.

Her secret with pups? “Treat ‘em like you treat people and they’ll do amazing things. Well, the way some people treat people,” she adds, pushing off.

The teacher glances at the pupil as he keeps pace, and a well-oiled machine chugs homeward.