"a woman and a dog... probably a golden retriever"

So last Monday, I decided to go up to the creek behind the house that’s across the street with this golden retriever that apparently lives down the street but has become the neighborhood dog. I never had a dog. I ran around the yard with it for a while the day before. So we’re walking up the creek yesterday and if he ran ahead of me I would call “Hey pup!” and he would come bounding back into sight. (I climbed a Tarzan vine again- even farther this time than last time because it was dry!). The dog runs up a hill ahead of me and I decide to turn around and go back. I yell, but he doesn’t come back. I start walking back down the creek (I’m barefoot, wearing a beater and Bermuda shorts and wonderfully smelly) and all of a sudden I hear a bird or something up on the hill. It gets louder and I realize it sounds like a cat or some animal dying- it’s this hissing screeching shriek full of more pain than I’ve heard in a long time. It creeps me out and I freeze, then slowly start walking again. Then, I hear the dog running through the woods back to me- I turn around and he’s bounding down to the creek (and me) with a raccoon in his mouth- still alive and shrieking louder than life! All four of its legs are sticking straight out and it is furious. All I can think of is how cats like to hunt things and then bring them to their owner as a gift or something- my cat lays animals in varying degrees of wholeness and life at my door or at my feet all the time- always more dead than alive though. So this dog’s running toward me and I’m terrified that he’s going to lay the thing at my feet (bare, mind you) where it would bite, scratch, claw at whatever it could- it was injured and angry and that's what injured and angry animals do… and it could certainly have run faster than me through the woods if I tried to run away from it on the ground. Nevertheless, I see him coming and so I take off down the stream- I had no idea where I was stepping (or on what) and I’m ducking under tree branches and running like I'm being followed by an axe murderer, and then I realize that the dog is following me and catching up and loving every minute of it like the running games we had played the day before! So I stop and face him, throw out my hand and yell “NNNO!” a couple times to freeze him in his tracks. He stops, looks at me, and drops the still screaming animal on the ground about 10 feet away from me. It immediately tries to fight him so he picks it back up and I scream at him again and try to motion for him to take it away. He finally takes off with it, still shrieking, up the hill and down the stream where I was heading. He stopped and looked back at me once, but I just yelled no again. After he disappeared, I just stood there shaking form running with adrenaline and holding my breath when I didn’t know if he would listen to me or not. Then I laughed and started walking again really slow. I was afraid it wold be laying somewhere almost dead and I would step right next to it and end up getting bit anyway. Then I heard the dog barking back up at the house and I wondered if he thought I was hurt and was trying to get someone’s attention or something like in the movies. That’s what golden retrievers do, right? When I got closer, I yelled for him and he ran down to me, raccoon free. I patted him on the head and asked him if he had killed it, then he followed me back to my house and I went inside. It was quite an adventure.