Sorry about the annoying alliteration in this true tale. And it's long—sorry about that, too.
Maggie, a 9-year-old Dalmatian, escaped from a recreation area about 90 miles from home. It happened when Melissa, her owner, asked a friend to hold onto Maggie's collar while Melissa participated in a quick canoe race on the lake. Obviously, the friend didn't do a very good job of hanging onto the dog because Maggie escaped, trying to find her mom. The friend chased Maggie and then followed her in a car but lost her in alleyways on Saturday afternoon. Melissa, with the help of family and friends, had scoured the area for 24 hours with no luck. Melissa's stepmom had hired a pet detective to find a missing dog once, and she found my website http://www.lostpetspecialist.com/.
When Melissa called me for help, I recommended large fluorescent posters and a neighborhood notification system called FindToto.com. Melissa did everything I told her to. Still no Maggie.
By the time I was able to get there, Maggie had been missing for 3 days. I met up with Melissa at the point where her Dalmatian was last seen. I gave Murphy, my search dog, the scent of the missing dog from a piece of her bedding. Murphy, an Australian shepherd, is a pretty good cat detection dog, but he has always been a little wobbly on tracking and trailing lost dogs.
I mean, face it—tracking is hard. Imagine an Easter egg hunt where you are blindfolded and have to find the eggs with your nose by following the footprints of the person who hid them three days ago. Plus, Murphy is also a bit of a goof-off. One whiff of a squirrel or rabbit can distracts him to no end. You could say that my confidence was "low-ish" as Murphy raced along through the neighborhood, nose on the ground, dragging me behind him.
So, I was as surprised as anybody when the owner, who was following along, said, "Omigod...there are bloody paw prints on the sidewalk!" The prints were dry, about the right size for a Dalmation, and enough to break your heart. If these were Maggie's prints, she had run until her pads wore through.
Murphy was trailing along the adjacent shrubbery—we have no practice with tracking bloody paw prints—so he was unaware that we humans were receiving visual confirmation of the trail. I admit I was tempted to follow the visual trail rather than Murphy's nose. Every time he made a turn away from the bloody prints, I thought, "NO! NO! The prints go that way!" But then we'd cross the grass or dirt and there would be the prints again, on the next solid surface. "Okay," I said to myself, "trust your dog."
This went on for about two hours. The Texas sun was scorching and it was really getting too hot for Murphy to work much longer. We had already gotten yelled at for trespassing by an old farmer guy, so we had to go the long way around his property. Even when we were beyond his property in a heavily wooded gully, he was still yelling at me over the fence. "Little Lady!" he said. "You are gonna get ate up by chiggers down there and probably snakebit. You need to get out of there!"
Now, I hate it when people call me Little Lady, but the idea of snakes really did scare me. But I looked up at Murphy and he was pulling hard into his harness, staring straight ahead into what I was sure was a pit of vipers, probably copperheads. I decided to follow him deeper into the gully. "Well, you may have to call the paramedics then," I yelled over my shoulder to the old farmer guy. And we kept going.
No more than 20 paces farther, Murphy stopped stock still, head up. In the tall brush beyond him, expecting to see a deer, I saw one black dot on a white background, then two…Maggie. I called out to the owner, who ran to her dog. Maggie was smart enough and tired enough to let herself be caught. A very dehydrated and foot-sore Dalmatian was delivered to her friends at the nearby fire station where Melissa's dad works. It was beautiful—shiny red firetrucks, firemen in uniform, lifesavers themselves, fawning over Murphy and the Dalmatian he'd rescued. Of course, I didn't have my camera with me—dumb, I know—I missed a great photo opportunity.
During the rescue though, I hadn't missed the opportunity to yell back at the old farmer guy, "We found her! We found her down here!" Of course I had a little twang of the triumphant-I-told-you-so in my voice. And he was nice enough to admit, "Little Lady, that's the most amazing thing I've ever seen."
