Sophie, Dog Overboard : The Incredible True Adventures of the Castaway Dog (29 page)

Dave grabbed Sophie's lead on his way out of the carport, and gave Jan a look.
Just in case.
They could hardly bring themselves to believe the best-case scenario, but they were brimming with optimism. Dave put the lead in his pocket.

The anticipation was overwhelming and there had been no time to prepare for whatever it was they were in for.
Were they really on their way to pick up Sophie?
The Griffiths knew they could be headed for grave disappointment. They knew their hopes were too high.
When had something like this ever happened? She was a dog. She'd been gone for five months. They'd circled for hours looking for her on that terrible day. How could it be that, all this time later, here she was?

The couple were beside themselves on the drive down to the marina and spoke no words. Jan was clutching the passenger door handle with her left hand. Dave seemed to take every stop, every roundabout in slow motion. The radio was tuned to the local ABC news radio station but neither of them heard it. Dave parked in the marina parking lot and Jan's door was open before the ignition had turned off. They gave each other a sideways glance and Jan raised her eyebrows as Dave swiped the key and, upon hearing the beep of access, started to walk down the ramp. They could see
Tomoya
and the rangers in their khaki shirts milling about.

The cage didn't become visible until they had almost reached the boat, at which point they saw a thick coat of blue fur moving about inside a large cage.

“Oh my God, Dave,” Jan yelled, grabbing Dave's forearm, “it's her!”

“Sophie!” Jan called. She already knew.

“Tuck, hey Tuck!” Dave called out. The blue fur stopped banging about and began to wiggle and whimper and throw itself against the cage.

Dave and Jan rushed forward. The rangers were all watching in amazement. They saw the dog switch, its mouth transition from defensive growl to glee. Sophie thrust herself at the door, beating and banging the cage against the floor.

Jan was crying. As Dave took long steps towards the cage he called out, “Hey Tuck, hey girl, where you been? Where you been?”

There was no doubt in anyone's mind: this was the Griffiths' dog.

“Oh my God,” Jan was saying, her hands to her mouth, just as they'd been all those years back when Sophie was a nervy puppy in the pet store. Jan and Dave knew her as instantly as Sophie knew them. That wiggle of her whole behind, like a baby who has just discovered the joys of walking.
This was their girl.

Dave looked at Jan, and Jan looked back at Dave, both of them only now daring to believe it was all true. “It's her, isn't it?” Dave said. His eyes glistened. Jan could only nod and smile and brush tears from her eyes. Sophie was alive and she knew them. She hadn't drowned and she hadn't forgotten them.

Bill's concern that someone was going to lose a limb
had subsided. This lone dog was now more like a new puppy. She wasn't going to bite a soul. Jan had turned to the rangers to affirm, it's her. It's our Sophie.

“Seems as though we've found our owners,” Steve said, looking at Jan, who was so choked up she couldn't speak except to say, “Sophie Tucker! Sweetheart! What happened to you?”

And with that, Steve opened the cage and Sophie leapt out. She bounded for the couple and leapt into Dave's outstretched arms. Dave stumbled backwards. Jan sobbed. If this scene had been in a Hollywood movie there would have been a stirring orchestra and an audience reaching for tissues. Burke and Ludi, burly, rugged rangers that they are, choked up. “I wouldn't say tears, but our eyes were definitely watery,” admits Steve. “Mate, it was great. It was an awesome feeling, actually.”

“There's our girl,” Dave said. He was frowning and smiling and looking at Jan and the rangers and rubbing Sophie's chest and cheeks, all at the same time. He grabbed Sophie's front paws and pulled her face to his and said, “Tuck, what on earth?”

Jan looked at Steve. “You can't believe how much we've missed this girl,” she said.

“I bet. I do believe it,” said Steve. “I can't believe how long ago you lost her!”

Jan pushed a tissue to her mouth and the corner of her eyes. Turning to the rangers, she said, “I can't believe it, I just can't. What did you guys do? How did you get her?”

Steve had first his camera out and then his video camera, determined to capture this incredible moment. He looked up at Jan, grinning, and said, “Canned food! Guess she was hungry, hey?”

He went back to filming, but Sophie wasn't about to prolong the proceedings.

“I didn't get to pat her that day,” says Steve. “She wanted to get out of there, which is fair enough. I'd want to get away as soon as I could, too.”

Sophie was wiggling and pouncing and barking and once she was off the boat, and Dave had managed to put the lead on her—no small feat, as this recently wild animal had never liked donning a lead even in her most domesticated times—she was off up the ramp, pulling Dave along with her. She was running towards where she knew home was and Dave couldn't hold her. For a minute there, he worried that she might run off, so desperate she was to get going.

Come ON . . . Let's get out of here
, Sophie seemed to be saying.

“I didn't even have time to thank the guys,” says Dave.

As Sophie dragged Dave up the ramp, Jan was caught between running along behind them and thanking the rangers profusely over her shoulder. She was mostly speechless. Her mind was spinning with the suddenness of it all. She was in a state of disbelief but she was also experiencing an odd sense that no time had passed since that gorgeous day five months ago that had turned so horribly wrong. Here they were back at the marina
that she had avoided for months, and her Sophie was back and seemingly as jovial as ever. She looked up at Dave and Sophie, then back at the rangers, waved her hand, yelled, “Thank you!”

“Take good care,” Steve told her, still with his camera out and full of adrenaline as he watched this miracle dog heave her owner up the ramp.

Jan saw that Dave was struggling to keep a hold of the lead.

“I thought,
the last thing we need now is that she take off without us
,” Dave laughs.

But even in her haste, Sophie looked behind to make sure that Jan was there too. Then she sniffed her way to the car she hadn't ridden in for five months. By the time Jan got there, Dave was in the driver's seat and Sophie was standing in the back, her head between the seats, looking at Jan, as if to say,
are we going home now?
Her tail was wagging, her tongue was out, and she looked about her, nonchalant as ever. As they drove out of the marina and stopped at the first set of traffic lights, Sophie poked her head into the front seat and licked Jan on the cheek.

Bridget had barely slept the past two nights since her dad had called her, unable to keep the news of Heather's phone call to himself. She and Ellen were both on tenterhooks. Jan was going to be calling one of them soon, there was no doubt.

Bridget was at home waiting for the call.

At work, Ellen was spinning around in her office chair, distracted. She'd told some of her co-workers what was going on and every few minutes someone called out, “Have you heard anything yet, Ellen?”

Ellen knew her phone was going to ring at any moment with wonderful or terrible news.

Jan started making calls before they'd even got out of the marina. She knew Bridget would be most desperate to know and Jan was desperate to blurt it out to everyone. “It's her, it's her, it's her,” is all Bridget remembers Jan saying, through sobs. Bridget started sobbing too—child sobbing with snorts and snot and everything. Jan was talking at a rapid pace, how she'd called Heather and then Dave Berck, and how Ross Courtenay had said, “It's your dog; I'm telling you, it's her,” and how Sophie's coat was thick and furry like a wolf's and how she was “dragging your father up the ramp at this very minute” and as far as they could tell, she was not feral at all but her old, gorgeous self.

“Call me as soon as anything else happens,” Bridget said, between gasps. Then began a frenzy of phone calls. Bridget hung up the phone to call Ellen. But Ellen's phone was busy. So she called Matthew who was at work and was in a state of disbelief. Matthew then heard from Jan and then the eldest Griffith dialed Luke, knowing full well that he would probably be out of range. Luke was in Indonesia, surfing in Lombok, oblivious to the miracle happening back home. Bridget kept trying to dial Ellen who, she didn't realize, was
trying to dial Bridget. All the while, Jan was trying Ellen, whose phone was busy, so she dialed Luke in Indonesia and she left countless messages to call home: “There's some news!” Then she called her friend Heather, who started crying, and Heather called Jodi, who was at work and started crying, and when Jodi told all her work mates that the dog she was telling them about yesterday morning, the one on the island that the rangers were trapping, was indeed her mother's friend's dog who went missing months ago, all Jodi's work mates started crying.

Jan got through to Ellen thinking that Ellen didn't know anything yet—when in fact Bridget had called Ellen on Sunday night.

“Finally there it was, a phone call from Mom, and she said something like, ‘we have some news,'” remembers Ellen. Jan started from the beginning, going into the details, as was her way. “She launches into the long-winded ‘Janny' version of the story, which she thought I was hearing for the first time.” All Ellen wanted and needed to know, though, was—was it Sophie and was she all right? “It was killing me. I couldn't pretend for even a second that I didn't know and quickly interrupted her and just said, ‘Is it her?'”

Jan said, “Yes! It's her! She's in the car with us now and we're on our way to the vet.”

Ellen hung up the phone, stood up in her chair and said, “It's her!” All her nearby colleagues cheered and Ellen cried again.

Then Bridget finally got through to Ellen and the
sisters wailed on the phone together. Meanwhile, Ellen's mobile was ringing. It was the koala scientist Bill Ellis. As Bill had been getting off the
Tomoya
at the marina, certain that things were going to go badly, he had been stunned to see that “the lady” who thought she owned the dog was Jan Griffith, the mother of his great old basketball friend, Ellen. It had been ten years since he'd seen Jan and Dave, but once he'd realized it was them, his fear that the event was going to go badly disappeared. Now he was ringing Ellen to tell her how he'd just witnessed the rescue of her dog, Sophie, from St. Bees. They laughed. It was about as small-town a coincidence as it could be.

When Sophie entered her vet's office not an hour after leaping into Jan's arms and dragging Dave up the marina ramp into the car, Dr. Katie Nash said, “Sophie hasn't been castaway. She's been on an island vacation.”

Sophie licked and wagged, lapping up the attention as the girls on the front desk patted and exclaimed over her. She gave herself up freely for poking and prodding and flashlight shining. She seemed jubilant, wiggling and panting as Jan and Dave patted her and looked on. Dr. Nash ran her hands over Sophie's thick coat of fur and plunged her fingers into her neck, checking glands under her legs. Jan and Dave were a bit giddy themselves and just praying that the happy dog they were seeing was for real, that Dr. Nash was not going to turn around and deliver them bad news. Sophie's coat was
the splendid outdoor coat of a wild animal but it was oddly odor-free—where was the stench from all those nights outside and all those dead things she must have lain and rolled on? The vet and the Griffiths surmised that she must have been swimming—her fur was sparkling. She let Dr. Nash inspect behind her ears and take her temperature and she looked at everyone with an open, tongue-wagging mouth as they marvelled over how long it had been since that nightmarish day when Jan and Dave thought they'd lost her forever.

The notes from that visit on March 31st, 2009, show that Sophie was in immaculate condition. “Bright, alert, responsive,” Dr. Nash wrote. “Good body condition, friendly and excitable.” All of Sophie's physical tests were in normal range, and after a full examination, Sophie was given a clean bill of health. Sophie's current vet, Dr. Rowan Pert, came in to visit this dog who, he had just heard, had been living out on St. Bees alone for five months. “I remember seeing a very normal, happy dog and I was just amazed,” he says. “It was fascinating, as though nothing had happened.”

There was, however, the possibility still looming that while Sophie seemed all joy now, there could be deep-seated physical and emotional issues still to surface. Dave Griffith had David Berck's words in his head: “I don't like your chances. If she has the taste for blood, it may not be possible to rehabilitate her.”

Dr. Nash wrote up a plan for Jan and Dave to follow in anticipation of the very real problems that might
emerge. Sophie might develop separation anxiety, just like a child separated from its mother, which meant that she would probably be clingier than usual. She should be fed separately from the other dog; rewarded for her calm behavior; given plenty of attention and plenty of things to do; not left alone.

As it turned out, all the concern about Sophie's mental state, her ability to return to domesticity and to lose whatever wild, ruthless behavior she might have picked up on the island, was seemingly for nothing.