The Journey in search of my lost dog ~ Mariella

I have a dog…or a dog has me, I can never tell! And last week Wednesday he went missing, pinched out of the ether as if he were never there. This is a journal of my week of looking for him and of what I gained through losing him.

                         

Wed 14^th August – It’s Market day and my husband is away so there’s lots of carrying to be done, Rocket, my big black beautiful Weimeraner Dalmation hasn’t come back from his daily run on the hill behind our house, for every hole in the fence we close he digs two and he’s always one step ahead of us! If he does go out he’s usually back in time for breakfast, I fill his bowl and off I go, but it doesn’t feel right.

By 12 o’clock there’s still no sign of him. It’s never happened before. I call the vets and PAWS. No luck. Immediately I think, snare, but everyone tells me to stay positive. In the afternoon I phone a dog whisperer friend, she is incredibly gifted and even though I have done an animal communication course and have done it before to great success, I felt utterly emotional and incompetent. She asked me to send a photograph. I left the market early and called a friend as guys had been sighted on the hill that week and there had been an attack. We went up the hill at 4:30 and started calling. We walked through fynbos where there are no paths, through forests so impenetrable that the Alsatian keeping us company looked at me like I was a crazy woman! My brother-in-law searched all the roads and never ending paths on the hills between us and the location but by sunset we had found nothing. The animal whisperer told me that he was alive, unconcerned, close to home, could see lights, couldn’t move, had tingling in his leg, mentioned left front paw, showed her pine trees stumps and a driveway with a double garage, she explained that he could have passed these places at any time during the day. 

Thursday 15^th –  Early morning I took a drive, followed the sound of a dog barking into a driveway and met the owners on the property I had seen from the hill the evening before. After hearing my story they dropped everything and took me on a two hour drive over the hills in their 4x4 to look for him. 

I learnt much about neighbourliness that day, about the concern and care that 'strangers' show when your plight is one of the heart, a missing animal. If I wasn’t so worried I’d have enjoyed the drive. It was so beautiful! Undulating brush bursting with yellow flowers and open fields with grazing cows, paths crisscrossing like a spider’s web, little dams everywhere. I called until I couldn’t call anymore. In the book I’m reading a lead character says,’ If you say something enough times, it loses it’s meaning’. My dog’s name became the only sound that left my lips, the only thing I knew how to say. I wasn’t beside myself, hadn’t shed a tear, I was bush woman and I was going to find my dog! We found nothing. I spent the rainy afternoon in the bushes in a rain suit ignoring the feeling that I shouldn’t be out there alone but I had turned into She-Rambo! Explorer and Dog finder extraordinaire, only slightly terrified of possible baddies and armed with a panga, not my weapon of choice but useful in fynbos! I found nothing. A friend told me about poacher-finding trackers and I booked them for Saturday.

Friday 16^th – It was getting tough, my animal whispering friend said Rocket hadn’t moved and was a little thirsty, people started telling me I should assume he’d been taken and that he’d found a good home. My mind was a mess but I still hadn’t shed a tear, resolute, life without him felt strange, as if some creature had ripped the fabric of time and snatched him through the hole, like he was just just on the other side of a thin curtain and all I had to do was reach out and he’d be there. I put posters everywhere because perhaps they were right, perhaps he’d been taken, a guy friend offered to chaperon me in my searching of our forest. 

I can now describe in detail, the vast array of thorns in our forest, the ones that hook, gouge, suspend you mid-barb-wire-fence-climb, like washing on a line! The Alsatian looking at me all the while, evidently wondering why I wasn’t crawling, I tried, there were more thorns on the ground!

It was about Friday that I started to feel changes within myself, that what Rocket had taken from me when he’d run into my knee almost a year earlier, he was giving back. I was told I needed an operation, but I don’t do operations! So I went to a kinesiologist instead and healed fast in some ways and slow in others! I felt a little unable, but after days of jumping, climbing, crawling and covering ground I felt stronger than I had when I injured my knee, he’d forced me to move and challenge myself, to creep through thorny gaps a little smaller than myself and for the first time I really had a clear picture of where I live, where the marsh begins and ends, especially where it ends, with a splash, the dams, cow trails, buck trails, fence lines, forest gullies, open paddocks, whose cows were whose, which neighbour’s dogs had killed which neighbour’s chickens. I received so much love and support, people I‘d never even met asking after him, neighbours phoning to find out the latest. My friend had spoken with him but had no more information to share and said that she has been way off in the past. It was hard. The thought of him dying out there because I hadn’t done right by him plagued me.

Saturday 17^th – I was tired. I’d had enough of the bush, picking thorns out of shins and hands and hair, the scratchy wilderness and a name sounding over and over. I left the trackers, all three of them and a sniffer dog to do what they do best. They came back at the end of the day, disappointed at not having picked up his scent, it seems the rain had washed every trace of him away, but there were no snares they said, which was reassuring. But being as thorough as they were meant they hadn’t covered the entire area and there was nothing more to be done as the trail had gone cold. It rained again that night.

Sunday 18^th – Still no sign, I searched more areas with no success. But I had woken up with the strong feeling that he wasn’t stolen, he was up there and in need. I journalled that night. Forgot about the ‘how’ and focused on the result I wanted, focused on holding him, hugging him, the feeling of his thick black fur under my hands, him in his bed, happy and home, I wrote, ‘you are coming home Rocket, you will be here by the full moon’ I left the wondering behind, I chose instead to remember something I’d read about the number 11 in numerology, my number, that we are the most intuitive and when we focus our minds on it, we can achieve anything, I used that as my inspiration. He’s coming home before full moon. My friend said, keep talking to him, he can hear you, it’s giving him strength.

Monday 19^th – I had a full day of work and couldn't search but felt strongly that he was on the hill. Feeling a fool for wasting time on posters, I hired Happy, a guy who has worked for us in the past for Tuesday morning. I felt a pull to a certain area, my heart was leading the way instead of my head,a place I’d walked past too many times but when dogs are trapped they won’t call out, not even to you, because instinctively they feel threatened and vulnerable. My friend, the whisperer said she had a vision of him floating above the Bitou river, she didn’t say that it was him showing her he was giving up, she knew that I needed to stay positive. I wrote in my journal that he will come home before the full moon.Tomorrow! 

Tueday 20^th – We climbed the hill at 10:00. I tried to communicate with him and for the first time, it was clear as a bell, no weird images of him in turmoil, writhing like a snake until I opened my eyes in despair. He was clear, his eyes looking at me. I said to him, today you are coming home, I am going to call you, if you can hear me, you call back, I am finding you and bringing you home, to your family, your bed, your food, aren’t you hungry? Come home, I screamed in my mind. I opened my eyes and called him. I heard something, like a seagull being strangled! I called again, heard it again but softer. I ran. Ran up the path, felt the worlds of unknowing between us slipping away. I found nothing at the top of the path. I phoned my animal whispering friend, asked her if she could confirm that it was him, but she was driving (as luck would have it!) but said I should just keep telling him to let himself be heard. We walked up and down that small area for four hours and stopped for lunch. I explained to Happy that I wanted him to search a specific area, close to home, while I collected my son from school. Don’t go far I said, stay in this area and call me if you find him. Five minutes from home I got a call. It was Happy. He was screaming into the phone in his lyrical broken English, I find him, I find that one! But his leg is not right. Can you carry him? I asked, turning around. I saw his tail wagging from beyond the fence. A snare wrapped so tight around his paw it had cut into his flesh, causing it to swell to more than double the size, but his wagging tail and his relieved eyes made me give up the tears that hadn't come all week. I could hardly see the steering wheel as we drove down the drive way to the vet. We had found him! 

 

The snare was removed under mild sedation and after 1 litre of water and three suppers, he went to sleep by the heater. A deep sleep. No dreams. His thin frame lifting and falling slightly with each breath. He was home.

I phoned everyone, my guy friend who’d done much of the searching with me said, Ah my faith is restored! And he was spot on, it was Rocket's left front paw, he was close to home, close to cut pines, he could see the lights.

I cannot advocate doing an animal communication course enough, find one in your area, it's an enriching ability to foster and useful. When I phoned the animal whisperer she said, he had given up and if I had given up he wouldn't have made it. It rained on Wednesday night, an icy deluge that flooded the paths and hillside, but it didn’t bother us, in our home next to the heater for full moon had passed.