Tuesday started quietly.
What few boats and cars we saw passing in front of the house mostly seemed to be local. And there weren't that many of them.
At 8:30 in the morning, the temperature outside was pleasant and a little breeze was blowing, so we opened the sliding glass door to enjoy some fresh air and allow the dogs, particularly Moose, some freedom he hadn't had over the weekend.
Sometime around lunch clouds gathered, and we heard thunder from an approaching storm. Moose, who had been sleeping at the front corner of the yard near where my car stays parked, was nowhere to be found. Jack had nagging concerns about Moose since mid-morning and had called for him several times. He isn't afraid of storms at all, but his favorite way to experience them is sprawled out on his doggie bed in the shelter of our front porch. The storm passed and Moose still didn't appear. We were worried.
When he didn't show up after a second round of thunderstorms rolled through later in the afternoon, worry turned into something much more intense.
Neither Jack nor I slept much Tuesday night. We each imagined horrible worse-case scenarios in our exhausted minds. I thought I heard Moose barking at 1 a.m. and spent fifteen minutes calling for him from the porch. Two hours later I woke up in tears, afraid he'd been dog-napped to be sold to a research facility. Jack flipped back and forth through mental images of everyone who has ever looked admiringly at Moose and said, "I'd love to have a dog like that."
We beat ourselves up for not having him micro-chipped. For allowing him be friendly to people. For letting him get used to playing outside without supervision.
I got up early Wednesday, but Jack was already awake. He was on FaceBook, sharing Moose's picture, letting everyone on his friend list know we had a missing dog. I spread the word to my friends as well before Jack and I drove to the local animal control on the outside chance Moose had been turned in as a stray.
On the front door hung a "missing" poster for our friend Amanda's dog, Cotten, a big yellow dog who looks a lot like Moose and disappeared from another part of the county last week. My heart sank.
"Moose is still alive," Jack said confidently on our trip back home. "We just have to concentrate on that."
And we did. We'd driven around the neighborhood enough times to know that he wasn't anywhere near here. Our dear friends up the road, the Medleys, had driven around the neighborhood looking for him, too. He wasn't here, but he was somewhere. We were going to find him.
I quickly put together a "flier" with photos of Moose, information about his disappearance and our contact number, and our friends on Facebook took it from there. Within 30 minutes of posting to our timelines, the flier had been shared over a hundred times by people from across Tennessee and elsewhere, and Jack and I had received words of support, encouragement, prayer and peace from countless friends and acquaintances far and near.
I talked to Mom and Dad and Sis, because no matter how bad a thing might seem, they always make me feel better.
Diva and Dudley fretted. Diva fell into a routine of smelling Moose's bed - deep whiffs and snorts - then begging to go outside where she would run around the yard in a frenzy before begging to come back in. Watching her reaction to Moose's absence was heart-breaking. She was a mess.
The afternoon passed in a blur of finally figuring out how to get our year-old "new printer" operational, making fliers and driving around Smithville, asking permission to hang them at grocery stores and convenience markets, all of which welcomed my double-sided super-sticky tape and wished us luck in finding our dog.
By six o'clock we were exhausted and starving. Neither of us had eaten anything all day long, and there's only so far a body can go on watered-down iced coffee with 1% milk and Splenda. We grabbed tacos from the new Taco Bell in town and found a quiet place to eat and strategize our next steps in the plan to bring Moose home.
"We'll need more fliers," I said, barely tasting the hot sauce I'd squirted onto my food. "A lot more. I'll make them half-page size, and we'll windshield every car in the Pates Ford parking lot on Saturday and Sunday. And an ad in the paper next week - we'll just use the same flier and have it put on page A-3..."
I rattled on, and when I'd finished, Jack took my hands and looked me squarely in the eyes. "Moose is out there, and we're going to find him."
Food took care of one empty spot, but the other was evident in simply walking through our front door, and the near-certainty of another sleepless night loomed in it. One last patrol of the neighborhood before dark resulted in nothing but a grim prediction from our neighbor, Frank, who wished us luck but told us, in no uncertain terms, that Moose was gone and we'd probably never see him again.
We'd barely gotten home and sat down when Jack said, looking up from his laptop, "Amanda found Cotten. He came home. She sent me a message."
Suddenly our fear that rogue stealers of big, yellow dogs were prowling the countryside abated, and we felt a brief shiver of hope, but that possibility was fairly far down the list anyway.
Minutes later, at 7:15, the phone rang. An unfamiliar number with a different area code from ours popped onto the caller ID screen. I answered and quickly realized this was the call we were hoping for...
The lady introduced herself as Bettye Pollard from White County. She had seen Moose's picture on FaceBook and said, with a lot of conviction, she had seen him at 8:30 that morning near Sligo Bridge. "I know it was him. I'm almost certain it's the exact same dog in those pictures. He was standing right by the road at the last curve before you get to Sligo Bridge coming from Smithville. He looked scared and confused."
After thanking her for calling, Jack and I grabbed our "missing" fliers took off into the fading daylight toward Sligo.
For those of you who aren't from the area or who have forgotten exactly what Pates Ford to Sligo looks like, here's the map from GoogleEarth --
By land (red line - 20 miles) or water (blue line - 15 miles), there's significant distance.
Driving slowly down the hill toward Sligo Bridge, we held our breath rounding each curve, knowing that busy roads are dangerous places for scared, confused dogs. There was no sight of him on the road or at the marina. The few people we were able to talk to had been out on the water all day and hadn't seen him. We stopped to hang a flier on the TWRA bulletin board near the entrance and continued our search.
We crawled the area across the bridge, noting the approach of dusk, and discussed whether we should head home or return with a vengeance Thursday morning.
One last stop, we decided. Even though Center Hill Restaurant on the Smithville side of Sligo was closed, I rolled our car up the steep hill into the parking lot. Jack quickly left a couple of fliers at their front door, and we stopped for a moment to soak in the day's last light and take a deep breath before heading back down the road toward home and another long, sad night.
I stopped at the base of the drive and looked to my left for on-coming cars before pulling out into the road. No traffic was heading our way, but in the warm, pink glow of sunset, running as fast as he could up the hill to our car, was Moose.
"JACK!!! There he IS! There's MOOSE!!!" I yelled.
Moments later he jumped into the empty driver's seat of the car and huddled in a trembling, whining ball like world-class athlete collapsing at the finish line of the world's most grueling race. He seemed to be in disbelief, as were we. Jack retrieved the blanket we carry for emergencies from the trunk, and lifted Moose, who was quite wet for some reason, into the back seat.
He'd recognized the sound of our car or the sounds of our voices somewhere along our trek and had given his all to catch up with us and do his part in getting home.
As much as we wanted to hug him and love him and pet him, the priority became getting home and making sure he was OK. I wasted no time retracing our path so we could collect the fliers we'd distributed, and when we got to the marina parking lot to pull the one off the bulletin board there, Moose sat up and cried like he we was being returned to hell.
I cried, too, tears of relief and happiness as I called Sis and then Mom and Dad to let them know the wonderful news.
Arriving at the house a half-hour later, the homecoming was sweet. Moose was as "beside himself with joy" as an exhausted, dehydrated, kind of freaked-out dog can be. Dudley and Diva led the tail-wagging party, and all Jack and I could do for the rest of the evening was watch Moose sleep and twitch with dreams of what had to be an even more terrifying ordeal for him that it was for us.
I called Bettye Pollard right away. She was so delighted to have been a part of Moose's homecoming that she refused the reward we offered. I think I'm going to send her a little something anyway.
He slept most of his first 36 hours back, taking short wakes to eat, drink and relieve himself in the front yard from the end of the leash but is now more back to normal. He's not thrilled with being on virtual house-arrest, but unless we figure out exactly what happened and how he ended up miles from home, which is unlikely, he isn't going to be roaming free, even if it's just the front yard and the field across the way. He was hanging close to the house when he disappeared, and it could happen again.
His collar was missing when we found him, and it's likely that he had to slip out of it to escape from whoever it was that had him. Moose is accustomed to traveling through thick brush, and only once has lost his collar - a couple of weeks ago - because it had gotten loose. He doesn't have any bruises, scrapes or road-rash to indicate that he have jumped out of a moving truck or car. He also doesn't have briar scratches from traveling through rough terrain. The most plausible explanation is that for whatever reason, malicious or not, someone decided to take Moose for a boat ride.
Unlike Jimmy, our old blue-tick hound, Moose doesn't wander as far as the marina or beg to go on houseboat rides with strangers. That someone lured or led him from our yard with us home, doors and windows open, is undoubtedly what happened.
While we'd like to know exactly what Moose went through and the specifics of his disappearance, it's just as well we don't. The law doesn't do much to protect animals and their owners from malice, theft or the threatening behavior of others, and replacing the pure joy of Moose's return with the frustration of a system that isn't going to resolve anything to our satisfaction isn't a trade-off either Jack or I want to make.
So, we celebrate his homecoming with raw hide and flea shampoo and plenty of walks around the neighborhood.
In closing Jack and I want to thank all the family members, friends, acquaintances, complete strangers, veterinarians' offices, animal rescues and humane societies who responded to our pleas for help on Wednesday and shared Moose's story online. Without your actions, we would still have a missing dog right now and the likelihood of finding him would be rapidly diminishing with each passing car and hour. Your words of encouragement and support were, and still are, worth more than you'll ever know, and we truly appreciate the positive messages, prayers, phone calls, meditations, love, vibes and strength you sent our way. People can say what they like about the negative aspects of FaceBook and the superficiality of the exchanges between people there, but when Jack and I (and Moose) really needed a strong, effective "social network", it was there for us.
And we aren't the only ones... Just this morning a friend found a dog in Nashville, and within four hours of posting his picture to FaceBook, he had been returned home. Yesterday two dogs were reunited with their owners after a four day absence after someone recognized them online.
News of Moose's homecoming was huge among our online posse. Together our happy messages of "MOOSE IS HOME!" got nearly 500 likes and more than 300 comments of congratulation. He's practically famous.
Next week he gets a new ID microchip. And maybe his very own FaceBook page.
