Sophie, Dog Overboard : The Incredible True Adventures of the Castaway Dog (28 page)

“It's unbelievable, I know,” said Ross to Steve. “It sounds like her dog, though. It could have swum.”

This timing was incredible but still, it gave Steve hope that maybe they could trap this dog after all. The bafflement all along for the rangers had been why, if someone had lost their dog on the island, they hadn't contacted them?

“I thought it was a bit strange at first. If I lost my dog overboard, the first thing I'd do is contact Parks in case we'd seen it,” Steve admits. “But then when we found out the circumstances, that they lost her five nautical miles off the coast, we could understand why we didn't hear anything.”

Steve got in the dinghy and zoomed it over to Stockyard Bay. He walked up the shore to the bushes, his boots crunching over the debris of twigs and shells. Behind him the tide was low. Had he not been working, he might have gone for a dip. The clear water was inviting even in less than perfect weather.

Steve crouched down. The angular green leaves of the beach-scrub tree poked at his forehead as he peered into the trap. It looked as though the dog had been there—there were paw prints all around. But it was nowhere to be seen—Steve looked up the shore, across to the line boat on Stockyard, scanning to see if the dog had just left. He hoped he could catch a glimpse of a tail or back legs disappearing across the rocks into the bush. Nothing.

But Steve consoled himself with the thought that the dog was intrigued. It had come close enough to touch the trap with its nose. He peered closer through the gaps in the wire. It hadn't touched the burlap bag, which was now well and truly seeped in gravy and attracting ants and flies. He marvelled at the dog's canniness: it must be hungry. There was food and drink on St. Bees, for sure, but they weren't seeing the amount of goat carnage
they'd imagined a dog could get into in three months, and there was certainly no evidence of any wallabies or koalas having fallen.
Wasn't it starving? Was it so wild that it didn't need any store-bought food? Or was it so smart that it knew that the trap could mean danger?

Steve made sure that there was still enough beef to lure a dog in. The beef hadn't gone rotten but as the gravy seeped, it was getting more and more pungent. If the dog was already curious enough to have sniffed around the edges of the trap, how long could it really hold out on taking a swipe at the food?

He took a walk up the beach of Honeymoon Bay, remembering seeing the white turtle shell wedged between the casuarina trees when he scanned the area from
Tomoya
a few mornings earlier. He was curious about it. Turtles would come into St. Bees to lay eggs in the spring and summer months, exactly the season when Sophie was there. This was a big one, 220 pounds or so, but there was nothing left of the turtle but its shell, mostly whole but for a few jagged flints snapped off around its edges. Steve crouched down to take a closer look. The shell was not going to budge. He flinched. This was sad. The turtle must have got trapped there on its way back to the water. He wondered if the dog had discovered it—it would have made a good feed. He saw no paw prints around but it did look as though something had been getting into this turtle. He scanned the beach, seeing windswept ripples in the sand, remnants of crab shells and beach scrub.

There was still no sign of the dog.

Throughout that day, Steve Burke, Ludi, and Bill traipsed up and down the hills of St. Bees. A few of the rangers were spraying lantana and prickly pear cactus over on Turtle Bay, on the east side of the island over-looking Aspatria, while others helped Bill and his volunteers fulfill his mission of catching and sampling his fifteen koalas in four days. All the while, the men were on subtle alert for the dog.

On Tuesday morning, March 31th, Steve woke again around sunrise, fixed himself a cup of coffee and fussed about
Tomoya,
peering through his binoculars and admiring the early hours. He looked over to the island but could not quite see the trap. The day before, not long after he'd inspected the trap to find paw prints around it, the weather had become gusty and the water in Homestead Bay choppy. The rangers had decided to move
Tomoya
over closer to Keswick Island to avoid the risk of hitting the bottom in Homestead Bay.

They hadn't seen the dog the day before and Peter, who had said he'd make sure to keep an eye on the trap from his house, had not called him with any news. Steve was wondering if this would be a failed mission—the rangers were heading back to Mackay today. If they couldn't catch it this time, they'd have to consider other measures. Nobody wanted that.

At around seven that morning Steve answered his cell phone. It was Peter. “You've got it,” he said. “I can see
the dog, it's moving about, probably not very happy, but you've got it; it must have been starving.”

“Are you sure?” Steve asked. He was excited but realistic.

“I was still skeptical—could it suddenly be this easy?” Steve confesses now. “Maybe Peter had just seen a shadow.”

He and Ludi got in the dinghy and motored back over to Stockyard Bay. The closer they got, the clearer it became that the metal trap was no longer empty. Steve and Ludi could hear the dog barking as the boat drew closer, and they could see it moving, pressing itself up against the cage and sticking its nose through the wire.

As they rode the dinghy onto the shore and hopped out, Steve prepared himself for a struggle. But he remembers the dog being gentler than he anticipated.

Sophie was whimpering and pressing her nose right through the cage wire. She was sniffing in and out anxiously, her breaths loud and frantic, and looking directly at the rangers as they approached her. Her hackles were up but her eyes were friendly.

Steve assumed this was the Sophie Tucker that the Mackay woman had called Ross about the day before, and so he and Ludi started to say her name as they approached her. “I started saying, ‘How you doing Sophie?'”

Sophie barked. She was alert and on guard but her tone was not vicious. And when she heard her name, she tilted her head.

“I think I'd expected some wild dog to be hissing at me, because she'd been there for three months by herself,” says Steve. “But she wasn't like that.”

Sophie was barking and moving around in the cage, trying to step her paws through the wire. Her head was tilting and every so often she paused, looking Steve square in the eye. Then she'd bark again, as if to say,
I am a dog and I'm scarier than I look.

Steve didn't buy it. “It was pretty cool,” he says. “She kept barking but it wasn't aggressive. It was more of a,
who are you and what do you want?
”

She was looking at him, as if to say,
how do you know my name?

“I pretty much knew then that it was her, that it was their dog.”

Burke and Ludi, looking at each other incredulously, knew they should move swiftly. They threw a towel over the cage and carried it down to the dinghy. As the tinny powered through the water, Sophie became more anxious. She was barking and moving to and fro in the cage. After all this time alone, facing the elements, she was being hurtled along in a cage, prevented from seeing where she was going. The rangers were taking her to
Tomoya,
moored not a hundred yards from the airstrip where, in all probability, three months earlier Sophie had waded in on the trail of the scent of survival.

Back on the boat, Steve phoned Ross, who could hear a dog barking in the background. “We've caught the dog! We're heading back to Mackay now.”

“You're kidding,” Ross said. It wasn't even nine o'clock and they'd already caught the mysterious dog and found the owners. He and his colleagues were somehow becoming involved in a Hollywood story.

“She was in there this morning, Pete called to tell me. I didn't believe it myself but we've got her and she seems OK. She looks a bit skinny but she's not threatening me,” said Steve.

Sophie had been throwing herself against the cage, wanting out, but when they got her onto
Tomoya
and were talking to her, saying, “Good girl, Sophie,” she started to settle. She even sat down in the cage, though her ears were still alert and her hackles up. That tail was not yet wagging.

Meanwhile, Bill Ellis, who was waiting on
Tomoya
to get a ride back into Mackay, wasn't feeling so optimistic. Bill has a different memory of Sophie's temperament on the way back into Mackay and was nervous riding on the boat with this wild animal that had looked so independent and cinematic running across the shoreline at sunset just a few days earlier.

“The dog was quite upset about the whole proceeding,” Bill remembers. “It was snarling.” Bill figured it was a good idea to try to calm the dog as much as possible. He tipped a bottle of water upside down to drip it into her mouth. She took a few licks but wasn't going for it. She was either not thirsty or she was too suspicious (or angry) to hydrate.

“She did calm down as we neared the marina,” Bill
remembers. “I think she knew where she was. But I was telling myself,
be careful where you put your fingers, you're gonna lose one.”

As Bill got off the boat to stand on the marina deck where he could see the action but easily escape it, Steve and Ludi stood next to the cage. Steve took his camera out. Ross had probably called this dog's potential owners right now. It wouldn't take them long to get here, and he wanted to capture the moment. Everyone, by this time, had a feeling: they were about to witness a miraculous reunion. The animal was no stranger to people. It might be scared, and they weren't about to pat it, but its bravado was fiercer than its intention. This dog was somebody's pet and it appeared to know its name—Sophie.

I
t was Tuesday morning, March 31st. Monday had passed in a bit of a blur. After the morning's phone calls, Jan and Dave had gone about their day as usual but neither could concentrate. They went to Oscar's and they went to the office. Jan stopped by the butcher on her way home and took Ruby for a walk and that night, over dinner, they chatted, their attention wandering to Ruby as she grunted and gazed at them through the screen door, wagging her tail at any hint that they might throw her a scrap. Neither of them wanted to talk about Sophie. It was feeling like a repeat of all those months earlier when they had driven through the gate with no Sophie in the backseat, unable to speak her name. Only this time, there was hope in the air. This
time, the energy was positive. Jan could have popped it with a fingernail.

On the Tuesday morning, having slept surprisingly well, Jan bumbled around getting dressed. She was on autopilot. She knew that if Ross didn't call today, he wasn't going to call. This was the final day that the rangers were on the island.

She was spraying some perfume when the phone rang. It was Ross Courtenay.

“G'day,” Jan said.

“They've trapped the dog,” Ross said. “They're on their way back to the harbor now and you are welcome to come down and meet them. The dog is pretty tense but we've got her.”

“Right,” said Jan. She wanted to say,
“Is it her?”
And then, if he said,
“I think so,”
she would have said,
“Are you sure it's her? Are you sure?”
But her throat was closed over.

“Oh my God,” was all she actually managed. She wanted to cry. It was now that the possibility that this might actually be Sophie really hit her. Or that it might not be her—it might be someone else's beautiful blue cattle dog.
If it was her, what had she been through? Would she remember them? If she was feral, would she be aggressive towards them? Could they handle seeing her like that? Could they handle seeing her feral and then having to have her put down?
It was suddenly all too much.

“Look, if it's her, she's apparently looking remarkably healthy,” said Ross, as if sensing the rush in Jan's mind. “The rangers are telling me that they're not
worried about her. She was in the trap this morning and they picked her up not long ago. She's a bit upset but she's OK.”

Jan hung up the phone, swept her hand through her fringe and immediately called Dave at work. She couldn't waste a second.

“You ready?” she said. Jan was trying to hold it together.
One foot in front of the other
was running over and over in her mind.

Dave made it home in record time. As he drove through the gate, his hands were gripping the steering wheel and his heart was thudding.

Jan came out to meet him. She looked the perfect picture of a boating woman on a mission: she was wearing a striped shirt and had her sunhat in her hands.

Dave's brow was furrowed as he got out of the car to greet her. He walked towards her and rubbed her back as she put her cheek out for a kiss. Jan looked up at Dave and they locked eyes.

“We're going to be all right,” Jan said.

“Yeah. Yep,” said Dave. “Yeah, of course. We've just got to give her this chance.”

“I have a good feeling. I know I shouldn't say it, but I do.”

Ruby was out there with them, her doggy radar telling her something was up. She jumped on them as they walked back to the car and Dave didn't even yell at her. All he said was, “You stay here, Ruby. We might be going to get your sister.”