Friday
A young female Borzoi is found running loose in busy late afternoon traffic on a main street near Sacramento. Several good Samaritans are out of their cars trying to prevent the dog from being hit or causing an accident. "Princess" has her first piece of good luck: Lisa, a Bernese Mountain Dog owner with Golden Retriever rescue experience stops to help. Lisa has the magic touch and coaxes Princess close enough to lasso her with a leash. She loads Princess into her SUV and drives her around the neighborhood for a while, asking if anyone recognizes the dog. No luck.
Because she's rescue savvy, Lisa is watching the clock. She calls her vet and slides Princess in for a quick health check and microchip scan before the vet closes for the weekend. Princess is healthy and uninjured, though stressed. Unfortunately, she has no collar, no tags, and no microchip ID.
Undaunted, Lisa takes Princess home. She introduces her to Gracie, the family's Berner, and settles her in. Then Lisa gets on the phone. She calls every nearby vet with a description of Princess. She calls the four area ER vet hospitals likewise, since the long weekend is now beginning. She calls the three area shelters and leaves a "found dog" report. She takes a digital picture and makes a FOUND DOG poster to distribute the next morning. Then she gets online, finds BR-NC, and shoots Jacqueline and myself an email.
I get in later Friday evening, pick up the post, and get right on the phone. Lisa is a joy to talk with. She gives me a detailed description of Princess, reports the dog is sweet, social, and well-groomed. We agree it's most likely a case of the dog getting out while the owner is away on holiday. Lisa says the family can and will keep Princess with them until the owner is located. No shelter stay for this girl - Sahara has her second piece of good luck. Besides, Lisa says, Princess has already "gone to bed" with her daughter. She sends me a picture to prove it.
Saturday
Lisa and her daughter paper their area with FOUND DOG posters. I call all the vets and shelters again, this time using our Rescue clout to speak to a live person. No luck. No reports of any lost large white dogs. We post to the Borzoi lists and ask for breeders to check on any white dogs of Princess's age who they have sold to N. California owners. We post to our local list and ask for help identifying Princess's owner. Jacqueline contacts everyone we know in the area who may know a dog of this description. As the day rolls on, lead after lead dries up. Every young white female is home safe. Meantime, Princess and Gracie the Berner have a swim in the family's pool, go for a long walk together, and seem happy as clams. Princess turns out to be quite a smiler. The family is charmed by her antics. We're still not concerned. After all, it's only Saturday.
Sunday
Princess has another wonderful day, but there are still no lost dog reports on her and no one has called Rescue. By now, a dog sitter or owner should be aware the dog is gone and should be hollering for help. LOST DOG posters should be appearing somewhere in the Sacramento area, but our local contacts aren't seeing anything. However, we're not done with our detective work. Princess has an ear-clamp tattoo on her right ear. It's a bit blurry, but we feel we have read it properly. A quick email to the Borzoi "tattoo expert" in Louisiana tells us it's almost certainly from a Ukrainian breeder, but the tattoo isn't registered. We go back to the big international Borzoi lists and ask everyone for help with the tattoo. No luck.
Monday
We're beginning to fret. Princess is doing fine with her temporary family, but why aren't we hearing from the owner? Something isn't right. The local Sunday papers have no LOST DOG notice. Did she escaped from someone traveling? Was she stolen from a different part of the county and somehow escaped her captor? We widen the search by notifying a western-region shelter list of a potentially stolen/found purebred Borzoi. Then we go back to the big Borzoi lists asking about stolen dogs. No luck.
Tuesday
It's time to start thinking of what's next for Princess. We decide we will move her on Wednesday to Jacqueline's while we wait for U.S. and overseas breeders to respond to our posts and for newspaper ads and other networks of help to do their work.
Late Tuesday evening, Jacqueline is walking down her hallway when she hears her answering machine pick up a call. It's a gentleman from the Sacramento area. He starts talking to Jacqueline's answering machine. Friday afternoon, house guests had arrived and left his back gate open while unloading their car. His two Borzoi, a male and a female, got out. He took off after them in nanoseconds, but they were already out of sight. He and his friends searched all afternoon and all evening. He drove all through the night looking for them while his brother slept in the open garage in case the dogs came home.
Saturday morning they all began the search again. They called every vet. They called every shelter. They put out posters. They spoke to everyone they saw. No luck. Saturday night, he slept in the open garage again. Same on Sunday. His guests and friends were walking the area every day, but by Sunday evening they were losing hope of finding the dogs, much less finding them alive. He doesn't show his dogs, isn't on the online Borzoi lists, and doesn't know any other Borzoi owners in the U.S. He is also obviously unaware that a young white female has been been found in the Sacramento area.
Very late Sunday evening, the owner got a call from Animal Control. They had his male Borzoi, and he was OK! The dog still had his collar and county tags on, giving the owner's phone number. The dog had been found on the shoulder of Interstate 50, lying next to the body of a large white dog which had been hit and killed. The owner asked to come identify the dead dog. Unfortunately, the body had already been taken away and "disposed of" by Cal Trans workers, but no collar or tags had been found on it. All day Monday and Tuesday, the owner had tried to focus on being thankful for one of his dogs still being alive.
"I know my dog is dead," he was telling the answering machine, "but I just can't seem to accept it. I found your phone number online, and I'm just calling because....."
Jacqueline was running down the hall to the phone as fast as she could. Later, she told me the pain in the owners' voice was almost too unbearable to hear.
"WE HAVE HER!" she blurted into the phone. "We *have* her, and she's SAFE!!"
She was, indeed. Our Sacramento Princess was his girl. We'll never know why the two dogs separated or how she lost her collar. We'll probably never know where the male dog was for the three days he was missing or who the other large white dog was. We do know that the owner bought Princess directly from a Ukrainian breeder - and that she and and her brother are now both microchipped. And we know that a joyous reunion took place very late that night when the owner and his male Borzoi came to pick up his much-loved Princess.
"Wow," Lisa said later. "Golden Retriever Rescue is tame compared to this!"
"It's the dogs," Jacqueline quipped. "It's that Russian flare for drama."
BR-NC's Lost Dog Page says, "NEVER STOP LOOKING." No matter what other people say or what seems logical, never stop looking until your dog is found dead or alive. More than any other single action, what brings dogs back home is that the owner never stops looking. Princess's owner had never read our lost dog page, but his instincts were right on the mark. In one afternoon, Sahara had travelled more than 10 miles from home. That's nothing for a young Borzoi who can run at 30 mph, but it's enough distance to make local search methods completely useless.
Princess's owner couldn't bring himself to stop looking. That was Princess's best piece of luck of all!!