I thought this would be a sad story. But luckily it’s not.
On a bitter cold night late last November, our 13-year-old dog, Amelia, disappeared.
Now Amelia has always been the mischievous, free-spirited type. You don’t earn monikers like “Stinky,” “Stealth Bomber Butt,” “Senorita Crapsalot” and—her best-known nickname—the “Devil Dog” without merit. So taking off for a night wasn’t out of her nature. Heck, that’s how we’ve met half our neighbors over the years. She is a true-blue mutt after all, with a gift for knocking those pesky, noisy little nametags right off her collar.
But Amelia, despite her puppy-ish personality, is far from youthful. By dog years, this Winter she turned 91 and has already out-lived most of her old running mates, though she’s now got a hitch in her giddy up, clouds in her eyes and the hearing of an aging rock star. So after the days she’d been gone turned into weeks, and then months, which drifted by like the falling snow, our hopes of ever seeing her again had all but melted away.
Amelia’s amazing life began simply enough, somewhere in the mountains of northern Arizona. All too soon thereafter, my wife—who had yet to even meet her (first and hopefully only) husband—picked up the tiny puppy from a couple of clueless kids while on her way to class at Prescott “like a biscuit” College.
And since the little fur ball was nice enough to sit through the better part of an environmental statistics class, and because no one else in the class wanted it, Brooke decided to keep the pup. She brought the cuddly canine home, carrying the tiny thing in the palm of her hand. But after setting up some space for the pooch, the reality of adopting a dog while working her way through college quickly began to seem like a bad idea. Being a woman, she took her gender’s prerogative, changed her mind and decided she couldn’t keep it.
But when Brooke took the diminutive dog to the local animal shelter, they told her that the puppy was too young to have been taken away from its mother and that they’d have to euthanize it. The big-hearted young coed couldn’t let that happen, so she took the puppy home and nursed it until the little doggie was finally big enough to eat solid foods—like Puppychow, shoelaces and homework.
Perhaps sensing the dog’s need for freedom, Brooke named her after Amelia Earhart. A fitting name, for the dog’s namesake was famous for wandering around the world and for disappearing while flying over the Pacific Ocean.
Eventually, Brooke and Amelia returned to the wilds of central Idaho where they met some knucklehead from Boston and his cute Australian shepherd, Jake. After some heavy sniffing and a few long hikes, the four became as one. And Amelia, who will eat anything and everything she can get her paws on, became known to kids in Old Hailey selling lemonade and cookies as “Oh no! It’s that dog!”
They then spent some time in the City of Trees where Amelia became a regular on the patio at the Lucky 13 restaurant (which has since moved) in Boise’s North End. The entire staff got to know our phone number, and I eventually invested in a steel dog leash—which only slowed her wandering ways down, without fully stopping them. The dog-led crew then headed east to New England via the southern route. Amelia proudly making her mark on shrubs and fire hydrants throughout the Rockies, Bible Belt and all 13 original Colonies.
After a few years in Cow Hampshire, where Amelia liked to visit and occasionally spend the night with neighbors a half-mile away, it was time to head back out west. This time taking the northern route, all the way out to the eastside of California’s High Sierra; Amelia leaving her scent along the streets of Cooperstown, New York, on the cornfields of the Field of Dreams in Iowa and by the parking lot of the College World Series in Omaha, Nebraska.
Not too long thereafter, Jake (Amelia’s only true love—besides her own butt) left the pack to go chase squirrels in the great beyond.
After a half dozen years of roaming around the mountains, deserts and beaches of the expansive Golden State, the family welcomed a child—though it took the Devil Dog a while to figure out what exactly it was. The first child, Jack, was soon joined by a cat named Dory(who thinks she’s a dog), a move back to the Gem State, and then another child named Sam. Maybe it all became too much for Amelia. On the family’s love and attention scale, the old dog had moved to the back of the pack. So on a frigid early winter night, she decided to go on a walkabout.
Calls to the shelter and clinics were fruitless. Lost dog reports on the radio went unanswered. A local veterinarian told me old dogs like that usually wander off for only one reason. The cat began binge eating and bloated up like a furry beach ball. Jack eventually stopped asking when we were going to let the “dogger” in.
But still, there was this unspoken hope that hovered around our little house. And it was kept alive by the odd occurrence of people constantly telling us stories of dogs disappearing for weeks or months and then returning.
While part of me tried not to listen, there are some things that even a deaf man can hear. Of the half-dozen or so such stories uttered our way, for some strange reason the one that gave me the most hope was shared over a meal of homemade pasta on a random Thursday night in March.
Justin, a local fly fishing addict, told us the tale of a small white mutt with a rather sour disposition. “Hell, that thing bit everybody in the family at least a few times,” he said with a slight twang. He explained that one day, the somewhat surly dog just walked out the front door of his family’s house in east Texas—and it was simply gone. Days and then months went by and the dog had all but disappeared from memory. No one gave it much of a shot out in the wilds of the Lone Star State.
The better part of a year later, though,with the same careless ease with which it left, the gruff but petite canine strolled back in like nothing had happened. And then lived there happily biting Justin’s family for many years to come.
It was beginning to get spooky. Less than a week later, a neighbor passed along a small classified ad in a two week old paper about a found dog. The date it claimed to have found the dog was off, but we instantly knew, before even calling, that the Devil Dog had once again, amazingly enough, been found.
Amelia is now lying on the floor next to the chair where her story is being shared—a story that seemed, for a while, to be over. She’s skinnier than when she left, but still has the same abilities to eat anything, stink up the better part of an area code and make you feel the kind of love only dogs can share.
Regardless of what’s happened to her since that chilly November night, we’re glad to have her back—no matter how long she stays. But that still doesn’t mean she’s allowed on the furniture, or that she’ll ever stay off it.
