Happy Birthday Fozzie!

The story of Fozzie finding James.

Fozzie is ten years old today!  That is, Mu and I found him 9 years ago today, after he had been reported running on the freeway. The vet had estimated his age at about one year old, so we say November 8th is his birthday.  In honor of nine great years with our pack, I wanted to share the story of this amazing search where Fozzie found a dog named James who had been missing for 10 days.  Fozzie did great work as a search dog, filling in between Kelsy and Tino. Fozzie definitely saved the life of James.

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Fozzie Finds James.

I was sick, and frustrated that it was preventing me from getting my work done. At least ten people wanted our help finding their lost pets, and I was forced to take a day off. When the going gets tough, I take a nap. I got into bed, pushing Sky over to make room, and Valentino and Komu climbed up and joined us. Fozzie was upstairs by the fire. I fell asleep on my left side because I was just having a quick nap, and I laid down fully dressed, with my pepper spray and pocket knife on my belt, so I could only lie down on my left side. All the dogs were to my left, and as usual, I had about a six inch strip on which to sleep, on the edge of the bed. After about half an hour, I was awakened by a dog’s wet nose bumping me on the back of the arm, just above the elbow. I turned to look, and no one was there. Komu, Valentino, and Sky were all on the other side, sound asleep. A name popped into my head, Kelsy. I had distinctly felt a wet nose bumping my arm, but there was no dog over there, so it must have been my feverish brain.  (It was probably Fozzie, who is known to bump my arm with his wet nose, but he moved out of sight before I could gather my wits.)

Although Kelsy died over a year earlier, it is safe to say that I have thought of her every day since. She was my first search dog, my partner, my daughter, my friend. I don’t believe in ghosts, but when I thought I felt a cold, wet nose on the back of my arm, waking me, I thought of Kelsy. Obviously, whatever illness I had was messing with my head, but I didn’t mind that Kelsy’s memory was the first thing that came to me. Kelsy is my spirit guide. I mean that in the sense that I think of her often, and she is in the back of my mind when I go out on a search with Fozzie, my current search dog. When Fozzie and I are searching, I am of course paying attention to him, and to my surroundings, but in my mind, Kelsy is there alongside us, providing guidance in the way that the past informs the future. I remember the hundreds of searches Kelsy an I undertook, the ones we found, the dogs we found deceased, and the times we failed through no fault of hers. My spirit guide, Kelsy, didn’t actually ghost bump my arm, I know, but it was comforting somehow. I thought, if it actually had been her, she would have just been saying, “Hey, I’m here with you. You will be okay.”  I really hoped I would recover from the headache and nausea quickly, because we were supposed to search for James the next day, and I didn’t want to have to cancel.

James, a quiet and shy Basenji, went missing near a cabin in the woods on Whidbey Island, ten days earlier. His family searched for him several times, but they couldn’t find him in the 32 acres of woods, at the beach, or in the adjacent neighborhood of homes to the north. On December 2nd, 2017, Fozzie and I went to look for James. We stopped by James’ home in Seattle, on our way out, to pick up his bedding to use for the scent. His family couldn’t come with us because they had previous commitments. The two hour drive to the cabin passed quickly, in part because I was on the phone to a woman in California who had lost her cat, giving her advice. I seemed completely recovered from the previous day’s illness, whatever it was. After a short trip on the ferry, we headed up the main road of the island, Route 525, and we passed several places where Kelsy and I had searched in the past. We passed the sign for Useless Bay, where I really would have liked to stop if we had time.  Useless Bay is where my novel about Kelsy takes place. We passed Freeland, the location of another science fiction novel I’m working on, which features Kelsy prominently. With each memory of Kelsy, I had a sense of the landscape as we moved through, the wet places, the dense thickets, ferns everywhere.

At the cabin, a friend of the family showed us where James was last seen, running out of the woods to the north, toward the residential neighborhood. It was 47 degrees with light rain at times and gentle breezes out of the south, perfect weather for searching. I presented the scent article to Fozzie, and he took me the opposite direction from where James was reported to have gone. Fozzie seemed to have caught a scent that was relatively strong, certainly more recent than ten days ago. The environment, shady woods, was ideal for preserving scent, but I would have estimated the age of the scent to be about three days old, based on Fozzie’s interest and intensity. James must have been hanging around, revisiting the last place he saw his family. Fozzie led me back toward the cabin, across the porch, around the south side, and down the steep switchback trail to the beach. The closer we got to the beach, the weaker the scent trail seemed to get. At several points, Fozzie stopped, and I thought he was going to turn around and lead me back to the top. When we approached the small cabin at the beach, Fozzie found some poop, which is not unusual. What was peculiar was that this scat was bright orange, which I had never seen before. Some animal, possibly a dog about the size of James, had been eating an unknown fruit or vegetable that was mostly orange. This might be a sign of an animal eating something of low food value, out of desperation, like a lost dog would. Near the cabin, Fozzie was indicating that the scent was weak. I had planned to restart him on the scent trail heading back up toward the top of the bluff, but first I wanted to check out the beach to see if I could find any footprints in the sand. The tide was high, though, and the sand was covered.

We walked around the corner of the cabin, near where Fozzie stopped, so that I could check the deck boards of the little cabin for any muddy footprints of a little Basenji. As I slowly walked up onto the deck, bent over and looking for prints on the boards, I was startled by an animal in the corner who had been startled by us. It was James. I didn’t even look directly at him, and I knew it was him. I instinctively wanted to use Calming Signals, to avoid spooking James away. I pulled Fozzie away, and I sat down about fifteen feet away from James and fed Fozzie his treat, in this case string cheese, his reward for finding the lost dog. I told Fozzie he had done a great job in finding the lost dog. I tossed some bits of string cheese over to James, huddled in the corner, and he came out to get the treats. I could see his ribs. He had lost a lot of weight. When James came closer to take the cheese from my hand, I realized why Fozzie had stopped short of James: he smelled terrible, like that mucky mud on the beach that makes your shoes stink when you get home. It reminded me of Kelsy’s first “walk up find”, of Thelma, the little terrier. Thelma smelled like sewage when we found her, under a bush, and Kelsy had this look on her face, like, I think I found the dog we are searching for, but she doesn’t quite smell right.

Fozzie had led me close to James, but not quite all the way there. Had I paid closer attention to Fozzie’s behavior, I might have recognized that he was saying something wasn’t quite right about the scent. Making themselves stinky is an instinctive thing dogs do to try to disguise their scent, as many dog owners have experienced when their dogs have rolled on something rotten or gross.

We might have turned around, ten feet short of our objective, and we might have taken much longer to find James, or we might not have found him at all if we followed other trails and they led to dead ends. What made me check around the corner even though Fozzie didn’t quite lead me there? Was I just being thorough, searching for evidence? I would say yes. It also seems possible that Kelsy, my spirit guide, helped us along those last ten feet. I don’t mean that in the sense that Kelsy’s ghost led us to James. Kelsy is my spirit guide in the sense that my memory is filled with all of those searches I did with her, including our first walk up find, 8 years earlier, when stinky Thelma was hiding under a bush and Kelsy was reluctant to get too close. That memory may have been rattling around my subconscious when Fozzie slowed down and stopped, ten feet short of the lost dog, with a similar sort of hesitation. At any rate Fozzie did an excellent job of getting us close, finding a lost dog after ten days, in 32 acres of woods, when we were told the last known direction of travel was in the opposite direction.

I put Fozzie’s leash on skinny, stinky James, to make sure he didn’t try to run off again. I took Fozzie’s jacket off and put it on James because he was shivering, possibly hypothermic. The jacket fit perfectly. James wouldn’t step off the porch of the cabin, either because he intended to wait for his family there, or because he was uncomfortable due to some unseen injury. James let me pick him up, so I tucked the smelly little dog into my jacket and started climbing up the hill towards the car, to start our journey home. Fozzie trotted along beside us, glancing up every now and then, perhaps wondering why he had to walk, even after doing such a good job, and the bad dog who got himself lost was being carried. This reminded me of Kelsy, too. When I picked up smelly Thelma after Kelsy found her, and carried her back to the car, Kelsy actually looked offended, as if she thought I should be carrying her if I was going to carry any dog. We trudged up the steep trail toward home, James in my jacket, Fozzie glancing up, and the memory of Kelsy shadowing us.