A while ago, I had written a post about how we managed to find homes for three puppies that dropped into our laps (not all together, at different points of time). I had meant to include stories about some lost dogs who have also passed through our life, but that post grew too long, so I decided to keep those tales for a separate update. It’s taken me almost a year to get around to it, but here is the first of those anecdotes.
This was when we were living in Porvorim, a year or two after we had moved to Goa. Late one night, one of our neighbours — not one we knew too well — landed up at home, so drunk that he was swaying as he stood there. With him was a dog on a rope, a young Labrador, panting and excitable. While our four dogs raised raucous objections to this sudden intrusion from inside the house, he tried to persuade us that the Lab was one of ours.
Too sozzled to take no for an answer, he left the dog with us and stumbled off into the night. At a loss about what to do, we gave the dog some food and water on the balcao while the others continued to rage away inside. After he had wolfed it all down, Anjali and I ventured out into the night with him on a leash, hoping he would recognise something and find his way home. No such luck. For close to an hour, we walked this way and that around the neighbourhood, but got nowhere.
On our way back home, we worked out a plan of action for the night. Back at home, our fearsome foursome were bundled into our bedroom (they generally slept there anyway), while we took the lab into the dining room. We set up a makeshift bed for me on the floor, and I spent the night there with the dog. While he had been generally cheerful as labs tend to be, the way he clung to me after we lay down betrayed how insecure he must have been feeling. It was almost as if he was afraid I might leave him at night and disappear, and therefore needed the assurance of physical contact.
Early the next day, Anjali and I walked out with the dog again, this time towards the shops and apartment complexes a couple of roads above where we stayed. At the shops, we were told that he had suddenly appeared there a couple of days earlier, and had been wandering around since. He had even tried to get into cars when people had opened the doors. Combined with his general good health, this reinforced our belief that he was from a home where he was well looked after, and used to going places in a car.
If such were the case, we felt our best bet would be to canvass the vets in the neighbourhood. There aren’t too many in all of Porvorim, so it wouldn’t have required a whole lot of effort, but we lucked out with the first one we visited — Dr Marilyn Estibeiro, quite close to where we lived. We were told by staffers at her clinic that they had had an enquiry the previous day from the GSPCA shelter nearby, about a lab that had gone missing. Excited by the information, we rushed him down to the shelter, and were told to our immense relief that our peripatetic pooch was indeed the missing pet.
His name, we learnt, was Miles, he lived in Alto Betim, and was brought regularly to GSPCA for his vaccinations and stuff, just as our dogs were. He and had been spooked by some crackers a few nights before and had run out unnoticed by his family, probably through a break in the compound wall. Alto Betim wasn’t exactly next door to where our house was, and Anjali remarked how the dog had lived up to his name in the distance he had travelled to get there.
The shelter staff contacted his guardian, who was delighted that Miles had been found. He was at work, and said he would come by in his lunch break to take the dog home. Happy at how things had turned out, we left Miles at the shelter and returned home, where we were given a rigorous investigation by our dogs.
That wasn’t the last we would see of Miles, though. A couple of weeks later, we had taken our dogs for shots or something to the GSPCA, and had just put them back in the car to head back home, when a car drove up with a dog in the back. Never ones to pass up a chance to meet a new dog, we waited for him to be taken out. To our delight, it was Miles! His guardian (whose name I can unfortunately not remember — yes, I know what it says of me that I can recall the dog’s name but not the human’s) told us that from the moment he drove up, Miles started to get all excited. He could evidently see us through the windshield and couldn’t wait to come out of the car. A short and ecstatic reunion happened, and then we said goodbye to Miles.
Barking Mad 