Sophie, Dog Overboard : The Incredible True Adventures of the Castaway Dog (14 page)

One morning during that first week, Jan woke up and felt that she needed to speak with someone other than Dave and the kids about their loss. The shame was getting deeper; Jan was being consumed by the feeling that they'd let Sophie down, that they should never have taken her on the boat and that they'd been terribly negligent.

She decided she'd call her old friend Heather—a decision she would later thank her lucky stars for.

Jan and Heather were part of a small group of women who held sometimes-raucous ladies' luncheons at each other's houses every few months; lunches that often involved a spell in a swimming pool and maybe a hangover or two the next day. Heather, who had been enjoying Sophie's presence at the ladies' luncheons at Jan's place for years, was herself a dog lover with a fluffy white poodle called Carly, who she and her husband, Tommy, took with them on their boat when they sailed around the Whitsundays.

“Jan rang up, in floods of tears, devastated,” recalls Heather. “She said, ‘We lost Sophie. Overboard.' It was just agonizing, I felt for her so much. We both cried.”

Jan needed a comforting voice, some empathy, some easing of the weight clutching at her, the suspicion that she had failed as caregiver to Sophie. “I think Jan knew,
because we take our dog out when we sail, that I understood how easy it would be to lose a dog overboard. And a lot of people wouldn't. People might have been very cruel about it but I knew that it could happen so easily. We take Carly out all the time and we wouldn't have it any other way. She'd be so upset to be left behind, but it's always a fear in the back of your mind.”

There was not a whole lot to say on the phone but Jan needed to let it out. She's not an easy crier and it was a great challenge for her to open up to Heather. “I just felt that she needed to know,” says Jan. She did feel a little better after hanging up. Later, over dinner, Jan told Dave how understanding Heather had been. “Accidents happen on boats and it's impossible to protect a dog entirely,” was Heather's final take on it.

Dave barely heard what Jan was saying. It was a small comfort remembering that they weren't the only ones who took their dog out, but still, he felt rotten. He had been to work the past few days, trying to keep busy with jobs, but he wasn't really there. He barely heard what anyone said to him. He tried to join in the coffee conversations with his men around the shed, but he stood there, mostly mute. He certainly wasn't joking around the way he usually would. Being there helped keep his mind off Sophie, somewhat, but whenever he sat still, the thought of those horrible hours crept in, of circling and seeing nothing but gray sky and choppy water.

Dave was having a hard time coming through the gate when he got home in the afternoons and had to
switch his brain off completely when he went for his evening Corona. No afternoon walks for him anymore. He missed the company of Sophie following him everywhere. He wanted to chat to her and was spending a lot of his days trying to think of nothing in order to avoid thinking about how horribly quiet it was around the house. When he watered the garden, he didn't know whether to whistle to himself or choke up. He and Jan were both suffering and the vibe between them was less breezy as a consequence.

Over the ensuing days, Jan continued to cry whenever she thought of Sophie, which wasn't at all like her. The four Griffith kids shot emails and phone calls back and forth, discussing what they could do to help. Dave, a natural listener, sat back in discussions more often than he had before the awful event that had redefined the Griffiths' lives. And, after the necessary people had been informed, aside from the odd time when someone would ask about the wonderful Sophie, Jan and Dave did not mention her name, even to one another.

I
t was about noon one day in the first week of December 2008, over a month after Sophie had gone overboard. Brian Kinderman was making his way back to the Keswick Island guesthouse from the island's landing strip, where he would greet and farewell every plane coming to and from Keswick. The moustached former corporate manager, who moved to Keswick four years ago to start a new life out of the Brisbane rat race, was wearing his usual island attire of denim shorts and slip-on canvas flats, along with a fluorescent-yellow polyester safety vest so that the planes could spot him. The day was hot and glaringly sunny, as they had been for months during this hotter and drier dry season than any of Keswick's few residents could remember, and
Brian was motoring in the golf buggy up the dirt road when he came across a dog.

It was a dark-blue dog flecked with chunks of swarthy gray, small pointed ears pricked but for a little flop in its left, and it was standing solid and alert, legs splayed slightly apart, in the middle of the road and staring at Brian.

A dog.

It was a surreal sight. Brian forgot where he was for a second. This wasn't suburban Brisbane; it was a remote island and dogs were forbidden. Brian looked behind him back to the airstrip.
Was there a boat moored down there? Where had this dog appeared from? And why was it stopped, staring at him?

A week or so earlier Brian's fellow islander, Mike Barnett, said he had seen a dog making its way down his residential road at about five in the morning near the island's one and only roundabout. Mike had told Brian and a few of the others that he'd tried to follow the dog but had lost it near the beach. “Have another beer,” was the joking response to Mike's sighting.

But here it was. Mike hadn't been imagining it.

They'd all figured if there
was
a dog, it must have come over with boaters who had moored overnight. But now, a week later, Brian realized that this dog might not have a yacht to return to. As he slowed the buggy to a stop, the dog didn't move. It looked skinny and ragged. He could see the dog's ribs and its fur looked wiry and askew. If it had been here for more
than a week or so, Brian thought it must be terribly thirsty. There was no fresh water on Keswick and the residents got theirs by collecting rainwater, of which there had been none for months. “She wasn't looking very good,” he remembers.

The dog stared Brian directly in the eye but intermittently turned its head away, coyly. It seemed to want to engage him but was not making the first move. It wasn't threatening either, though, or noticeably frightened. Brian didn't know if it was inviting him over or trying to show him something. It was tentative but not unfriendly.

“I got out, grabbed the rope from the back of the buggy and tiptoed very gently towards it, saying, ‘G'day boy, g'day.'”

Brian and the dog had a genial Mexican standoff. Brian got close enough to hear it pant. “It looked as though it was checking me out. It wasn't scared but it wasn't softening either; just stood there like a statue.”

But just as Brian got close enough to hold his hand out, the dog bolted. There was not a split second between its stillness and its bolt. Brian tried the rope as a lasso, whirling it in the air twice and hurling it towards the dog that was, by now, not hanging around. It was already off, galloping up the road towards Keswick's twenty scattered houses.

Brian ran back to the buggy and took off in pursuit, going the island's speed limit of 15 miles an hour. In a scene straight out of a
Looney Tunes
cartoon, the dog led Brian up and down hills, never straying from the
road. “It kept looking back at me, as if to say,
are you still following me?
I got the feeling it was taking me somewhere.”

Why Brian was following the dog wasn't exactly clear, even to Brian himself. “What would I have done if I'd caught it? I would have taken it home with me and at least given it food and water, but I would have to have called the EPA (Environment Protection Agency) because animals other than the natives aren't allowed on the island. We've all said goodbye to some really beloved pets to come here.”

Brian followed the dog as fast as he could, across a quarter of the island, down “Goat Road,” which leads through Keswick's new development plots and to the beach, where Keswick's manicured lawns and tousled gardens of native maiden's blush and macaranga trees give way to scrub and bush.

It was between the bush and the beach at Basil Bay that Brian lost the dog. “I was following for ages, telling myself I was going to catch up to it. It kept looking around as if to make sure I was still there. Then all of a sudden, it disappeared into the undergrowth. I stopped the buggy and ran into the bushes, but it was gone.” Brian searched and called out, “Here boy!” for an hour, but to no avail. The mysterious visitor had melted back into the wild.

A visitor to the two-square-mile Keswick Island could laze around for days without seeing anyone. Eighty per
cent of the island is wild, tropical land, most of it mountains thick with rainforest foliage, thousand-year-old cycads and grass trees, their fat trunks sprouting long needles of grass. Cessna pilots who fly over the island, usually from Mackay's airport, 21 miles away on the mainland, look down to see the sort of undulating wilderness that would have confronted Australia's first settlers. Strewn through the mountains and around the perimeter of the island are thickets of mangrove, swamps overhung with towering paperbark trees, and plots of eucalyptus species including blue gums, poplar gums and bloodwood. Scattered around the island's shoreline are five white-sand beaches, dazzling yet rugged. These beaches mostly go unvisited for days or months at a time. Crabs and hundreds of the tiny brown gecko-like skinks have the run of them, as do the tumbleweeds and driftwood that sweep up and across the sand when winds are high, which is often, as Keswick is in the firing line of the region's prevailing southeasterly winds.

A honeymoon couple staying at the island's one and only guesthouse could sit on the beach of Basil Bay with a bottle of wine and be left alone for hours or days but for the odd nosy crab or a passing iguana. The only human activity that the romancing couple might encounter would be one of Keswick's fourteen (and rising) permanent residents kayaking by, or strolling down one of the island's fire tracks to enjoy their own bottle of wine as the sun streaks pink and orange over the Coral Sea.

The monitor lizards on Keswick are unfazed by predators because, for the most part, there are none. They have to keep an eye out for the sea eagles and crows swooping overhead, but on the ground there are only non-venomous snakes and spiders. There is nothing bigger than the monitors—no goats, no kangaroos, no dingoes, dogs or cats.

Keswick, unlike many of its surrounding islands including St. Bees, has been kept free of introduced species, and the residents are prohibited from having pets of any kind. Keswick's tourism campaign calls it “the last Whitsunday paradise,” and proudly references its hundreds of happy bird species and its disease-free Caucasian bee population, a result of hundreds of years of isolation.

The human outpost is on the island's southeastern side, occupying a crescent of land barely visible from most of Keswick's beaches or even from the dozens of leisure boats that motor by every weekend. Yachts passing through the Egremont Passage or looking across from St. Bees might not even spot the tea-green guesthouse, perched like a stork above a steep descent, overgrown with rainforest that drops directly into Horseshoe Bay. The rest of Keswick's houses—lightweight timber constructions painted in muted blues, grays and green that dot the village's gentle hills—are barely visible. There are twenty houses, a building site for four more, a 525-yard airstrip and the refurbished guesthouse owned by Brian Kinderman and his wife, Lyn.

Residents rumble along half a dozen graded dirt roads with names like Azure Bay Drive and Coral Passage Drive in electric golf carts. They spend their evenings on their balconies watching sunsets over the island's rainforest and coral-lined shores and most of them can see far out into the tropical ocean, past the flashy Brampton and Hampton islands all the way up the Great Barrier Reef.

They spend weekends tending to gardens of native species and, in the springtime, they gather for dinner parties at the guesthouse to watch pods of humpback whales moving through the Egremont Passage as they migrate southwards. Jero Andrews, who moved to Keswick in early 2008 and who's spent most of his life around boats and water, has been kept awake all night by the sounds of whales jumping and splashing in the lead-up to mating. Island residents have witnessed whales giving birth as they've sipped their morning cappuccinos. The whales might spend the next few months lingering in Egremont before moving on with babies in tow.

There are no shops or cafés on the island. The biggest intrusion from the civilized world is the Cessna planes dropping off architects and construction workers as well as groceries and cases of wine for the days, weeks, and months ahead.

Keswick visitors, of which there may be three hundred or so a year, can sit and gaze at eagles and sea hawks, snorkel around Basil Bay at high tide with sea turtles
and lounging sting rays, or wander from one bay to the next, photographing dramatically-sculpted coral. They can hike along fire tracks and a couple of walking trails, watching tree snakes slide up and over branches or a monitor lizard stand on its hind legs. The only real danger is the island's silver-striped bees that bother no one unless provoked by strong whiffs of perfume.

Brian was really the first person to encounter the dog, and for weeks afterwards he regaled his fellow islanders and guests with full details of the low-speed chase. The thought of the mysterious dog battling to survive out there on the island both haunted and delighted Keswick's inhabitants. Pets and missing them terribly was a common topic of conversation over drinks, as most of the residents had given up some beloved four-legged family member to make their life on the protected island. That's if it wasn't too painful to talk about, as it was for Lyn Kinderman, who found giving up her two cats when she and Brian moved to Keswick so heartbreaking, that she'd need a few glasses of wine to even begin to open up about it. “We sent them to a shelter. I can't talk about it or I'll cry,” she says.