Sophie, Dog Overboard : The Incredible True Adventures of the Castaway Dog (2 page)

After that, there was nothing to be done except to head back to
Tomoya
and get settled for the night. Steve, for one, was looking forward to relaxing in front of the TV, while Bill was ready for a beer.

Bill had been scanning the beach for more evidence of the dog, but there was no sign of it. “I hope this works,” he said, pointing at the trap now looming in the dusk.

“You and me both, mate,” said Steve.

I
t was the middle of 2005 when Bridget Griffith first set eyes on Sophie. Bridget was a tall, demonstrative sixteen-year-old with almond-shaped eyes and a wicked smile. She was working two holiday jobs at a shopping center in Mackay, and the object of her affection was a shy, fluffy puppy with her nose pressed into her belly as she lay sleeping behind a window in a pet store. Sophie was the sleepiest of a litter of otherwise bumptious cattle dogs, which in puppydom are white-haired, squashy-nosed and compact, like toy versions of wolves.

Every day during her lunch break, Bridget would go straight to the pet store, which was across the way from the card shop she was working in, and stand in front of
the puppies that had no doubt been strategically placed to tantalize every young girl or boy passing by. Bridget would “Aww” and “Oh my God” as the male puppies, in particular, wooed her, bouncing and clawing the windows as they looked out at her with their eager eyes. All the while, there was one little puppy that stayed in a furry ball in the corner of the pen, apparently oblivious to the potential suitor tapping at the window, waving and smiling at her.

For years Bridget had been carrying on to her mom and dad about getting a dog. All three of her older siblings had had their own dogs, and Bridget had dreams of a puppy with a super-girly name, like Alicia, who she would take everywhere and have as her companion, much like her brother Luke's dog was to him. Her parents kept saying no. They had one cattle dog already, Luke's Jordy, and in any case, Bridget had commitments all over the place, from basketball to netball and schoolwork, not to mention a popping social life. But it wasn't enough for Bridget. She needed a puppy to share it all with and she was determined to take one of those cattle dogs home.

One dry day in July, Bridget's mother, Jan, a smartly-dressed and dynamic late-fifty-something, drove to the Caneland shopping center to meet Bridget after work, which was a rare occurrence. Jan had always hated the shopping center for the same reason she seethed over lots of more recent changes in Mackay—she saw them as the sterilization of the once idyllic coastal town that
had run for decades on the hard work of small-business owners such as herself and Bridget's father, Dave. So this visit to Caneland was to be brief, and Bridget and Jan split up to get everything done as quickly as possible, buying underwear from Best & Less and new basketball uniforms from Lorna Jane.

Bridget decided to make a little detour. She wanted to go see the puppies, even though she knew it would make Jan cranky. But Bridget just had to have a look.

As she walked to the window, she noticed that the litter she'd been eyeing for weeks had been reduced to just two: a boy and a girl. She stood there in front of them, mesmerised more by the boy pup than the girl. The male was mischievously bouncing around, getting its paws entangled in paper, barking at the window and, in general, looking very adoptable, while the female was huddled in a corner, sleeping and seemingly uninterested in even the possibility of attention.

Bridget couldn't help herself; she had to hold the dogs. She found Jan in Best & Less and begged her to come see the puppies. “I promise we won't cuddle them, I promise,” Bridget lied. Jan was reluctant: she knew that if they cuddled the puppies, that would be that. But it was hard to say no to the vivacious and determined Bridget, who had linked her arm through Jan's and was walking her mother towards the pet store before Jan could stop her.

The minute Jan saw the puppies, her resolve started to melt.

“Can I hold the boy?” Bridget asked the woman minding the pet store.

“No, take the girl,” Jan interjected.

Of the Griffiths' many dogs, all but one had been female. Jan wasn't keen on taking another dog home, but she knew the odds were already stacked against her—at the very least they should stick to the gender they were used to. Dave always believed that female dogs had a better nature than male dogs. “And besides,” he would say, as if it couldn't be more obvious, “they don't pee all over everything like males do.”

Bridget picked up the sleepy female puppy, who by this time was shaking. “She was a really scared little dog,” Bridget remembers. But Bridget held her and stroked her under the chin and calmed her down. The pup was soft and warm, with piles of white-gray fur flecked with blue. She had a slightly upturned nose, like the nose of a little child, and she smelled of dog biscuits and freshly laundered towels. Once calm, the puppy turned her head to Bridget and licked her face. “Dealbreaker, absolute dealbreaker,” Bridget says now.

Bridget put the puppy back down in the window and mother and daughter walked outside to discuss what getting a new dog was going to mean for the family. Outside, as Bridget worked up every angle to convince her mom that there was no reason not to get a puppy, the tears started to fall. If it took a mini-tantrum, Bridget was prepared to go there. She had been looking at these puppies for weeks, just dying to take one home. She
practiced the age-old refrain: she would feed it and look after it, she promised. All the other Griffith children had had their own dog; it was her turn now.

Jan wasn't fooled; she knew her theatrical daughter could lay it on thick when she wanted something. Bridget was being over-the-top, but Jan couldn't help sort of admiring her for it. This girl knew what she wanted and how to get it, and in fact, Jan didn't need a whole lot of convincing. She was already smitten with the tiny pups.

Jan agreed to go back into the pet store and let Bridget hold the girl dog once more. Looking on, as Bridget nuzzled with soon-to-be Sophie, Jan clasped her hands over her mouth in adoration. The girl and the puppy looked like they belonged together and clearly they were both falling head over heels. Bridget handed the puppy to her mother and, just like that, another Griffith woman fell hopelessly in love.

Jan told the girl in the store that they were coming back for the female puppy and entreated her not to sell her, but they all knew that the clock was ticking. The rest of the litter had already gone, so there had to be more Bridgets out there trying to convince more Jans that now was the time for that new puppy. Jan just needed to clear it with Dave, who was over at the offices of the family electrical business.

When Jan called to say they needed to talk seriously, Dave became pretty nervous. Dave Griffith was a broad-shouldered man in his early sixties who wasn't
generally the nervous type, but it wasn't often that he got a call from his wife of thirty years announcing that they had to have a serious talk. He suddenly worried,
was she going to leave him or something?
He couldn't really believe that there was anything badly amiss, but then again, he had just bought the family's first boat,
Honey May
. She was a 32-foot third-hand motor cruiser with very tight living quarters: two tiny bedrooms and a saloon with faux-leather upholstery. Not exactly a yacht, but still. He'd bought the boat so that he and Jan could enjoy their later years out on the ocean, fishing, whale-watching and relishing the marine paradise that their tropical town afforded them. But when he got the call to say that Jan was on her way over, he began to wonder if this latest toy might have been enough to throw Jan into a bout of wifely discipline.

Dave was mistaken.

Jan pulled up to the office of Dave Griffith Electrical Services and, leaving a highly-excited Bridget in the passenger seat, walked into Dave's office, white pants very crisp and a resolute expression on her lips. “We're getting a new dog,” she announced.

Dave frowned then raised his eyebrows. Relief flooded through him as he realized that there was no drama after all.

“Yeah, yeah, whatever you want,” he responded to his own relief. “As long as you're not divorcing me.”

Jan threw her husband a puzzled look as she hurried out of the offices. She was desperate to get back to Caneland.
Bridget, who had climbed out of the passenger seat and was looking over the car, impatiently scanned her mother's face. Jan was smiling and Bridget knew it was a yes. She let out a whoop and jumped back into the car, which sped back to the shopping center. Bridget was sick with pure tension. If someone had bought the puppy in the meantime, she was just going to die.

Jan parked the car and Bridget ran ahead. There in the window of the store were the two puppies. The girl was sleeping again and the boy was bouncing around, paws pressed to the glass. He probably recognized Bridget by now, for all the time she'd spent fawning over him. As Jan was inside paying for Sophie, Bridget peered once again through the window that had lured her here every day for months. She almost couldn't look at the boy puppy, who was still staring up at her with his tail wagging. Bridget felt terrible about leaving him in there, alone, his little white face turned up to hers. She wasn't going to push her luck, though. After all those years of dreaming about a dog of her own, and all those weeks of visiting the litter of puppies, having just managed to convince her parents that it was time for a new dog, she wasn't going to argue about which pup! Bridget was beside herself with happiness and nothing could dampen her mood. She was going to be the best dog mom ever to Sophie, the very girly name that was the first to come to mind as she walked out to the car with her new best friend.

Bridget and Jan drove through the gate of the family home, a typical 1940s Queenslander with timber panels painted cream and a second, outdoor home of sorts, under the house. The house was a perfect family home, complete with plush bathroom, barbecue area, guest room, and two TV screens—one up, one down—the size of a grown man's boogie board. The upstairs bedrooms—one of them Dave and Jan's, the other a guest room—looked out through mottled latch windows onto a kidney-shaped pool in the front yard, edged with red timber and tropical gardens of hibiscus and royal pines.

When Bridget and Jan pulled in, there was a welcome committee in the form of Jordy, the family dog, who was doing her routine run around the garden before greeting them as they opened the car doors. Bridget swung her legs out of the passenger door and struggled to her feet—her arms were folded around Sophie, whose soggy black nose was nestled in the crook of Bridget's elbow as if she had been born there. Jan noticed that Jordy stopped the welcoming tail-wagging the second she saw Bridget. The old dog's nose didn't take long to stop sniffing, either—she knew that smell. Another dog . . .

The Griffiths are dog people. They've always had dogs; both Jan and Dave grew up with them. Jan's family, who have been in Mackay for four generations, have had various breeds, including an Australian cattle dog named Biddy, who they adopted after someone left her
on the passenger seat of Jan's father's car. Dave grew up in one of the many booming surf towns on the central New South Wales coast, before moving north in the 1970s to work as an electrician at the Bowen Basin coal mines. His childhood was spent in the company of a series of dachshunds, every one of them named Tinker. The first Tinker had a harelip; the last one went everywhere with Dave and his younger brother Lloyd, including out on their surfboards, riding the waves with them as they hit the beaches.

Jan and Dave met when Jan was a very attractive bartender at the smoky local bar, Wilkie's, slamming down beers for local tradesmen and mine workers, such as Dave. Their courtship was legendary around Mackay for being both volatile and long: Jan did a lot of telling Dave to “Pack your bags and get out of here,” and Dave did a bunch of promising to change his ways. There were plenty of parties, but the pair also bonded by sharing things with each other that they weren't in the habit of talking about. In his early twenties, Dave had lost his father to a sudden and early death and was still, close to a decade later, very raw over it. Similarly, Jan's family had been hit by tragedy, and Jan was known to demand that people stop talking about her twelve-year-old brother Danny, who had died when she was just thirteen, “Unless you want me to really lose it.” Neither of them were the type to talk too intensely about their emotions but they found comfort in an unspoken pact between them. Their marriage was a rude awakening to a lot of their friends,
who could happily have gone on drinking in Wilkie's, one big happy gang. But the Griffiths were ready for the next stage of life, and it wasn't long before they had two young children, Matthew and Ellen, and a budding family electrical business. Luke and Bridget came along several years later.