Sophie, Dog Overboard : The Incredible True Adventures of the Castaway Dog (22 page)

“It was like she was on Ecstasy,” says Bridget, who had a hard time bonding with Ruby. “I was excited that there was a puppy but then I got home and thought,
You're a
bit much.
Don't get me wrong, I thought Ruby was absolutely gorgeous, so cute. I just wanted her to stop—just calm down.”

It was hard for all the Griffiths, but especially Bridget, not to compare the rambunctious Ruby with the quieter, gentler Sophie. More placid and more stubborn, warm, intuitive Sophie was as happy with her chin on someone's lap as she was being thrown the tennis ball over and over for hours upon hours. Ruby, on the other hand, didn't sit still long enough for Bridget to pick her up and snuggle with her the way she'd loved to do with Sophie. She had an attention span not much longer than a goldfish's, so the game of throwing a stick or a tennis ball would last all of two throws. “I wanted to say, ‘that palm frond that you're eyeing off is still going to be there in ten minutes, can you just chill out so I can pat you?'” Bridget says. But two pats on the head and Ruby would be gone, ready for,
what now?

Bridget's first meeting with Ruby was when she came home for the Christmas holidays. She had a few days on her own to sound out Ruby before the rest of the family descended. Over the Griffith family Christmas, while everyone might have been comparing Ruby to Sophie and thinking about Sophie, no one was talking about her anymore. The kids hoped that one day it would be possible to revisit old memories, tell old stories, but they knew that they weren't there yet. There were still no photos of Sophie around the place and her name was understood to be all but unmentionable.

So the 2008 Griffith family Christmas marked the beginning of a new era with this tireless young red dog at their feet, crooning and drooling by their side as they dined, and jumping on the table or all over a Griffith, the minute someone turned their back. With everyone home for the holiday, Ruby was in her element. As the family kicked the three-day holiday off in the traditional way, with champagne for the girls, beer for the boys and games around the pool, Ruby was bouncing and slobbering and scratching wherever there was the slightest bit of action for her to be involved in.

Jan served up a tropical-tinged feast of fresh seafood salad with a homemade mango dressing followed by roast pork, roast turkey with “Nan's special stuffing” as well as ham. There were veggies of roast potato, pumpkin, steamed greens, and to spice it altogether, cranberry sauce, applesauce and gravy. Ruby got her fair share of the feast and then some, making herself more than available as the family celebrated for days, dining on leftovers, napping, and watching Australia's traditional Boxing Day cricket match.

Ruby was there for all of it, a pouncy, panting, tail-whipping force-of-nature dog, unfazed by reprimand and full of hope for fun times, all the time.

“If I had known then what I know now, I would have called her Ginger Rogers,” Jan recently said, adoringly. Instead, this is just one of the new dog's nicknames along with Fergie (after Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of
York), Red, Ruby Doobee, Rubes, Doobs, and Ruby Doobee Doo.

“I think I may initially have had some trepidation about getting them a new puppy,” admits Ellen. “But in the end, I had to agree with Luke. Puppies make everything better.”

P
eter Berck (who sadly died at the end of 2010) lived alone on St. Bees for thirty years and had known stray dogs to come and go, left there by boaters who had to catch the high tide back to the mainland and return when it was safe to rescue their wandering pets. He'd also had dogs himself. Domestic animals were not technically permitted on the island but Peter's dogs had been such devoted allies that he justified it to himself. So when he got a call from Brian Kinderman on December 16th, telling him to look out for the blue dog that had been on Keswick and was now on St. Bees, he was as excited as he was curious.

“That dog I told you about, the one I chased the other
week down Goat Road, it's over there with you now,” Brian said to Peter on the phone.

The two men kept in regular touch to swap island and Mackay gossip and have a friendly yarn. In early December, Brian did have news: he had just a few days earlier chased a blue dog from the airstrip to Basil Bay and he didn't quite know how to feel about it.

“I don't know where it came from but Mike saw it a few days before I did,” Brian had told Peter. “I got the rope out and swung it around but it wasn't having any of it. I was too slow. Pathetic, mate.”

Peter chuckled. “Those buggies will get you nowhere.”

Two weeks later, Brian called again, wanting to let Peter know that a few of the visitors to the guesthouse had reported seeing a dog skulking around on one of the beaches on St. Bees, across the channel, when they were standing on the deck drinking their morning coffee. The guests had marvelled at the sight of a lone dog on the isolated beach over there. Who did it belong to? It looked like it was catching crabs on the rocks.

Brian had filled his guests in on the whole story, how the Keswick locals had been seeing the dog on their island and wondering who it belonged to. No one had been able to catch it. The dog was obviously tough and was being elusive, but did not seem to be dangerous. It was clearly someone's pet and most likely abandoned.

Brian had been amazed to hear from his guests that the dog was on St. Bees now. It must have swum right across the Passage. It seemed unbelievable that a dog
could manage that feat—no one was silly enough to try to swim Egremont. This animal was starting to seem like some sort of super-dog. Every time someone encountered it, it was getting up to something unbelievable. Keswick people had been thinking that it was only a matter of time before they saw the dog in or near one of their houses. Now it was on St. Bees? All this made for some exciting dinner table conversation for Brian and Lyn's guests. Wasn't the Passage dangerous? Weren't there sharks? How did a dog get across?

“It must be smelling food,” Peter told Brian. “And remember, there's water over here. You guys have nothing over there.”

“Yep, it's true,” Brian conceded, laughing, knowing Peter was having a bit of a dig.
My island
'
s better than your island
. “It's looking pretty scrawny but it's a tough old thing. I don't know what it's living off but it didn't seem to want to befriend us. Maybe you'll have more luck.”

There was no doubt that a dog had a better chance of survival on St. Bees than Keswick. The incredible thing was that this dog seemed not only to have worked that out, but to have done something about it.

St. Bees Island looks from above like the fertile, primitive setting for a dream getaway that could go horribly wrong, a mostly deserted tropical island with scattered mangroves, palm trees, and a majestic shoreline from which visitors look out over to Keswick Island and the
Coral Sea beyond. Its steep hills are layered with rock and vegetation and only sensibly tackled with hard yakka, ankle-supporting boots. The north Queensland wet season ensures that, from January to May, St. Bees is thick with eucalyptus trees and lush-leafed rainforest vegetation but the ground is covered in several species of wiregrass, its long blades capable of lacerating even the toughest of bare legs. All around the island there are mini beachfronts—bays the shape of fingernails with rock-strewn sand and mangroves. The water is as warm and blue as a hotel swimming pool, but in many areas, whipping with currents. At low tide, the bays become scratchy, muddy inlets. Boulders edge these beaches and are covered in oysters good for eating if someone has the tools and the time to wade into the water and extract them. This needs to be done at low tide, though, or the gatherer runs the risk of being knocked about by the tides and into the island's fringing coral banks.

Homestead Bay is the island's only developed area, if one could call it development. It is a roughly one half-mile strip of beach with three stucco, ramshackle houses built randomly of brick, tin or timber, a couple of them with wobbly verandas from which to look out on the sunsets over Keswick and the Coral Sea. Whether motoring in on a small boat or flying overhead, Homestead Bay looks like paradise, something like the abandoned tropical island where a teenage Brooke Shields stowed away with her hunky cousin in
The Blue Lagoon
in the eighties. Tall, unkempt palm trees—a few of them that
have stood there for at least sixty years—line the bay. Old generators, sand buggies and the occasional temporarily abandoned plastic toy are cozy evidence of the life of the Berck family.

The Bercks are some of just a handful of leaseholders of Homestead Bay over the past century. Peter Berck, the eldest of five Berck siblings, was a lean, pale-skinned man in his late fifties who lost his legs as a teenager as a result of electrocution. He and two of his mates were carrying an aluminium flagpole across a golf course in the town of Ann Arbor, Michigan, where Peter grew up. The accident occurred just before his family was due to leave for their native Australia, where Peter's father, Lionel, had purchased an island in tropical Queensland—St. Bees.

Lionel Berck was fascinated by the island's history (and eventually wrote a book about it). It had been owned since 1907 by the large and innovative Bussuttin family, who raised cattle and sheep there, built gorgeous colonial houses and brought koalas over from Proserpine, just south of Mackay—possibly as pets and possibly to save them from the then-popular sport of koala shooting. Lionel Berck bought the Homestead lease in 1968 and the family used it as a second home. In 1979, Peter decided that his needs and his temperament were more suited to life on the remote St. Bees and he moved to the island permanently. In 2006, Peter's younger brother David and wife Carolyn took over the lease from Lionel, with a group of their friends.

Peter was a dog person, through and through, so when he hung up the call on December 16th from Brian on Keswick, he was, in fact, looking forward to seeing his new neighbor. Years before he became an island dweller, he and his four siblings had spent childhood and adolescent weekends and school vacations on St. Bees, along with their dog, Whiskey, a blue cattle dog just like Sophie. Whiskey often used to try to follow the family across the dangerous Egremont Passage when the Berck boys motored over to Keswick to mow the island's 1,500-foot long airstrip for pocket money. They'd have to stop the motorboat, scoop up Whiskey from the water and turn round to take her back to Homestead Bay to shut her in the house, so she wouldn't follow them and risk serious injury in the Passage.

Aside from the few disciplinary setbacks, Whiskey was one lucky dog. When the Bercks weren't mowing the Keswick airstrip, they were over on St. Bees playing beach cricket, learning to catch tiger sharks and ignoring the swarms of feeding mosquitoes as they fell asleep under the palm trees that lined Homestead Bay. All the while, Whiskey was there, barking at sea eagles, tormenting the thousands of shiny brown geckos that scuttle and sunbathe on the island's rocks, feeding on mosquito corpses and chasing the waves as the tides came in.

Peter had had other dogs out on the island since he'd made his life there—dogs that also followed him everywhere. After Whiskey, there was Knickers, a black female cattle dog cross who had a litter of pups on St. Bees
in the 1980s. David Berck had to fly over to take the litter to Mackay after Knickers carried them all up into the Bees' mountains for supposed safety. Then there was another female blue cattle dog whose real name was Zeuch, but for some reason Peter and all his visitors nicknamed her George. Both Knickers and George were less interested in chasing koalas and wallabies than they were in sticking by their loving owner's side, and while they reveled in island life, they, like Sophie were loathe to be far from their owner.

It had been awhile since he'd had dogs though and Peter spent most of his days alone on the island. He kept himself busy, spending most days around his shed, fixing things, talking on the phone, drinking a beer or a glass of port here and there, and more often than not, searching the Internet for music. Whatever he was doing, he had music coming out of his giant subwoofer speakers. The volunteers who came to check the koalas on the island always knew when Peter was in the mood for a party when, from the top of St. Bees' hills hundreds of yards away, at around four p.m., they'd hear the sounds of Creedence Clearwater Revival or the Bloodhound Gang blasting from Peter's shed. Peter spent chunks of his solitary time on the island digging up hits that had disappeared and bands that had fallen into the shadows, and priding himself on knowing every tune that had ever hit the Top 40 charts. He had over 2000 CDs on display in the Bees shed, alphabetized and each with the original cover art.

It was January 18th when Peter Berck first saw Sophie standing on the marshy flats of Homestead Bay at low tide, not a hundred meters from his front door. While Peter knew his obligation was to report this mysterious blue dog to the rangers when he saw her, he was somewhat reluctant. He knew that, if the dog had gone feral and was impossible to capture, it would have to be shot. That January day when Peter Berck first saw the wolfish dog, he had a feeling about it. He even named it: Robinson Blue Dog. This dog was tough and by all accounts had been surviving on its own for quite a while.

It was a blue heeler; he was pretty sure, the same breed as Whiskey and George, though with a woollier coat, and far less trusting. It was standing with its back to the ocean, looking through the palm trees up at Peter as he shuffled out of the large, open shed.