Sophie, Dog Overboard : The Incredible True Adventures of the Castaway Dog (24 page)

Frank went back to the main house to calm himself down with a cup of tea and to tell David Berck, “I saw the dog,” he said. “Scared me. I thought it was a wolf.”

“There
are
no wolves in this country,” David pointed out.

“It's furry and it's mean and it was in the generator shed. It was growling at me,” said Frank.

When David called Peter in the hospital and told him about Frank's scare, the issue of the dog escalated. When Peter and David got over a little giggle—
What was Frank thinking? A wolf?
—the brothers started to think that they were not going to be able to let this go for much longer.

“To start with, we just thought it was a dumped dog. Some boaters had come along and camped, couldn't find the dog that's run off, and left it there,” says David's wife Carolyn. But this was different. This blue heeler had been out there a long time, and it had scared Frank by growling and hissing.

Carolyn had already been concerned for the safety of her children, seven-year-old Hayley and five-year-old Tyler, who spent their time on St. Bees running around barefoot and free, playing cricket on the beach or tearing up bush tracks to drink fresh water from springs, but her concern escalated after Frank's encounter.

David did a few quick searches around Homestead Bay and came upon the carcasses of several baby goats out in the bush behind the south house. These goat carcasses were a little closer to the main house than he felt comfortable with. They could have been left over from a past cull but they could also have been the handiwork of a very hungry, feral dog. “If it was bringing down goats, then it was getting vicious. It had the taste for blood,” David explains. Between them, the Bercks realized that they needed to act soon to get the dog off the island. “We didn't know whether the dog was a serious threat or not, but in any case, it was against the rules for it to be there, and we just couldn't take the risk.”

One way or another, Sophie's days as a castaway were numbered.

O
n New Year's Eve, 2008, over two months after Sophie went overboard, Jan, Dave, Bridget and Sammy, Bridget's roommate from Brisbane, piled onto
Honey May
for a day out on the water. They were headed for St. Bees Island, to one of its little beaches adjacent to Homestead Bay.

Jan and Bridget had suggested the trip when they heard the weather report saying that the weather was going to be divine even by Queensland standards. Christmas was over with and this year the other Griffith siblings hadn't stayed on for the rest of the holiday. Usually they would all have been on their way to the Eimeo pub for beer and fish and chips, a New Year's Eve tradition since Ellen and Matthew left home. But
this year, the others had arranged to go camping with friends, so going out on the boat seemed like the perfect way to spend a quiet New Year.

The day before the trip, Dave was dragging his feet. “It wasn't like him at all,” says Bridget who, looking back, now realizes that he was thinking about Sophie. Dave grumbled that he liked to plan for these trips further in advance. He muttered about how much work it was to get the boat ready and then to clean it afterwards. He reminded Jan that
Honey May
was having some issues—it was blowing out black smoke. It wasn't anything serious though, and Dave was usually so enthusiastic about his retirement hobby. Ordinarily it was Jan who rolled her eyes about all the work and all the money they funneled into
Honey May
. “Why can't the bloody thing just work,” she'd say sometimes. But it was New Year's and they'd had a hard couple of months and Jan thought they needed to get out of the house. She hoped that getting Dave out on the water would cheer him up and she was trying, after their talks about her lack of enthusiasm since Sophie's disappearance, to revive her own joy for the boat.

They compromised: rather than go all the way to their beloved Scawfell, they'd head over to St. Bees, which was at least half an hour closer. It wasn't Bridget's favorite destination—the beaches were rockier than on Scawfell and she'd never liked to swim in Egremont Passage. “The water just whips through there,” says Bridget who on one family trip thought she'd try to
swim across the channel to Keswick, just for the fun of it. “I thought I could manage it but I ended up turning around. When the tide is moving, you have to swim at a diagonal just to keep yourself travelling straight. It was not fun at all.”

Jan told her to buck up, and reminded her that the beach was just as incredible as Scawfell's. At high tide, swimming in the bay just off the Passage was perfect. It got deep quickly and they could float around, looking up at the rock cliffs, and sometimes waterfalls, if it had been raining.

Besides, they were all working hard to get Dave excited, and so as long as he was prepared to go somewhere, Bridget was up for it. She wasn't going to be bratty.

But Dave was still not keen on the whole idea.

“He didn't even want to take the dinghy, which would have meant that we wouldn't have been able to go to the beach,” Bridget says. “And I said, ‘no, we'll want to go to the beach. We'll make sandwiches, come on.' He was kind of being a bit of a wet blanket about the whole thing, which was totally unlike him because he was always so proud to take us out.”

In the end, Bridget and Jan convinced Dave, partly just by being ready to go.

Jan packed the usual overabundance of snacks and drinks, chicken and some delicious baked treat that she had spent an afternoon putting together—Jan is famous for her chocolate cake and her caramel drops, buttery
cookies with a chewy dab of caramel in the center. There was white wine and beer and plenty of Diet Coke for Jan to sip on when she was feeling seasick.

There was absolutely no question of taking Ruby. Unlike Sophie, she was simply too hyperactive to have on the boat. Not only would she drive them all bonkers with her rushing and scampering about, they would be terrified that she'd bounce overboard. But they knew now the speed with which something disastrous could happen and they weren't going to risk it again. As the family set off, leaving a very sulky Ruby behind, it was impossible not to think of Sophie, who had so loved being with them and so enjoyed the ocean.

The sky was glassed out with not a cloud and the ocean was completely calm. “It was just beautiful,” says Bridget. It was another one of those flawless north Queensland days and it was hot, perfect for being splashed all over by
Honey May
's wake of sea water.

They motored over to St. Bees, which took them about an hour. Bridget and Sammy were taking photos of each other pulling silly faces on the front deck. Dave was quiet, driving the boat up on the flybridge and Jan was up there too, doing her best to quell the queasiness, munching on dried apricots and looking into the horizon. Jan couldn't stop getting flashes of
the trip
out of her mind. They were heading on virtually the same route and today was sunny and calm, as that day had started out.
One foot in front of the other
, Jan
reminded herself. She was fighting not to allow still-tormenting memories to overtake the fun they could still have out there.

They moored the boat at the mouth of Egremont Passage and motored in to Vincent Bay, across the passage from Keswick Island, with all the picnic gear on the tender. Anyone sitting on Brian and Lyn's deck would have seen picnickers on the shore across the channel, just as they'd looked out and seen the dog sniffing about the shoreline weeks before. The beach, as most of the little inlets around St. Bees are, was as much rocky as it was sandy. It was a lean curve of sand bookmarked by rocky headlands and jutted with boulders covered in oyster shells. In low tide, the bay was muddy and scrappy and scattered with coral and oysters but at high tide, which they caught on this day, the water was incredible.

Bridget kept her mind off the comparison to Scawfell's white sand paradise by getting her video camera out. She had been taking comedy classes in Brisbane and had a budding career as a comedian, so she was making a mockumentary inspired by the iconic nature movies of David Attenborough, with Sammy as the star.

At some time in the afternoon, after the family had eaten lunch and while Bridget and Sammy were filming each other, over in a watery inlet separated from the main part of the beach by a sand dune, they heard a yell from Jan. She had gone on a shell-investigating mission around the beach. “Come here, come here!”
she yelled. She was on the opposite end of the beach to the girls. At first, the family ignored her, figuring she was having an excited moment in her explorations. “We thought she was just being her dramatic self and that she'd call out in a moment that it was nothing,” Bridget says.

Jan was rummaging around on the edges of the forest where it grew over the sand line at the back of the small beach. She was picking up shells, ducking in and around the scrub and each inlet of rocks and staying out of the sun—the overgrown ferns and windswept trees provided natural shade on the hot, hot day.

“Everyone, stop what you're doing, come quickly,” Bridget remembers Jan insisting. “We thought she'd found a snake or a goat or something awesome like that.”

They sprinted over, Bridget calling out to Dave who was down by the shore checking over the tender that he'd pulled onto the beach. He, too, stopped what he was doing and ran over. Jan was standing amidst a clump of trees, wearing one of her huge sunhats and Hollywood-sized sunglasses. “She was like, ‘I think I've found a goat's nest, isn't it eerie?'” Bridget was embarrassed, in a charmed sort of way, that her mom was being so melodramatic. “I was, like,
are you even my mom
? She was being all hippie and weird. There was nothing, just sticks and bones.”

Jan knew Bridget was teasing her but she insisted. “Come here,
look
at this.”

Bridget glanced at Sammy, shrugged and moved
closer to the nest with her camera. In fact, it was a whole animal skeleton, head and all.

“I have this really peculiar feeling,” Jan said to Bridget. She had her hand on her heart and her face had paled.

Bridget looked at her mom and wondered what was going on. In the midst of her teenage embarrassment, Bridget didn't twig to what was going through Jan's mind.
Bones. Nest. Shelter. Sophie
, was whirling through Jan's thoughts.
Here were the remains of a goat and, if a dog had done it, could that dog have been Sophie?

Jan was overcome with emotions she couldn't really explain. She had edged unwittingly up to the nest and stopped in her tracks. The carcass had a skull on it and it was about the size of a dog's head.

“I saw the shape of the head and, well I just stopped,” she explains now.
Oh my God, it
'
s a dog
, Jan thought to herself, for a split second before she saw it was definitely a goat. Her heart started to ache. She clutched at it. It was as if all the grief of the past few months was facing her here on the beach at St. Bees.

“I looked around and I looked up at the little rock gullies where there are waterfalls when it rains. Here was this goat that had died and I thought,
if Sophie made it here, she could have made herself a resting place, a nest.”

Jan suddenly felt serene. “If she'd made it here, she would have been protected,” she thought.

At the time, Bridget was no longer thinking about Sophie every time they went out on the water. Part of this was that it was still painful to think about her
lovely puppy, stranded out in the water, hitting the wake of
Honey May
, suffering. But also, the fact of never really knowing what happened and never being able to say goodbye had prevented Bridget from facing the fact that she was gone. There was no tangible memory of her death to bring closure. Bridget's life in Brisbane was booming and, while she'd been back to Mackay several times and experienced home without Sophie, Bridget had dealt with the grief with a little bit of fantasy.

“Dad still had all her water dishes and so it was like, I don't know, she just wasn't there,” Bridget struggles to explain. “It was as if she was on an extended vacation somewhere. I couldn't believe it. It just didn't seem like she'd actually gone.”

Jan, on the other hand, was dealing with the palpable absence of Sophie at home every day. Puppy Ruby was certainly offering up enough attention and diversion to lessen the loneliness of Sophie's absence. She had injected some much-needed frivolity into Jan and Dave's days. But she wasn't Sophie.

As the tide turned, ready to take them back to Mackay, the Griffith family packed the picnic gear and the blankets into the tender. Jan was still thinking about Sophie. “It was an amazing feeling. It wasn't terrible but it really got me,” she says. “I didn't tell anyone what I was really thinking because I knew it would just stir Dave up, and Bridget was in her own place.”

Jan stood on the shore and looked over to Keswick.
The tide was high, the water still sparkling in the heat of the afternoon. “I just kept thinking, if she made it here, she might have survived.”

On board
Honey May
, as they came out of the Egremont Passage, Jan looked behind them over to Aspatria, a nautical mile away but very much visible from St. Bees. She couldn't see Hesket Rock, although even remembering it was there brought the usual moment of anxiety. She didn't allow herself to really focus on everything that was swirling through her mind, but somewhere a thought flickered:
could Sophie have made it here?
She was a good swimmer and she was bullheaded enough to try it had she survived the fall overboard.