Sophie, Dog Overboard : The Incredible True Adventures of the Castaway Dog (25 page)

Jan didn't share her feelings with anyone. Dave and Jan were still barely mentioning Sophie's name to each other. They were at a point where they could have a warm sigh together at the sight of other blue cattle dogs that reminded them of Sophie. There were cattle dogs everywhere, passing by on the back of trucks as Jan and Dave looked out of Oscar's windows in the morning, or snorting on the end of a lead as Dave took Ruby for walks. But Sophie's disappearance was still too tender to bring up casually. Jan knew that raising the idea with Dave of Sophie making it to St. Bees would make him hurt, rather than hope. The chance of Sophie surviving a fall into the ocean so far from land was outlandish. It had been over two months since she'd gone overboard. How could she have survived all this time?

But nevertheless Jan left St. Bees with an eerie feeling, one that never left her. Now, when she dreamed of Sophie, she saw her on beaches, running into the ocean off the shore.

What Jan and the others didn't know (or maybe Jan felt), was that Sophie was on St. Bees that day. It was two weeks before New Year's Eve that Brian Kinderman's guests had looked out across the deck to see a dog rolling around on the very same beach that the Griffiths were picnicking on. Sophie could have been up on a knoll about a 600-foot climb from them, or she could have been fishing off the rocks on another one of St. Bees' beaches. She was definitely there, though, and if she had looked out and seen
Honey May
or picked up their scent, she could have come scampering out of the bushes or around the rocks as the tide receded, wagging her tail, snorting and grunting, her tongue lolling in utter delight. “I just imagine she would have run up to us, her hips swaying, thinking,
there you are, I
'
ve been waiting for you!”
says Jan.

The most likely scenario, though, is that Sophie was several beaches down, somewhere on the opposite side of Homestead Bay to where the Griffiths were, either resting under trees or lying in the water. It was a scorching day—Bridget was getting pink and red as she hung out in her bikini—and Sophie, having recently pulled off another big swim to get to St. Bees, must have been tired and hot. Most likely, she would have been taking
shelter somewhere. It's hard to imagine that, had she been anywhere close, she wouldn't have smelled her beloved family out. It's a stomach-churning thought for the Griffiths. The possibility of a reunion that day was far greater than any of them could ever have imagined.

S
ophie could never have known how close she had come to being rescued by the very people she had been waiting for all those weeks. When the Griffiths motored ashore to Vincent Bay, she'd been gone for over two months and still hadn't made any attempt to secure new owners. It would seem that Sophie, devoted Griffith family member that she was, was still holding out for Jan and Dave to come pick her up. So how did she miss them that day? St. Bees was not a tiny outcrop of rock, by any means, but she'd been on that very same beach two weeks earlier and how far away could she really have travelled in her reportedly waning state?

Did she make her way to Vincent Bay again after the Griffiths left, and pick up on their scent? Did she sniff
around the beach and detect Jan's sunscreen or Bridget's shampoo, indeed any of their familiar scents, and look up and about her excitedly? Did their scent inspire her with further motivation to keep going, keep surviving, knowing that they were out there, somewhere?

Then again, she'd only been on St. Bees for two weeks the day Jan found the goat skeleton and had a sort of epiphany, and Sophie must still have been trying to adjust to yet another new environment. Perhaps she didn't go back to Vincent Bay at all or not until many weeks after the Griffiths had gone, by which time, their trail would have faded.

She'd spent nearly two months trying to survive on Keswick, only to consistently shed pounds as, day after day, she failed to find enough food and water to nourish her. That search would have been her overwhelming priority now. And it seemed that her movements were not entirely impulsive. Rather, Sophie appeared to be her calculating, cautious self out there on the islands. She had probably spent time preparing for the swim over to St. Bees and once she arrived, she probably rested before setting off to explore the island, in search of her best chance at survival.

There were a lot of new experiences for Sophie on both Keswick and St. Bees. The constant solitude and the hunt for food were the main ones. There were also so many smells to investigate—of tea trees and macaranga trees, of Keswick's bees and of St. Bees' goats and their sun-soaked flesh. And on St. Bees there
were new noises too. Hours after night fell she would have woken to an entirely unfamiliar sound. She would have known the wailing, sorry moans coming from the curlews all over the island, from back home in Mackay. But overwhelming the cries of the curlews would be bestial sounds resembling a wild pig. They would start after midnight and last for hours, escalating from a guttural bellow to a loud, aggressive grunt. There would have been heavy breathing and almost gasping noises as the sound built into a crescendo.

Did Sophie set off along a bush track in search of this new, mysterious noise—another potential threat to her survival? Or did she huddle even further into her nest, be it in the generator shed or on a pile of eucalyptus leaves in some secluded spot? Sophie couldn't know it, but those eucalyptus leaves were the very substance sustaining the animal emitting the hearty noise. And what she also would not have known, at least at first, was that she was a far bigger threat to that creature than it was to her. That creature was a koala. And there were hundreds of them. The ones making the noises, the grunting and bellowing, the ones that were probably interrupting Sophie's sleep at night, were males.

Every year the St. Bees koalas bring scientists and volunteers to the island, eager to study them. One of the regulars is zoologist Dr. Bill Ellis, who has spent the better part of his past twenty years clambering up eucalyptus trees all over Australia, swabbing chunks from
koala's ears and tongues or collecting fecal pellets to analyze back in Brisbane.

Bill (sometimes known as “Bill the Koala Man”) is a tall, laconic guy in his midforties. His scruffy salt-and-pepper hair is not unlike the color of a koala's fur and his eyes are an intense blue, again, not unlike a koala's. Bill, along with his zoologist colleague Sean Fitzgibbon and ecologist Alistair Melzer, have been catching and studying the Bees koalas (otherwise known as teds, teddies and fuzzy gray bums) since 1998, when a fellow koala lover and frequent research volunteer, Mary McCabe discovered one halfway up a tree while camping on St. Bees.

“Until then, we didn't know there were koalas out here,” says Bill. Nobody had thought to look for koalas on St. Bees, mostly because the island was so off the radar. Once Mary McCabe had paddled her sea kayak up to the Bees' Homestead Bay and told her friend, Alistair Melzer, that she'd seen one clinging to a tree during an afternoon exploration, they went on to discover that the St. Bees koala population actually exists in a rare harmonious state, unafraid of human or animal threats.

Several times a year, the scientists island-hop off the coast of Mackay, from Stradbroke, Rabbit, Newry and the popular resort island, Brampton, then on to St. Bees. They pack up metal poles and specimen jars, hiking gear and wide-brim hats and they put the word out to any locals who might be heading to a koala area and can give them a spot on their boat or plane. Over
on St. Bees, the scientists and their revolving army of volunteers, who come from all over Australia and the world, sleep in bunk beds in the south house's school-camp-like bedrooms. (Although if it's just Sean and Bill, they roll out their sleeping bags and sleep under the stars.) Everyone logs the day's info on laptops, stores their koala-luring poles and heavy boots, and winds down at night with steak and a few beers and endless games of dice, to the backdrop of curlew calls, bellowing koalas and rolling waves.

Koalas have been threatened for decades throughout Australia, mostly by land clearing. The Australian Koala Foundation estimates that there are 80,000 koalas left in the wild, possibly as few as 43,000, and there is research going on all over the country with the hopeful goal of creating a national solution that will save the species.

“We must be approaching the point where they are functionally extinct, where these creatures are not going to be able to continue at any sort of viable level,” says Bill, who sees Australia's ability to save these universally-loved animals as an end in itself, as well as a symbolic step towards preserving the planet. His optimism roller coasters as the years go by and he sees government plans come into action and disappear, and funds for koala research wax and wane. “Try picking one element of the ecosystem that we'd really like to save—people want to save trees but it's not universal. With koalas, it's universal. Everyone looks at koalas and even if they
know nothing about them, says, ‘oh, they're so cute we've gotta save them.' We've got this species that lives quite close to us and which is quite resilient. Can we save it? It looks as though we can't.”

Bill tries not to dwell on the doom and gloom, and to stay positive. That's why the St. Bees koalas are so important to his research. The koalas on the islands in the Cumberlands and Whitsundays are particularly healthy, and the discovery of the St. Bees population has led to significant gains in knowledge. An estimated 300 koalas are living on St. Bees, and almost as many have been tagged over the years by Bill and his colleagues. Koalas have come and gone in the St. Bees community, munching on eucalyptus leaves and sleeping by day and, it would seem, making a racket by night. They are among the healthiest of Australia's diminishing population of koalas because they live outside of civilization—without the smog of traffic, without the menace of wandering house pets, without the threat of development that replaces trees with buildings and koala-friendly paths with fences. The koalas on St. Bees do have chlamydia, which, after their diminishing habitats, is the single largest threat to koalas' existence. But many of the St. Bees koalas are asymptomatic and those infected don't seem to suffer as badly as their mainland compatriots. “The bacteria doesn't seem to impact the population in the same way it does mainland groups,” says Bill.

Alistair, Sean and Bill track several things: the effects of
illness, who has moved from this tree to that or from that part of the island to this, new babies and who has given birth to them—female koalas seem to start giving birth at the age of two and keep going, having one baby a year after that—and who is mating with whom. In the decade that Bill and Sean have been tracking St. Bees' population, two of the female koalas have given birth to at least nine babies each and the scientists are fairly certain that all of them came from different fathers. “That's a pretty cool piece of information,” says Bill. Nobody had speculated that this might have been the case, until Mary McCabe stumbled upon the St. Bees teddies.

Sometimes the scientists spend their days climbing trees and rustling a plastic bag above the koalas. This trick drives them to the ground to be pinned down and swabbed, tagged, or otherwise inspected. Although occasionally, they attack the bag. Volunteers working with Bill over the years have lost parts of their fingers and sometimes even entire fingers. Bill, himself, has been nipped, but luckily the koala's incisors only got the fleshy part of his pointer finger—if it had been the koala's back teeth, Bill might be one finger short these days. He and Sean insist, though, that if a koala gets angry, it's because the catcher hasn't been careful enough.

The first person to get their hand on the koala gets naming rights, and the only stipulation is that the name begin with the next letter in the alphabet after the most recent koala noted in Bill's log book. Once the koalas have collars, the researchers are able to track them for
years and years. As a result, Bill and the others frequently become attached to certain koalas.

Each time they arrive on St. Bees, Bill and Sean try to prepare themselves for the possibility that one of their favorite koalas has died. Finding a dead koala is a professional hazard. “It's a total bummer when you come across one of the real characters, the ones we've become attached to,” says Bill, who, when he turns up to Bees these days, is preparing himself to find Elizabeth, an eleven- or twelve-year-old koala, dead. “But she keeps on keeping on,” he says, delighted. Bill and Sean mourned a female koala named Yellow a few years back, who appeared to have travelled several hundred yards from her usual tree to the spot where she died—something not often observed. Bill now tracks the movements and listens to the bellows of one of Yellow's sons, a fully-grown male named Stewy who was probably responsible for some of the bellowing that Sophie heard in the night.

Other times, the scientists spend their days lounging on the deck or visiting Brian and mates on Keswick and telling jokes. Then at night, they head into the hills, walking slowly over the crunchy bush paths to the spot where they know a koala is hanging about. They might crouch for hours beneath trees, trying to avoid being peed on (though Bill says that if you're going to get peed on by an animal, best it be a eucalyptus-eating koala). Their work at night is to try to work out what, exactly, is going on when these male koalas grunt and gasp and bellow into the darkness.

“We're sort of trying to work out who's talking to whom,” explains Bill. Are the males marking their territory: the deeper the bellow, the more virile the male? Koalas like to breed but they are also a solitary species and need to keep it that way or they'll claw and bite each other ferociously. Bill, Sean, and their colleague Jason Wimmer, around the hills and knolls of St. Bees, have recorded the koalas throughout the year, something they haven't been able to do in urban populations where noise from roads and backyards interferes with both the recordings and with the koalas' confidence.