Sophie, Dog Overboard : The Incredible True Adventures of the Castaway Dog (30 page)

Jan and Dave drove their girl home from the vet's, Jan answering and making calls and just loving the sound of Sophie panting happily in the back seat. She turned around to stroke her girl, her head reeling with the reality of what was happening.

As Dave drove the Nissan through the gate, Sophie's enthusiasm rose. They opened the car door and Sophie raced upstairs. She hadn't forgotten the house or the air conditioning. She was sniffing madly, her behind sashaying with enthusiasm as she sniffed around for that old squeaky pork chop. And where were the tennis balls? Finally, the rug, air conditioning, tennis balls!

But as if her ordeal hadn't been enough, there was also a rude shock awaiting Sophie. An addition: Ruby Red.

“She got home and must have thought,
after all I've been through, now you want me to be nice to this red thing?”
laughs Dave, who is utterly charmed by Sophie's handling of Ruby.

As Dave drove through the gate, Jan got out and ushered Ruby behind the gate that separated the pool from the carport, to give Sophie her bearings before introducing the two dogs. Ruby, of course, was a frenzy of energy, running and practically skidding on her claws towards Sophie, ready for a game the instant she laid eyes on her new big sister. As Dave opened the gate, Ruby bounded through it and Sophie froze. Her tail did not offer up a wag. She stood in the carport, legs slightly widened, hackles up. Her armor was in place while Ruby sniffed her, tail mad with movement, and hoping desperately for a tumble. Sophie growled. Ruby went on sniffing. Sophie wasn't threatening to bite. She was letting Ruby know that she better know her place now. As Ruby sniffed her all over, the top dog turned around to look Ruby square in the eye. Ruby was oblivious to the possibility that Sophie might not be so excited to see her. Sophie looked at Jan and Dave with those big, accepting eyes but they knew what she was saying:
Who is this? And how long is it going to be here?

Jan and Dave walked Sophie around the garden, got the red water bowl out of the storage closet where it'd been all these months, and did a lot of standing and watching their girl in awe.

“How about it, hey darl?” Dave said, watching Sophie and addressing Jan. “Is she a hero or what?”

“I know this sounds crazy David, but . . . I knew it, I just knew it,” Jan said. She was still thinking about the day on St. Bees. But she couldn't go there or she'd
really
start thinking:
maybe they could have rescued her earlier
. But Sophie was home and she was lovely and she seemed absolutely happy.

Sophie sniffed and explored, rolled on the grass and nudged at a tennis ball for a throw. She was showing no signs of anxiety yet. When Jan went to the kitchen to make a few tuna sandwiches for lunch, Sophie was there, sitting in front of the kitchen island, hoping for any scrap of food to fall, which of course it did, because Jan and Dave were so ready to give their girl whatever she wanted. Ruby stayed outside, almost beside herself with anticipation. Sophie pretty much ignored her, sitting with Jan, rolling about on the Turkish rug as Dave and Jan sat at the table and just watched her. Sophie then took her post in front of the table and dropped her legs, landing as if on a pillow on her right side in the stream of the air-conditioner. Jan burst out laughing.

“How long have you been waiting for that, Sophie Tucker?” she said as Dave's eyes seemed to water a bit.

That afternoon it was time for their weekly juvenile doggy training with Ruby. Dave and Jan piled both Sophie and Ruby into the car. Ordinarily they'd have left Sophie at home, but they didn't want to leave her ever again—and they were following vet's orders to include her in all family activities for a while. The class was always a hoot, and Jan loved watching the dynamics play out between the puppies, some of them docile
and obedient but most of them, including Ruby, running amok in their own unique ways.

The dogs were being handed treats every time they performed some menial duty, such as walking around the circle or sitting. Sophie wasn't involved, she was just on the sidelines. She started whimpering and barked a few times. “I couldn't say if she wanted to participate or just wanted a treat,” says Jan.

They eventually had to remove her as she was disrupting the energy, and Dave went and sat near the car with her, chatting and looking at her intently.
Was this the beginning of anxiety?
He was still trying to work out what the hell his girl had been through. He couldn't imagine how far she'd swum, let alone what she'd done all those nights out there on the islands alone. “Where have you been, Tuck?” he said to her over and over again, as she looked at him and swayed her behind. It was a bit spooky.
What if she did become a nervous wreck, how would they cope with her? She seemed so normal but how could that be?
But all these thoughts were secondary for Dave, who was on a high from Sophie's return. Nothing could bring him down.

Around seven that evening the four of them drove through the gates back home,
at last
. Jan and Dave figured the dogs would be weary from all the activity and Sophie might be ready for her first night back on her armchair.

Jan settled on a lounger at the pool while Dave took a Corona out of the bottom fridge and headed up the stairs. Sophie followed him, wildly excited. In the kitchen, she
watched him go for the fruit bowl on top of the microwave, cut a lemon into slices and then head back downstairs to wind down in the balmy evening. Sophie was following him on the tip of her nails. “Come on, Tuck,” he said. He pulled up one of the deck chairs but quickly noticed that Sophie hadn't joined them around the pool.

“Sophie,” he called.

Jan leaned forward and looked round next to her.

“Sophie Tucker,” Jan coaxed.

She wasn't coming to their calls, so Jan went looking. She found Sophie sitting by her lead, which was hanging in its usual spot in the carport—Dave had put it back there after they'd driven in that morning. Now their miraculous rescued dog was waiting at the gate, ready to go for a run in the paddock just as she had done every day before she went missing.

“It was amazing,” says Jan. “She knew exactly where her lead was and what she wanted.”

“You want to go for a run, sweetheart? Is that what you want?” Jan cooed.

“Do you remember this?” Dave asked, holding the lead in front of her nose. Sophie began wagging her tail madly, looking at Dave and then at the gate. She was back to her old routine as if no time had passed. Once out of the driveway, Sophie broke into a run, sniffing and bounding her way around the next-door paddock, looking back to be sure that Dave was there and watching her. She brought him a stick every now and again or came and sat beside him to catch her breath.

Ruby followed Sophie, racing circles around her, as if to say,
I'm here, I'm here! What do you want to do now?
as Sophie continued on her explorations of the block of land that she knew and loved so well, especially with the whole bunch of new smells that had arisen, five months after her last jaunt here.

Later that night down in Brisbane, Bridget went over to Ellen and Ben's place with a bottle of red wine. While a very pregnant Ellen sipped soda water, Bridget and Ben had a drink and the three of them video-called Mackay. Dave had just returned with Sophie and Ruby, and Jan had given the two dogs three Schmackos each, a tradition reinstated in Sophie's honor.

As the Griffith sisters appeared on the computer screen, Sophie looked at it and wagged her tail, of course completely unsure about where all those familiar voices were coming from. Bridget, putting her face to the camera, called to Sophie, “Hi baby girl, hi baby girl, you're back!” Sophie looked at Jan and at the computer screen, wagged her tail, looked over at her armchair as if to work out her best option. Then she trotted the few steps from the kitchen table to the Turkish rug and laid down.

Ellen asked Jan how Sophie's first day back had been and Jan vigorously recounted that it was as if she had never left.

“It's just incredible, Nell,” Jan said. “She's her old self, instantly. It's like, whatever she was doing out there, she
hasn't forgotten anything. We got her home and she raced up the stairs, sniffed around the kitchen, wagging her tail. She's been following us around from the second we got home. This afternoon, your dad and I sat on the couch—we're exhausted—and Sophie just flopped in front of the air conditioner.”

Ellen and Bridget looked at each other and Bridget said, “She's such a star.”

“It's pretty crazy,” said Ellen. “All this time . . .”

“But when we got home from doggy training tonight—this is the most amazing thing—your dad started chopping up a lemon for his Corona, you know how he does. Well, we called her and called her and she didn't come. She'd raced straight to her lead and she knew exactly where it was. She wanted a run in the paddock next door.”

All the Griffiths were in shock, but the ease with which Sophie had adapted to her first day home made everything seem so positively normal. All the guilt, all the worry, all the mourning and moving on seemed somehow rinsed away, at least for now, by Sophie's presence and her obvious eagerness to be there, by her love for Jan and Dave and the love she received in return.

Bridget and Jan sipped red wine from their respective lounge rooms and Sophie occasionally looked over from her napping spot with happy bafflement. She'd get up and come and sit on Jan or Dave's foot, then wander off intermittently for a sniff around the kitchen linoleum and a lie down under the couch, then come
back to the dining table where the action was, to wonder where exactly these sisters of hers were—she could hear them but they weren't there.

The Griffiths blithely welcomed their beloved family member in just the way they would have had one of the siblings been travelling overseas for months and months, catching Sophie up on family matters that had taken place while she was away. “See Ellen's big belly, Sophie? You're going to have a niece or a nephew,” Bridget said, pulling Ellen's shirt up and rubbing her sister's bursting pregnant tummy. The family began singing to her belly and Bridget told the baby about the family it was about to be born into and how much they already loved it and look!—what a clever pet they all had.

Sophie's ears perked and fell. She looked at the computer and away, plonked herself against Jan's leg and Jan scratched her between the eyes with her fingernails.

Then Sophie, perhaps a little bored, moved over to her armchair, climbed up and flopped down, head propped on the wooden arm for a rest. Her eyes drooped and she looked up and over once more at the family. Then she dropped her head and her eyes fluttered closed.

I
n the days and weeks after Sophie returned, Jan and Dave watched her for signs of anxiety. Jan came home a little earlier than her usual lunch or afternoon hour, and Sophie, followed by Ruby, was there waiting for her to pull into the carport so that Sophie could stick her head in the car door. She didn't seem nervous or unhappy; she seemed content and eager simply to greet Jan and follow her upstairs for air conditioning time. When they were at home, they kept Sophie with them and mostly separate from Ruby. Ruby was still an outside dog at that point and spent a lot of those first weeks gazing through the screen door, standing up and wagging her tail every time someone moved, thinking,
this is it, this is when I get to go inside
.

That moment didn't come for a while, though, and for the most part, Sophie didn't seem to pay much attention to this new red dog staring in at her except to express a little bewilderment. When they took Sophie and Ruby in the car to Ruby's doggy training, Sophie looked at Jan and Dave from her spot on the backseat as Ruby jumped around and was yelled at by Dave, “Ruby, geddown!”
What's her problem?
Sophie seemed to be asking. Sometimes she'd growl at Ruby when it seemed the red dog was simply too much in her face. There was no aggression, though, and no clinginess beyond her normal affection for the Griffiths.

Finally, the whole family was back together and Dave and Jan, after all those months of guilt and grief and trying to push the horror and the unknowing into the back of their minds, started to feel a little relief. Sophie's presence made them realize how sad and tense they had still been, despite Ruby's adding much distraction and a lot of funny moments to their days. Sophie was both a reminder of how terrible things could get but also of how wonderful their life really was. They felt terribly lucky, almost too lucky, to have her back.

That Sophie returned while Ellen was on the brink of giving birth to the first Griffith grandchild, added to the sense of family bonding. “It was just a really nice time,” says Bridget. Everyone was in touch, even more than usual, all four kids calling around to update each other. In Brisbane, Bridget spent a lot of time at Ellen and Ben's and then the three of them would go over to
Matty and Melissa's and they would video conference to Mackay and catch up with Jan and Dave, sometimes several times a week. Jan and Dave would be wondering how Ellen's belly was growing and Bridget and Ellen would be wondering how Sophie was fitting back in.

And, just as in Ellen's case, the answer was that Sophie was doing amazingly well. So far, she wasn't showing any signs of what the vet had warned them about. There were a few things that were different: she seemed snappier around meat, for example. She was less gentle when Dave put his hand down with a piece of beef fat. She was still a remarkably polite eater for a dog, though. When Sophie would eat, she'd do it slowly. She wouldn't growl and grunt or inhale a bowlful in one go as some dogs did. She'd take breaks, sometimes taking a piece of meat or fish out of the bowl to break it up into neat pieces and eat them up, one at a well-chewed time. She could lick a bowl clean for twenty minutes, delicately tending to every bit so that it was clean and undamaged. But in the weeks after Sophie returned from St. Bees, she had become more aggressive. While Ruby, in some of her rare moments of total obedience, would sniff at a sausage or a bone, keeping her teeth out of it ever so respectful of the giver's hand, Sophie was inclined to snap at the last minute when being hand-fed. She'd sniff the meat out and look at the giver as if to say,
thanks
, but the last second would be an urgent, almost ruthless grab, leaving slobber and prompting Dave or Jan to snatch their hand back in reflex. “She
certainly learned how to make the most of a kill out there, as now she never wants to give up on a bone,” says Jan.