Sophie, Dog Overboard : The Incredible True Adventures of the Castaway Dog (31 page)

Jan and Dave spent a lot of time watching Sophie sleep smooshed up against the pool fence outside in the sun, or lying belly-flopped on the wooden floorboards in front of the air conditioner in the living room. Sophie went back to her old routine of nudging her way into their bedroom every morning and waking Dave with a gentle look or a lick, and Dave was more than happy to get out of his warm bed no matter what the hour.

He was also more enthusiastic about the afternoon walk routine. Sometimes he would take the two dogs on his own, or Jan would go with him, Dave taking Sophie, who—after five months of free-roaming island life—would pull a little harder on the lead than she did in her early days and was too strong for Jan to handle on her own. Then, without fail, every day as Dave went for a Corona from the bottom fridge, Sophie and Ruby would get frenzied, Ruby jumping all over him provoking a “geddown!” from Dave, while Sophie sashayed all over the place but never leapt or whimpered. Then Dave would usher the dogs back through the front gate and they'd run upstairs to where Jan had prepared their afternoon treats: three chewy beef Schmackos each, lined up like toast soldiers on the kitchen bench. Sophie's three Schmackos would be lined up on the left, and Ruby's on the right. Jan would hand them one each at the same time, as the two dogs sat, Sophie with her legs splayed like a kangaroo,
looking up at Jan with wide eyes. Unlike meat, both dogs would receive their Schmackos gently, chewing them up and looking to Jan to hand them the next one until all six treats were gone.

No sooner had Jan and Dave begun to feel as though life might really be back to normal, when the world got involved. The week after Sophie arrived home, her story ran on the local ABC radio station and appeared on Channel 10 and in local newspapers across the country. The day after the story ran on the ABC, Jan and Dave walked into Oscar's for their usual breakfast routine. Desley was there and John was working the coffee machine. That day, he personally brought the skinny latte over to Jan, put it down in front of her and said, “How did I not know about your dog? How did you keep this to yourselves for months?”

This time, Jan and Dave were not so shy about the facts. “We got our Sophie back,” Jan announced proudly. And the questions began: “What happened to her and how was she?” “What was she, some sort of super dog?”

“God, I remember that horrible day that you told me about her getting lost. I felt so terrible for you,” Desley said.

“We didn't tell many people, Desley. We were so ashamed,” Jan admitted.

Jan and Dave didn't really know, of course, what had happened to Sophie. There were a lot of questions they couldn't answer, questions they would like to have been able to answer for themselves.
How did she
survive? How far did she swim? How did they suddenly have her back?

“It's hard to believe, isn't it?” Desley said, almost speechless. “What a wonderful story. I'm just so happy for you. What a girl.”

Jan and Dave told John and Desley, Jenko and other friends around town, who called the Griffiths' home after seeing Jan and Sophie on the news, about the incredible coincidence of Jodi's connection to the Bercks and the last-minute barbecue over in Eimeo. Jan was especially thrilled by Jodi Manning's partner, Ray Cook, who remembered the story of the friend of Jodi's mother whose dog went overboard, and his insistence on following it through,
just in case
it was this woman's—
her
—dog.

Denise and Ian Thomason called Jan, having heard the news, and Denise had a flashback to that night out at Scawfell. “I
knew
there was something wrong that night,” Denise said. “I can't believe you've been going through this. What a story.”

“We'll never pass by St. Bees without thinking of Sophie again,” said Ian.

The attention didn't stop at home. Sophie's story hit Europe before the week was out. The news of the heroic dog's island survival and her seamless, blissful, almost unbelievable reunion with the Griffiths had the world's attention within days.

Dave's older sister, Janet Khan, and her husband, Peter, were sitting in their living room in Haifa, Israel,
where they had been living for 27 years, watching the BBC news. On came a news story from tropical Queensland. Janet was curious—this was where her brother Dave lived. The story honed in: it was set in Mackay, which was Dave's hometown. Janet sat forward. Her sister-in-law, Jan, was on TV. That was Dave's dog, smiling from the family pool area, taking Schmackos from Jan's hand. “There were Jan and Sophie in my living room.” Janet started calling all her friends, most of whom were already watching the news. “It felt as though half of Israel were watching. We were so excited.”

Ellen dined out on the story for months and it became a friendly game between her friends: where will Jan and Sophie be spotted next? The pair were on every channel and in gossip mags. Luke even had friends in China and the UK who called him when they saw the news.

Over the coming days and weeks, everywhere they went, the story of Sophie would come up. Both Jan and Dave told of how amazing the rangers had been in allowing them to come and see the dog and in not ridiculing Jan for believing that her pet might have performed such a feat. Jan told people that even the rangers had been baffled by Sophie's survival against all the odds.

“It's amazing that she managed it,” Ross Courtenay says. “There wouldn't have been much meat left on any goat carcasses from culls but I suppose the hides and a lot of bones could have kept her going.”

Jan and Dave are fairly certain that Sophie found a
way to dine on the Bees goats. When they watch her now, attacking and demolishing whole bones, they figure she had to have been feeding on something. In the past, a bone could last her days. In the first week after her return from the island, they watched her at a barbecue, sucking on the marrow of chop bones and crunching each one like it was a bug. They fretted that she was going to choke. But Sophie licked her lips clean and hoovered over the ground for chips that might have spilt from her mouth. She looked up at them, hungry for more. It made Jan think back to New Year's Day on St. Bees when she'd found the nest of goat bones on the beach.
Could she really have been that close to Sophie, that day?

“It just makes me sick to my stomach to think that I didn't call out to her. I was thinking that she could have survived. Why didn't I call out?” she says now.

But all those pangs of regret paled in the glow of the high they were on from the moment they knew it
was
Sophie in that cage on
Tomoya
. Jan and Dave walked around town with effortless smiles on their faces for weeks. They held hands walking into Oscar's and leaned in for a kiss more often than usual. They were being woken once again every morning by the clack of Sophie's toenails on their bedroom floor. Jan's first sensation was, once again, the wet of Sophie's tongue as she leaped over her to follow Dave outside. They now regarded Sophie's tugs on the lead as they walked her and Ruby, (or any resistance to being asked to move from in front
of the air conditioner) as nothing but a source of pride and relief.

“I believe that she calculated everything she did,” says Jan, figuring that Sophie's inherent stubbornness at home paid off on the island.

Luke agrees. His theory is that Sophie stopped on at least one, possibly two islands before she got to Keswick, where she was first spotted by Mike Barnett and then Brian. “She would have dragged herself up onto Aspatria, waited there until she got herself together and assessed the situation. Just as we would have done,” he says.
Hang on, there's a rock, it's exposed, I don't have to swim. Bang. I need to rest. Survival.
Aspatria was an achievable resting point before taking off to St. Bees, where she could smell food.

But when people asked about the day she went overboard, Jan and Dave choked up. They were able to give the basics—they had hit the Hesket Rock channel, they left her on the main deck for several minutes, somehow she fell in, they circled around and around for her and they were frantic that they couldn't see her after so little time. And they realized that she couldn't have survived, that she must have hit her head and drowned. They were so ashamed and so full of grief that they could barely tell anyone, even their own children.

The constant going over of the details exacerbated the very mixed feelings the Griffiths had about all this attention. On the one hand, Jan was thrilled. She was so proud of Sophie and felt so blessed to have been
reunited with her that she wanted to sing it all over town. But it was also a bit perturbing. Suddenly, images of their family pool area were being cast all over the world and one of the most terrible days of their lives was being broadcast at cocktail hour in places as far as Japan and Israel and the UK.

The story was, of course, being dramatized: Sophie was a miracle dog who had survived on an abandoned, tropical island and had been eating baby goats for five months. Sophie's ordeal was morphing very quickly from a family story, one for the Griffiths themselves to digest, celebrate and recover from over time, into one of those buzzy, water-cooler stories verging on urban myth.

Jan and Dave weren't the only ones swept up in the media craze. Not long after Sophie returned, David and Carolyn Berck flew to Macau, where Carolyn's brother lives, and where the story of this incredible swimming dog was all over the news. The airline staff on Carolyn and Dave's flights brought it up as soon as they heard where the Bercks were from. Indeed, the Bercks not only knew the story, they knew—and leased—the island on which the dog had survived for three of its five months in the wild.

The story made it over to Ashington in the UK, a small mining town outside of Newcastle, and home to the parents of Ray Cook, Jodi Manning's partner, without whose excellent memory and insistence on following his instinct, Sophie might have been sent to the pound.

Ray's parents woke up one day to a photo in their local paper of this smiling, sparkling blue dog who had swum through shark-infested waters, survived on baby goats and—a worrisome glitch in the reporting—koalas.

The increasingly fact-challenged story was that this iconic Australian dog, who had survived in the iconic Australian region of the Whitsundays, had kept herself alive feeding on the flesh of the iconic Australian marsupial, the koala. Somewhere along the line, after local ABC radio reporter, Kim Kleidon, had investigated the story and run a feature interviewing Jan and Dave, David Berck, Brian Kinderman and Steve Fisher, the fact of there being koalas on St. Bees morphed into the story that there were koalas on St. Bees and Sophie had been killing and eating them.

Steve Fisher was quoted in a Queensland newspaper as having said so, and the news went viral. It wasn't true. It prompted comments ranging from “disappointed” to “disgusted” on newspaper sites. People were outraged that this dog had supposedly survived at the expense of koalas. It also called into question the handling of the dog by the QPWS Mackay office, whose charge is first and foremost the natural flora and fauna of the area's national parks.

There were other overhyped reports running in papers and on blogs all over the country, some of them including distortions of facts such as how long Sophie had been left unattended on the boat. These prompted some very negative responses from readers, comments
such as, “someone call the RSPCA,” and claims that Jan and Dave were irresponsible pet owners.

Bridget was less than happy about all the attention—good and bad. “I just thought, if people could see Dad every night, barbecuing the dogs their own steaks, or the way he looks at them. It's ridiculous how much Mom and Dad love their dogs. . . . In the end, though, I was just happy to have my dog back,” she says.

Dave and Jan felt the same way. The media stories were surreal, but at the same time, both of them had to keep reminding themselves that actually, the core of the story was very real indeed. Their Sophie was back. They had lost her in one of the most isolated, tropical parts of the world and she had survived. What was there not to be proud of?

“W
e're just so flattered,” Jan told journalists who asked her what she thought had brought Sophie back to them. “Apparently, she was never going to be anybody else's dog but ours.”

The Griffiths will never really know how Sophie survived out there, but they're all in awe of how she held out so long, waiting for them. “I didn't think she had it in her,” Luke admits.

“You can't go against Mother Nature; she'll beat you every time. It just wasn't time for Sophie to go,” says Warren.

Jenko concurs. He was reeling when Jan called to tell him the story, just after Sophie got home. “I wouldn't have put money on her making it to land. She was kind of a sissy sooky for a cattle dog. She was quieter and
friendlier than they usually are, not reserved or shy but laid back. Placid. I was really surprised. I guess all her breed's instincts kicked in. And she kept her mouth shut!”

What was it that made her stay loyal to the Griffiths for so many long, lonely months?

Sophie's vet, Dr. Pert, continues to be astonished by several elements of Sophie's story. He can't believe she swam so far and he can't believe that she chose to swim again, several months into her ordeal. Most of all, he's confounded that she didn't give herself up for some human love and companionship. “Why she didn't mooch in for a meal or for a bit of friendship is what I can't understand,” he says. “She's such a normal, domesticated dog.”