- Tracking in MargaritavilleLynn Byrd, July 28, 2023 I’m in it for the dog. These words serve to remind me to stay focused when mean drama pushes me to my emotional limit during a supercharged track. This one sentence was my mantra for the eleven days I tracked Margarita, a four-pound Chihuahua with forty pounds of attitude and… Read more: Tracking in Margaritaville
- Basement Basement BasementLynn Byrd, May 16, 2023 Cats are the witchy shape-shifting bosses of the Universe. When they come whispering in my ear or knocking on the caverns in my head, you bet I’ll listen. There was one message this time, but they kept on saying it. In unison, like a Greek Chorus, and there was no… Read more: Basement Basement Basement
- MILLIEJune 28, 2022 BLUE dots: Millie’s footprints GREEN dots: new path RED dot: camp A one-year-old, four-pound Chihuahua with a trembling fear of the outdoors survived four long nights and most of another day alone in a thunderous hellscape. Millie’s precious life hung in the balance between hot asphalt and fast traffic on southbound Highway… Read more: MILLIE
- ELLAApril 27, 2022 If was as if Prince dressed Wednesday’s dawn sky in every shade of purple he ever wore. Scent hounds Willow and Ivy lifted their wet noses to sniff the buzz of the waking day. Stacy Gang and I were reading a map guided by planets and stars and readying ourselves for the… Read more: ELLA
- JACK’S STARby Lynn Byrd It happened that a dog star appeared in our house this morning: a gold star with a rawhide lanyard tie, hanging from the old balloon mold in the stairwell landing above the kitchen. Neither Jamie nor I had ever seen it before today. I found it when I went looking for an… Read more: JACK’S STAR
- JACKby Jamie Cheshire “Spanish Johnny [Jack] drove in from the underworld last night. [Well, the night of July 23] With bruised arms and broken rhythm and a beat-up old Buick but dressed just like dynamite.” He sold us his heart. The price was our hearts. He said his name was Jack. Jack anything. Jack Kerouac,… Read more: JACK
- HOW ONE DOG BECAME THREEby Rebecca Neagle It is so difficult to lose a best friend, and our loss of little Lucy seemed impossible. Her first months had been rough, and when we rescued her I promised her that the rest of her life would be easy. This was a promise I couldn’t keep. We’d had her only three… Read more: HOW ONE DOG BECAME THREE
- LITTLE BEARFebruary 28, 2022 After reading the comments on one particularly poignant “MISSING DOG” post, I did something I rarely do. I made contact with the family and offered to track Little Bear, a strikingly handsome, 14-year-old, blind and deaf gray chow who slipped out of his home undetected late on a Wednesday night. Bear’s people… Read more: LITTLE BEAR
- JACO AND THE BISCUITIt was a narrow country road and the sunlight was faded like my jeans. Dew hung like pearls on the spider webs. The air was fresh and filled with birds singing to me through the car’s open window. I saw something moving on the side of the road. A big red dog was running like… Read more: JACO AND THE BISCUIT
- ANDRA“Today is a good day to die.” According to Wiki, this phrase is frequently attributed to Crazy Horse, but the earliest reference attributes it to Oglala Lakota chief Low Dog who fought with Sitting Bull at Little Big Horn. None of the backstory matters to Andra. She knows today is her day, and she knows… Read more: ANDRA
- HOW TO INCREASE YOUR CHANCES OF FINDING A MISSING DOGLynn Byrd, local tracker Every lost dog story is different because every dog is unique, but there are common themes for success. You’ll have a better chance of reuniting with your pet by following this advice. Typically, the first step for people who have lost their pets is to walk or drive around their neighborhood… Read more: HOW TO INCREASE YOUR CHANCES OF FINDING A MISSING DOG
- JACOOnce upon another place in time, a dog star fell from the sky and landed on the side of the road. I picked it up, kissed a promise into its star heart and, for the next eight years, was graced by the most incredibly cool and highly intelligent creature who ever walked this earth. His… Read more: JACO
- JESSIEIn numerology, the number fifteen is associated with love and relationship. Fifteen years ago, a fifteen-year-old horse crazy girl found a stray puppy at the barn and brought her home for good. Shannyn named her new best friend Jesse and never ventured far without her. Now Jesse is a fifteen-year-old gray-faced, deaf and mostly blind… Read more: JESSIE
- BAILEYIt happens every single time. When instinct and intuition beckon me to move away from something, moving toward it is always the wrong decision. This is a core truth which I willfully ignored when I felt my energetic curtain close recently yet agreed to track a terrified dog on a big-time run. As a practicing… Read more: BAILEY
Say It Three Times
January 31, 2024
It’s safe to say that in the movie Beetlejuice, very little made sense. In one of the best comedic performances of all time in the Entire Universe, Michael Keaton’s character jumps out of his grave and wreaks havoc on a small-town ghost family who becomes possessed by him after his name, Beetlejuice, is bespoken three times in a row, with feeling.
My husband planned a surprise party for my birthday which I almost spoiled in a few different ways. For one, I was tracking a dog – a beagle I started calling Beaglejuice, hoping he would show up and stick tight, like Michael did for Geena in the movie. But by my birthday, I was four days into a track in which very little made sense and I was in Dog Brain, not Party Brain.
For the record, beagles don’t like to be tracked. They like to track. Following a beagle anywhere is sort of a joke, especially when their nose is to the ground. When tracking a lost dog, the idea is to be ahead of them. It’s almost impossible to get ahead of a beagle because they never stay in one place for very long at all, unless they’re bound to a double leash, or overfed and mesmerized by watching other beagles on television.
This dang beagle didn’t give one whit about me or my theories, nor did he care about his new person who had rescued him from the side of a major interstate, in traffic, by wearing him down and scruffing him to safety just a few days earlier. We heard from other frequent highway travelers and rescuers that Beaglejuice had been wandering up and down the same stretch of concrete for over three weeks. Had he escaped, or been dumped? He had no chip, and nobody had posted him as missing. His new person was in the clear to adopt him.
His second big escape happened on a cold, dark January evening when he slipped out of a harness and ran through the woods while being chased by well-meaning but woefully misinformed people with flashlights and big voices. Beaglejuice stayed off our radar for the first four days of his adventure until the big, bright, bold road posters, our best tool for generating reported sightings, worked their magic. Then, the sightings began in earnest.
During his travels over the next fifteen nights (yes, fifteen nights), Beaglejuice cruised through backyards, across front yards, and down driveways in eleven neighborhoods, traipsing across busy urban roads in an expansive circle around his new home. We couldn’t begin to consider setting up a food station for him, or a camera, or a trap. He would not stop moving long enough to help us help him. Sure, he was seen twice in the same evening at someone’s house. But if you’re paying attention, you know it’s impossible to track at night, unless the dog is old, blind, and deaf. (Never, ever, put pressure on a dog in the dark of night – or anytime. This causes him to panic and run when what he needs is to rest, to get his mind calm. Remember: Zero Pressure.)
On my birthday, I was out tracking. For hours, really up until the last possible minute. And I spoiled my husband’s surprise which bummed me out for him. Switching gears with poise didn’t come easily for me. I avoided everyone for the first half hour, still talking on the phone with people who had seen Beaglejuice and hiding in the house so I could decompress. While that quiet time helped to calm me down, my focus on Beaglejuice never turned off. I wasn’t able to transition into graceful gratitude for my husband’s efforts, or to accomplish true camaraderie with the generous friends who shared their time around our fire that night. They all celebrated me anyway, god bless ‘em, knowing that I would fly out of the gate if a major call came in.
Two nights later, the track turned in our favor. Beaglejuice was spotted in a backyard only 1,400 feet from his home and, according to the urgent caller, he had been there for a while. Beaglejuice watched as we set up a hot buffet-style food station, a roomy, quiet trap, and a couple of trail cameras. Then, he followed me around. We did figure eights around that trap and circles around the town homes. I hid behind a gate, and then hid behind a tree, and he found me both times, watching from a distance of about eight feet. Standing there, just staring at me.
“Nice Lady,” he said, “I’ve been smelling you for several days now.”
“Yeah, Buddy? Well, how about you get in that trap and let’s call it a day?”
“No, no, no. No doors. Not going through a door. Figure it out, Nice Lady.”
“Maybe you should just follow me home then, Little Mister.”
“All in due time, Nice Lady. You still have much to learn.”
The next night. The night after that. And all through the next and the next, during sub-freezing temperatures and driving rain, Beaglejuice would show up on camera, stretch toward the trap, lean into his desire for hot chicken and a pup cup, but would not step into the trap. No way, no how. The camera told his story, and his message was succinct: “GO TRAP YOURSELF.”
Beaglejuice must have been eating somewhere else. There had to be a little old lady knitting him a sweater and feeding him Friskies. But during those last hard tracking days while I was crawling in and out of the trap and leaving my own scent everywhere he had been seen, Beaglejuice was grubbing in the third world country known as Deacon Station, a place where privileged white children throw their trash bags into a ravine rather than take them to the dumpster not so far away. Beaglejuice actually gained weight while on the run. A very successful hobo, this guy. He took advantage of every happy or trashy meal offered.
My biggest concerns became his access to food resources, which meant he had no skin in the game, and his courageous road behavior. He was traveling near dangerous intersections and through treacherous curves with heavy, fast-moving traffic multiple times a day. I had already removed the damaged body of a deceased small brown dog from one of Beaglejuice’s routes. (The work of animal rescue can be heartwrenching.) We had to get Beaglejuice off the road before he was injured or worse, and I had to up my game so I could lure him successfully. Sedation seemed appealing, but wasn’t an option.
He wasn’t going into a trap, or a garage, or through a door or a gate. His aversion to openings opened a new theory: maybe he had been a rabbit dog who had lived in an off-ground beagle box in someone’s back yard, and he would rather kiss the road than go back to that cramped, claustrophobic lifestyle.
And wow. I totally got it.
“Hey dude. I saw the movie Papillion. I understand the psychology. I’d give you the spoon, I’d help you dig out. But look here. Your new life is going to be very sweet and plush. Resistance is futile. Just come on in and let’s get you to safety before someone gets hurt, okay?”
“Too many words, Nice Lady. Stop with the words. More smells, fewer words.”
“Follow me home, Beagle.”
“Three magic words. Say them, Nice Lady.”
“Beaglejuice. Beaglejuice. Beaglejuice!”
“Ah, good listening out, Nice Smelly Lady.”
My brain relaxed on Day Fourteen (my lucky number) when a neighbor reported that she had seen a beagle in her driveway that morning at 5:30am, only 1,000 feet from my house. That evening at 9:30p, Beaglejuice was spotted 900 feet from me and by 11:30pm, he was within 500 feet of my front gate.
“Nice Lady, those clothes you’ve been wearing for two weeks smell nice. You’re easy to track, like a rabbit.”
“Glad to be of service, Little Buddy.”
“That’s Beaglejuice to you, Nice Lady.”
“Thank you for tracking me, Beaglejuice. Thank you for following me home.”
“Premature, Nice Lady. Let’s see how you do tomorrow, and then I’ll decide.”
“Too many words, Beaglejuice.”
“You think so. But no, Nice Smelly Lady. Rest easy tonight. If you want to see me in the morning, you’ll need a clear head.”
The call came at 7:30am as Jamie and I were walking our pack. Beaglejuice was in a friend’s back yard, just two doors from where we were walking at that very moment. He was hiding in the southeast corner in a twisty cover of vines and brush. He had tried a couple of times to trot past Jeff, a gentle but physically imposing man who simply stood quietly at the one opening in their yard and pointed a finger at Beaglejuice, turning him back into the tangle. Jamie and I hurried home with the dogs and headed back down the road. From start to finish, it took thirty minutes to put the player in a pickle, then lure him close enough so I could scruff him and pull him close.
This smart guy followed me for days; he followed me into my own neighborhood. By now it should be clear that I didn’t track him. He trusted his nose and tracked me. When he got tired of the game, he decided to trust me, too.
“Beaglejuice, Beaglejuice, Beaglejuice! What a smart fella! You tracked the tracker.”
“Hah, Hah, Hah! Nice Smelly Lady, you are a lazy rabbit. Run faster next time.”
Beaglejuice is now Rico. He’s at home now, eating bonbons and watching beagles chase rabbits on television. He sometimes dreams of the road, and he sometimes wags his beagle tail.
Little Pet Chapels 