Corky, our beloved PortugueseWaterDog, was lost about one mile in from the trail head at the Pygmy Forest parking lot of Van Damme State Park (off Little Rivet Airport Road) on Nov. 3, 2003. He was hiking with, my husband Richard and just disappeared. The Portuguese Water Dog is an ancient breed (poodles are descended from them) of working dogs used by fishermen in Portugal. They were used to carry messages between boats and actually herd fish into nets. There is a whole team of water dogs in San Francisco that retrieve baseballs out of San Francisco Bay when the SF Giants hit fly balls or homeruns out of the ballpark. They are also wonderful and lovable companion dogs.
We own the Whitegate Inn andAbigail’s Bed and Breakfast in Mendocino and our
innkeepers and staff are like family to us. They take care of Corky when we travel. Our whole staff was out calling and calling for Corky and he seemed to be completely gone. Day after day we walked the park and surrounding neighborhoods, posted hundreds of posters, contacted every agency, every vet in spotting of him on the bridge by Sanford Inn Mendocino County and adjacent counties.
Gretchen Phillips, our innkeeper at Abigail’s, dog lover extraordinaire, called hundreds of locals to be on the lookout. She even kept a poster on the window of her car, long after everyone else thought there was little hope. She placed little signs all around the inns which said, “Corky is carefully finding his way, making all the right choices. Loving spirits will gently guide him home again.”
In most of November and earlyDecember it rained and rained and got very cold. Richard wrote a story called “Corky in the First Person,” trying to imagine where Corky was and what he might be doing. Many people thought he had been eaten by a mountain lion. Some thought he had been stolen and taken out of the area. There was a possible spotting of him on the bridge by Stanford Inn on election night.
We looked everywhere and talked to everyone. We became friends with all the Caltrans crews, the forestry people, the Adelphia guys, the Mendocino firemen, the mushroom pickers, and all our fellow innkeepers in Mendocino and everyone kept on the lookout. Just about every business in Mendocino, Little River, Fort Bragg, Albion, Philo, Comptche, and Boonville, had his poster up and kept it up for weeks. We would walk the Van Damme trail often and see people who didn’t know us and they would tell us that they were calling and calling for Corky as they walked the path.
Our head housekeeper’s daughter took Corky’s picture to school and had all of the school children on alert to find him. In early December, someone called and said they thought he had found Corky and that he was dead. They had found the body of a dead dog in the bushes 10 feet away from the parking lot at the Pygmy Forest Trail. Richard rushed to find him in the dark and to retrieve the body. I stayed home and cried. As it turned out, it wasn’t Corky!
More days went by and it just seemed impossible that he could return. We were finally beginning to be reconciled to losing him forever. After all, it had been 44 days and even the optimists among us had never heard of a dog being lost in the woods in the winter for that long and surviving.
On the evening of Dec. 16th, about 7:15 p.m., someone rang the doorbell at the inn. A man named John Goodstein said he found Corky and he had him in the car. He had found him crossing Little River Airport Road; had called to him and Corky had jumped into his car.
Sure enough, there he was. He rushed into our arms and we were overwhelmed with joy and disbelief.
Corky had lost 26 pounds, nearly half of his body weight, from 65 pounds to 39 pounds. His fur had turned from rich silky brown to coarse gray and it had thinned considerably. He had several big superficial wounds and over 300 ticks. But he was finally home.
We carefully followed our vet’s (Karen Novak) directions to bring him back to health. Amazingly, he didn’t have any major injuries or diseases. He was just malnourished. He was always such a happy dog and pretty spoiled; a dog that loved his comforts and didn’t really like to be out in the rain and cold. But he survived with this sweet personality intact.
He is a celebrity about town in Mendocino. People who don’t even know us come up to us and say, “Is that Corky, the Miracle Dog?”
With such an outpouring of community support, I felt like I needed to give back. I am the newest Mendocino volunteer firefighter.
