Junkyard Dog
The true story of a boy who was lost and found.
I spent the months leading up to Buckley’s third birthday believing that he was OK. A Dachshund mix, he and his father (my now ex-husband) were busy settling in to their new home in New York, while me, Jack (a Chihuahua), and Titi (a Russian Blue) were settling into our new home in Atlanta. That’s what I chose to tell myself, at least, because we weren’t speaking.
There wasn’t bad blood, but we’d been together for ten years. We needed to move on, and we couldn’t do that while remaining in each other’s lives. But on November the 3rd, I texted his friend, the person who’d been designated as our go-between.
Hey! Thinking about Buckley today. It’s his birthday. Do you happen to know how he’s doing?
I didn’t think much of the nearly two hours it took for her to respond, but my stomach dropped when she finally did.
She said: Chris asked if he can call you?
The text came to me just as I sat down at a coffee shop, intent on doing some writing.
Of course, was my immediate reply.
My laptop had only just been removed from my bag, and my cup of coffee had only just been delivered. I was nervous, of course, but tried not to think the worst as I packed up. It became impossible not to, however, once she added: Okay, just be kind.
Chris called me a few minutes later. I was moving in a blur, arriving back at my condo and depositing my bag absentmindedly on the counter. I ignored the confused and imploring looks from Jack and Titi as Chris and I stumbled through awkward greetings.
“Hi.”
“Hey.”
“How are you?”
“Good. How are you?”
He was very nervous. I knew this because I knew him.
“Scared, at the moment,” I admitted. “What’s going on?”
And that’s when he told me: Buckley was missing. Not only that, he’d been missing since August.
Apparently, he was staying with a new pet sitter in Georgia while Chris was in New York, prepping for his move. Two days into his two week trip, however, he received a distressed call from the sitter saying that Buckley had bolted out of the door. He hadn’t been seen since.
I was stunned. I starting crying instantly, but was able to ask some questions and get some answers, before eventually hanging up to melt into a heartbroken puddle.
Before the divorce, we’d lost our orange tabby, Owen, to cancer. Then, we got divorced and lost our family, too. I’d only recently moved out of the home we shared for five years (half of our relationship), and had just been laid off from my job. I was just barely keeping my head above water as it was, but the idea of losing Buckley on top of everything else pushed me to a breaking point.
For the next few hours, I could do nothing but sob and picture the worst. I tried to hold on to Jack and Titi for comfort, but couldn’t. I tried to watch movies, but saw Buckley in all of them. Wall-E, for example, had Buckley’s eyes. In that little robot’s solitude I pictured my little dog, only I couldn’t bring myself to believe that my he’d gotten a happy ending.
Buckley was the most neurotic dog I’d ever met. We got him as a puppy, and he was a nightmare to train. In his crate, and even the large gated area we provided around it, he would scream bloody murder whenever Chris or I were not physically near, as if someone was doing him physical harm. We tried everything we could to teach him how to be on his own, as we seemed able to teach Jack. We got cameras, moved his crate to somewhere quiet and private in the home, and timed his periods of isolation through an app in a desperate effort to make him understand that his fears were unwarranted: that we would always, always come back.
What I couldn’t stop thinking about was the fact that, in the end, his fears had ostensibly come true. I couldn’t stop picturing him scared and alone, meeting his end while wondering where we were.
My despair — my grief — became so bad that I reached back out to Chris. I wanted more details, a feeble attempt at being comforted or at the very least dampening the dark loop of intrusive thoughts and horrible images replaying over and over in my head.
I asked: “where did he go missing?”
He answered: “Marietta. I can get you the address, if you’d like.”
“I would. What did you do to try and find him?”
“We called the nearby shelters. We posted fliers. We registered his chip. We went walking around, calling his name. I promise we did everything we could.”
I couldn’t stop crying. “Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”
“Don’t go there, Stephen…”
…so I didn’t.
We chatted for a bit longer. He talked about what his grieving process had been like. He told me about how it felt to lose him, and what he was choosing to believe: that some nice family found him, saw how cute he was, and was spoiling him in ways that we couldn’t possibly imagine. I told him that it would take me a while to get there, but thanked him for talking to me, and especially for finally telling me.
When we hung up for the second time, I believed that that was going to be the last time I ever spoke to him.
I wished that Chis had told me sooner, if not only because I could have done something — anything. Three months felt like too long a time for so little a dog to be able to survive out on his own. How could a dog so afraid of being alone ever stand a chance of being alone for that long, let alone surviving? There seemed like no use in trying at all. There was no possible hope of him still being out there, needing to be found, but I found myself pulling up Google anyways.
Despite both myself and the odds, I searched for “lost dog Marietta,” and began scrolling through the endless amounts of lost and found posts on Facebook anyways.
Then, I searched for “found dog Marietta,” and to my absolute disbelief the results immediately yielded a link with a thumbnail that looked a lot like Buckley. It’d been posted on October 19 — four weeks ago.
FOUND DOG: Third time I’ve seen him. Thankfully got a picture this time. I’m 95% positive someone named Chelsey Williams from Marietta, GA posted about him 7 weeks ago and she won’t answer my messages on Nextdoor. If anyone knows her please let her know her dog is at the Metro Apartments off windy ridge parkway. The dog will not come near me and runs away immediately.
Four weeks felt like better odds than three months, so I fired away a message to the post’s author, and sent the link to Chris. I called him back without hesitation.
“I think I found him,” I said, my voice wavering.
“Are you sure?” Chris worried. “That dog looks too big.”
“I’m positive.” The collar was the same size and color as the one Buckley was wearing when he vanished. There was a brief video included in the post, too. It was grainy, seconds long, and captured through a window, but the way the dog moved made me absolutely sure. “It’s him.”
“Oh my god.”
While we spoke, the post’s author shot me a response.
“She says she saw him yesterday.”
“Oh my god!”
“She’s only twenty minutes away. I think I’m going to drive over there right now.”
Chris began to sing “Bring Him Home,” from Les Misérables.
We saw him yesterday, when he went across the street. Not sure if he made it back, but he hangs out under the tennis court in our complex .
The woman on Facebook gave me tons of information. She told me where she’d seen him, the places he liked to hang around, and what time of day he was usually active.
I’ve never seen him at night, but mid-morning and afternoon he’s always running around. Lots of people have been feeding him, including us. Yesterday, he crossed Parkwood Circle, and some guy walking his dog ran into him. I was running to a bridal shower I was planning and couldn’t stop. I’m assuming he would’ve come back, though, since he’s being fed here.
I pulled on a hoodie and grabbed my keys, my hands trembling. It was dark out, and well past 9 PM. That Buckley might still be alive was something I wanted to believe, but wouldn’t be able to accept or even begin to process until I’d seen him with my own eyes.
He won’t let anyone get near, but he’s a cute little guy. He seems pretty upbeat considering the circumstances!
Every little second seemed to count. If it really was him, my mind was already jumping to the very real and possible fear that something could have happened to him between yesterday and today, especially if he’d crossed the street.
He’s on the list for animal control, but it’s been like two weeks since I called them.
I tried to prepare myself for the possibility that I wouldn’t be able find him that night; that I might need to come back in the morning.
He’s been here so long!!!
I thanked her profusely, and with Jack seated firmly in my lap, oblivious to all that was going on but excited to be going somewhere with me regardless, we sped off toward Buckley’s last known location.
The gates were open when I pulled into the complex, just like the woman said they would. The tennis court was right where she said it would be, too — up on a hill that looked like it’d been sliced in half. While one side was attached to the top of said hill, the other was propped up by concrete columns over a small section of the parking lot.
This is where I parked.
My heart was beating fast. I felt like I was in a fog, but my senses were heightened. My eyes darted everywhere, not knowing where in the world to even start looking, and I leapt out of the car as soon as it stopped.
“Buckie?” I blurted out into the quiet night, unable to help myself. We were the kind of people that had a million different nicknames for our animals, and that was one of his.
A delivery driver who was getting back into his car shot me a look.
Jack was giving me a look from inside the car, too. I returned to him quickly, leashed him up, and then set off to begin our search. Mere steps away from the car, however, with Jack already fighting me to slow down so that he could sniff around, I saw something in the distance: something that looked like a pair of eyes peering down at us from the top of the parking lot’s far wall.
The empty space where the court met the hill was no more than a foot or two tall, and there appeared to be a tiny black animal resting in the dirt there, watching us. It was too far away to make out clearly, among the various buckets and equipment (stored there, no doubt, by the apartment’s maintenance staff), so we started walking towards it to get a closer look.
Jack resisted my pull, but I ignored him. Dragging him with me toward the concrete wall, I kept my eyes squarely on the animal — because it definitely was an animal, and it definitely was watching us.
It could just be a cat, I reasoned with myself. It can’t be that easy.
But as Jack and I got closer, and the animal’s features became more visible, I became more certain: it looked a lot like Buckley.
I recognized those ears. In fact, they looked almost exactly like they did when I last saw him. Despite the darkness, his black fur looked the same, too, if not only without its usual sheen. His eyes looked different, though. He was staring right at me, but three months on his own seemed to have turned him wild, distant, and cold.
He didn’t recognize me. Or, perhaps, he didn’t believe it was really me, either.
“Buckles?” I called softly, and something clicked. His eyes brightened and his body language changed in an instant. He scrambled to his feet, and even though his tail didn’t wag, I got the distinct impression that he was as surprised to see me as I was to see him. He whimpered, and I could see his body shaking as he hurried along the wall over to us. He swung his head left and right, his recognition turning to desperation, readying himself to jump off of the ledge in order to get to me.
I held out my arms, my adrenaline not allowing me to register the much safer path up the hill on our left.
“I’m here,” I told him. “I’ll catch you.”
He didn’t jump, but he let me hook both of my hands under his front arms and pull him down. I was running on pure adrenaline, hyper focused on holding him close and tight, and getting him to safety.
“My sweet boy. My sweet, sweet boy.”
I hurried back to the car with Buckley trembling and crying in my arms, scared that I might be dreaming, that I might somehow drop him or even wind up losing him again if I didn’t act fast. Jack continued to protest, pulling against me while trying to get to a bush, making his annoyance about the reunion known.
Buckley curled up in the passenger seat of my car like he had so many times before, like he hadn’t been missing for these last three months, like we had merely been visiting this place and he was ready to be taken home. The longer I looked, though, the more I saw of the toll that the time had taken on him. He was filthy. His hair was thin above his tail. He was covered in fleas, and looking at me with imploring intensity.
“Where have you been?” his despondent eyes seemed to ask. With a tilt of his head toward his lifted leg, he bit at his haunches, the fleas scurrying across his stomach. “Look,” his body language seemed to say. “Help.”
“I’m so sorry, Buckles,” I whispered. I was too stunned to cry, but my heart felt like it could break in two. I couldn’t imagine what he must be feeling, what must be going through his head, or what it must have been like to be living outside all on his own for such a long time. “I’m so, so sorry.”
For a while, I just stared. Jack sat still and quiet in my lap, watching me. He seemed to finally understand that something important was happening. It took me a second to remember Chris, who was no doubt waiting, and hoping.
I fumbled for my phone, my hands shaking as I punched the camera icon next to his.
“I found him,” I told Chris’s wide-eyed visage as soon as he answered.
He blinked, his disbelief laced with cautious hope. “You did?!”
“Yeah,” I nodded, my voice cracking. “I’ve got him.”
Buckley let out a whimper beside me as I turned the camera around so that Chris could see him.
“Oh, my little junkyard dog,” he murmured through tears, while Buckley fretted and whined. “I can’t believe he’s alive!”
“He’s alive,” I repeated. The world seemed to have melted away, and for a moment it felt like the fractured pieces of our family were sliding back together, if even for just a moment. Buckley wouldn’t keep his eyes off of me, and as I peered into them, realizing the full extent and gravity of my relief, I began to cry. “He’s home.”
Sweet Buckles. You brought him home. ❤️