Four-Legged Miracles: Heartwarming Tales of Lost Dogs' Journeys Home - Softcover

BRAD AND SHERRY STEIGER have written 44 books together dealing with the inspirational, the miraculous, and the mysterious. These include Christmas Miracles (winner of the 2002 Storytelling Award from Storytelling World magazine) and Dog Miracles. Fourteen of their titles explore the wonder of animals and the incredible bond that they share with humans. The Steigers have appeared on Hard Copy, Inside Edition, and Entertainment Tonight; in specials on HBO, Discovery, History, and A&E; and were featured in twenty-two episodes of the syndicated series, Could It Be a Miracle?

Chapter 1
 

Dogs That Found Their Way Back Home
“Lassie Come Home” Stories
Many readers are familiar with the story of Lassie, the stalwart collie, who against seemingly impossible odds found her way back to her young owner. Based on a short story by Eric Knight published in The Saturday Evening Post in 1938, Lassie was more fully developed in Knight’s novel Lassie Come Home in 1940. The storyline of the very successful 1943 motion picture Lassie Come Home tells of a Depression-era English family who is forced to sell their exceptionally beautiful female collie to a wealthy nobleman who lives hundreds of miles away on his estate in Scotland. Through a series of harrowing adventures, Lassie uses her instinct and courage and manages to return to the young boy she loves.
The film starred a teenage Roddy McDowall, an eleven-year-old Elizabeth Taylor, and a large male collie named Pal. Beginning with Pal I, the character of Lassie has always been portrayed by a male. (It was discovered early on in filming Lassie Come Home that female collies shed profusely when they are in heat.) Elizabeth Taylor got the part of Priscilla when Maria Flynn, the actress originally cast, could not conceal her fear of the big collie. Elizabeth had no problem working with Pal and did not find his size intimidating. Her father had given her a puppy when she was just a little girl, and she loved dogs—a love that continued throughout her life with spaniels, Pekingese, Maltese, Lhasa apsos, and collies. On her sixtieth birthday, Elizabeth was gifted with a collie that was a great-grandchild of Pal, her Lassie co-star.
In 1945, MGM capitalized on its canine bonanza with Son of Lassie, starring Peter Lawford and June Lockhart. The third movie in the series Courage of Lassie, in 1946, starred Tom Drake and Elizabeth Taylor, this time as Kathie Merrick. In this film, Lassie comes home battle-scarred after having served in the K-9 Corps in World War II.
In the Lassie Radio Show (1946–49) and in the long-running television series Lassie (1954–73), the collie didn’t have to find her way home, but in each episode she faced a challenge on the farm that would stymie most adult humans. Tommy Rettig and June Lockhart are two actors most commonly associated with the series, which was later syndicated as Jeff’s Collie.
Lassie had undeniably achieved popular culture immortality. In the 1980s and 1990s there were Lassie series produced by various production companies. In 1997 the Animal Planet network in the U.S. and Canada created a Lassie series that ran until 1999. In 2005 a United Kingdom production company did a remake of the original Lassie Come Home, starring Peter O’Toole and Samantha Morton. In that same year, Variety named Lassie one of the Top 100 Icons of All Time, thereby firmly establishing a “Lassie come home” story as a generic sobriquet for accounts of lost and found dogs.
Bobbie, the Wonder Collie of Oregon, and His Three-Thousand-Mile Trek
In North America, perhaps the most famous of all the dogs who found their way back to the homes and hearts of their owners after conquering seemingly insurmountable distances and inhospitable environments is Bobbie the collie, who made his way alone and on foot from Indiana back to his home in Oregon. With only his canine instincts to guide him, Bobbie managed to find his human family after walking three thousand miles through forests and farmlands, mountains and plains, scorching heat and freezing cold.
Bobbie’s story is also fully documented. Although no one can fully know what trials and terrors the brave collie faced, endured, and conquered, when Colonel E. Hofer, president of the Oregon Humane Society, launched an investigation of Bobbie’s fantastic journey, he received hundreds of letters from men and women who had assisted or befriended the dog on his amazing trek westward.
In their personal accounts, people remembered Bobbie because of his bobbed tail, the prominent scar over his right eye (where a horse had kicked him), his mismatched hips (after being struck by a tractor), and his three missing front teeth (torn out by their roots while he was digging for a ground squirrel). Some of these kind strangers had tended to Bobbie when he was starving, when he was freezing to death, when the pads of his toes were worn away so badly that the bone was exposed in some places.
It was from such reports that Charles D. Alexander, an author of short stories and novels for children, was able to document the story of the courageous dog in his book Bobbie: A Great Collie of Oregon (1926). The author of more than two hundred short stories and eleven books, mostly fiction, Alexander admitted that if he had not had access to such extensive documentation, the adventures of Bobbie would have seemed like the product of an unrestrained imagination.
The remarkable story of Bobbie’s odyssey began in August 1923 when Mr. and Mrs. Frank Brazier, owners of a restaurant in Silverton, Oregon, began their long automotive journey to Indiana to visit relatives. Bobbie, their canine family member, rode on top of the luggage in the backseat of the open touring car.
Deciding to visit relatives in Wolcott, Indiana, before continuing a hundred miles farther east to Bluffton, their final goal, Frank drove the car with Bobbie in tow to a garage for a carburetor adjustment. As the big collie leaped from the backseat, he accidentally ran afoul of a formidable bull terrier.
Frank had no real concern for Bobbie as the collie and bull terrier stood sniffing and growling at each other. He couldn’t imagine the two dogs actually getting into a fight, and if they did, he would soon break it up.
But what Frank didn’t know was that the grumpy bull terrier had a whole pack of canine buddies who ganged up on Bobbie just as soon as they lured the collie out of sight of his watchful owner and the garage attendants. When Bobbie saw that the odds were seven or eight to one, he beat it out of town with the pack of growling, snapping dogs at his heels.
When the work on his automobile was completed, Frank drove up and down the town’s streets and the nearby country roads, sounding the horn to summon Bobbie. The big dog would always come bounding for the backseat at the sound of the car horn. But not this time.
The next day, the Braziers placed an ad in the local paper, offering a reward for the return of their dog, and they delayed their drive to Bluffton to await what they prayed would be favorable results.
No response. No one seemed to have seen the big collie.
The Braziers knew that Bobbie would not run off. He was devoted to Frank. The Braziers could only conclude that something terrible had happened to the collie while their automobile was undergoing minor repairs or that someone was keeping Bobbie against his will.
Bobbie had managed to escape pursuit from the inhospitable curs, but he was left confused, shaken, and frightened. He was in completely unfamiliar territory. He wanted only to return to his master—but where the heck was he?
The Braziers finally drove on to Bluffton, hoping that someone would soon spot Bobbie and bring him to their relatives in Wolcott. But when they returned there many days later, they were disheartened to learn that no one in that community had reported seeing a big collie anywhere in town or country.
They had no choice but to begin the long, sad drive back to Silverton, Oregon. It just wouldn’t be the same without Bobbie in back, perched atop the luggage. And it wouldn’t be at all the same without Bobbie in their lives, but it appeared that Bobbie was lost to them forever.
We can only imagine, from the collie’s perspective, that he was at a loss to imagine why his master was nowhere in sight. Why hadn’t he waited for him at the garage? He wasn’t even able to pick up Frank’s scent.
The problem was, the collie had become so disoriented that he headed in the opposite direction from Wolcott and was approaching garages that had never contained the scent of Frank Brazier or his automobile.
While Bobbie’s sense of direction may have been temporarily skewered, his seemingly preternatural ability to detect dog lovers remained in excellent working order. Time and time again, as he was nearing starvation from walking in circles, Bobbie arrived at the home of kind people who took him in and nurtured him back to good traveling condition.
After more than a week of wandering, Bobbie appeared to have been given a renewed sense of direction and purpose. From what researchers could piece together, it was somewhere near Des Moines, Iowa, that Bobbie was done with walking in circles. He would keep to a westward course and never turn east again.
Traveling ever westward back home to Oregon, he swam rivers, survived blizzards, endured hunger and thirst, and climbed over mountains.
Nearly seven months later, a battered and worn Bobbie nudged past Mrs. Brazier and her daughter and dashed up the stairs to jump onto the bed where Frank lay sleeping after working the night shift at his restaurant. The startled man awakened to find his beloved collie licking his face and emitting howls of joy. Bobbie refused to leave his master’s bedroom that day, even to accept food and water.
While not enough can be said about the collie’s incredible endurance and survival, it is perhaps most astounding to learn that when the complete account had been pieced together and Bobbie’s trail had been plotted on actual maps of the states that he had traversed, it was discovered that the dog had managed to pick a very reasonable route with very few detours. After the initial period of confusion and misdirection, it seemed as though Bobbie somehow had been given a precise mental “map” that would take him home.
What some dog owners also find remarkable is that even after surviving that three-thousand-mile trek through snow, fr...