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That night, Barbara returned home even more exhausted and depressed. How could she possibly celebrate under the circumstances? Wiping away tears, she started decorating her tree. She swore to herself, I am not going to light this tree until he’s found. And I’m going to keep this tree until he sits next to it with me.
Barbara realized that the job was too big for just one person, so she tried a different approach.
“I asked myself what the best way was to get the word out that Boris was lost, and I said, Okay, let me call the newspaper.”
She found a sympathetic ear in New York Post reporter Laura Italiano, who found herself unexpectedly touched by Barbara’s story.
“Barbara called the New York Post absolutely frantic. Typically, we’re busy chasing murderers, political corruption. It took a special kind of story to get us to care about a little lost dog. And Barbara was the one who made that happen for us. The Post absolutely loved the story. It is a classic tabloid story. You have a clear-cut villain, this bungling airline, and a very sympathetic victim—a poor dog who had been lost. I think everyone’s heart went out to Barbara. This is a woman who doesn’t know New York City, knew no one in town, and she had this tremendous responsibility to find an animal in completely unfamiliar surroundings. You had to feel for her; you had to worry about her,” Laura says.
“I couldn’t believe how many people responded,” Barbara marveled. “It touched so many people’s hearts.”
One of those hearts belonged to Paula Forester, a professional psychic who saw Boris’s picture on a television news program. Paula was amazed at her reaction to the picture. “They did a close-up on his eyes, and pow. There was a psychic connection. I have worked psychically with animals before, but I have never felt such a strong and urgent connection to anything before that point.”
Paula immediately contacted Barbara.
“She told me that she was a psychic and that she was getting strong feelings from Boris. They were communicating. My first reaction was, Hey, lady, if you’re communicating with my dog, tell him to come home! She told me that she didn’t want a reward, she didn’t want pay, she just wanted to get Boris back to me. I didn’t believe in that hocus-pocus-type stuff, but I just wanted my baby home. I wasn’t going to turn away anyone volunteering to help find him.”
Paula turned out to be more than just a volunteer. She was a force to be reckoned with.
“She was pushing me, and I thought I was the aggressive one. She told me, ‘Come on, let’s go, you can do it, you can do it. Keep going, keep going.’ She was really doing the legwork, really going out there getting the flyers out.”
“I knew Boris was alive,” Paula said. “And I knew he was desperate to find Barbara again. He was very confused and very, very sad. Every time I linked in psychically to Boris, the sadness, confusion, and heartache were overwhelming.”
“We went from neighborhood to neighborhood. We just kept looking every night, in the cold. We just never stopped,” Barbara said.
“What really kept me going was this little dog that had a really big psychic voice that said, ‘Please help me,’” Paula said.
But after days of searching, Barbara’s hopes began to fade.
Barbara remembered, “New Year’s had come and gone, and it was so cold. With the wind-chill factor it was 25 below zero outside. All I could do was cry, I couldn’t imagine how Boris was surviving.”
Meanwhile, Barbara’s friends and family were worried sick about her and urged her to accept reality and get on with her life. But Barbara wouldn’t give up.
“Some people told me, ‘Oh, it’s only a dog,’” Barbara recalled. “You know, get over it, get another one. And I told them, ‘You don’t understand. There is no closure. I can’t live my life knowing that he’s out there, he’s cold, he’s hungry, he’s starving.’ I said, ‘I’m not gonna give up on him.’”
And the media was standing by Barbara’s decision.
Laura Italiano says, “We started running a story a week in the Post, and Barbara kept us well-fed with updates. She felt that if the newspaper kept up a steady drumbeat to search for this dog, that public attention wouldn’t just die down. And he wouldn’t die out there, unmourned, unsearched for.”
But all the publicity only produced more false leads. The phone rang around the clock with sightings of strays from people anxious to help, but all turned out to be dead ends. Barbara was completely physically and emotionally exhausted. She didn’t know how much longer she could continue.
Luckily, she had Paula Forester to help keep her spirits up. “Her energy just kept me going,” she said, “and really it was a godsend that she did come along.”
Paula said, “The worst thing you can do is get discouraged. I just knew he was out there. I told Barbara not to give up. I don’t care if it takes two months; I don’t care if it takes three months. The dog is coming home. Alive.”
Several weeks later, despite all of Laura Italiano’s best efforts, the publicity and the media attention hadn’t produced a single solid lead. But a strange recurring dream was about to change the parameters of the search.
Paula tossed and turned for hours every night, dreaming of Boris. She said, “I would get images of Boris sleeping in tires, of him having a bloody foot, starving and very cold. I knew that I was picking up what the dog was feeling. Boris was freezing and desperate.”
The dream eventually led Paula to an automotive shop in Queens.
“I must have driven by this one auto repair place a hundred times. I actually went up and approached one of the workers there, asking about a stray. The man was so busy, he really kind of brushed me off.”
It seemed like just another dead end. Unfortunately, at this point, the media was also beginning to question its involvement in the search. Even the indomitable Laura was giving up hope. “Maybe we were doing the wrong thing keeping this story going, because the more time that passed, the less likely it was that there would be a happy ending.”
Barbara had to make a tough decision. “I didn’t know whether to keep going on with this endless search or get on with my life. It was really getting to the point where reality started checking in with me. But Paula said to me, ‘Barbara, if you give up, this dog’s going to give up and die. The only reason he’s staying alive is because he knows you’re out there looking for him.’”
After weeks and weeks of searching, Paula received a tip on yet another sighting of Boris. Paula received a call at her apartment from a stranger in Queens, a man who said, “I think I have the dog that’s in the flyer. There’s been a stray dog living in this garbage-filled abandoned lot next to my house. And sometimes we throw leftovers over the fence because we feel sorry for him. It kind of looks like the dog in the picture.”
The call brought Paula back to a familiar location. The man’s apartment was next door to the automotive shop she’d visited days before. The man had brought the dog into the apartment. Paula stood in his apartment, looked at the dog, looked at the picture, then looked at the dog again. “His eyes were soulless, they were dead. He was filthy. He was a different color. He had a slash in his foot, almost all the way through. I walked up to him and said, ‘Boris, is that you?’ And then one ear went up and one ear went down. And I said, Oh, my God. It’s Boris after fifty-two days.”
Her hands shaking, Paula immediately called Barbara. “Barbara,” she said, “we have Boris.”
“I can’t go and look at any more dogs,” Barbara answered. “Are you sure it’s him? I’m so tired. I don’t know how much more I can take. Are you sure?”
“Somebody called me. He’s inside a house. This is definitely your dog. You gotta come here now.”
“Paula, I can’t go through this anymore,” Barbara said. She didn’t have an ounce of strength left.
“Look, I’m telling you. One ear up, one ear down. You’ve gotta come down here. He’s only a mile from the airport.”
“I’m on my way.”
Weeks of sorrow and worry were about to come to an end. “I went inside this apartment complex and there he was, this little dog coming around the corner peeking its head out at me. And I looked and I said, ‘That’s not my dog. Boris has beautiful eyes. He’s got a tan coat. This dog’s skinny.’”
“Barbara, please,” Paula begged. “Just look again.”
Barbara kneeled down and looked the limping, bedraggled dog in the eye. “Boris,” she called softly, “Boris, is that you?” And he looked up at her with one ear up and one ear down, and suddenly Barbara let out a yell. “Oh, my God, Boris, it is you! It’s you!” She was shaking all over, and suddenly her legs gave out. She found herself sitting on the floor with Boris licking her face, crying. Everyone else in the room was crying right along with her.
“I missed you so much,” Barbara told Boris tearfully. “I love you. I can’t believe they found you!”
“It was the most beautiful thing,” Paula remembered. “It was worth every minute of whatever I contributed as a part of this bigger picture. It was the best reward and the most miraculous. And it was a miracle. It was a chance in a billion.”
That night, Barbara kept her promise. After weeks of waiting, her Christmas tree was finally lit to welcome Boris home. “We’ll make it all better,” she told Boris. “Look at the pretty tree with the lights. You’re home. You’re home, baby!”
The next morning, a triumphant New York Post headline greeted all of New York City. And Boris immediately became a media darling.
A reporter said, “After six weeks of street life, the boxer was finally home. He’s a trooper. He held in there. I can’t believe it. All the while his owner kept faith. But it was a little magic that brought him home.”
And Paula Forester helped provide some of that magic. She and Barbara continue to be close friends, and today Barbara is far less skeptical of psychic phenomena.
“Our chances psychically or otherwise were one in a billion,” Paula says. “I could have been totally wrong through this whole thing. It was a miracle that Boris was found.”
“I’m a believer,” Barbara says. “There are some powers out there that you can’t dismiss. To find a lost dog in New York City? Anything could have happened to him. Anything. For me to be reunited with him is a total miracle to me.”
RUPERT, THE PARROT (#ulink_76a05aef-72ac-592a-a6ec-a545fee48de4)
Lynn Norley of Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, has a very special relationship with Rupert, her African Gray Parrot.
“There’s definitely something magical about this bird,” she says. “I mean, the bird just interacts with everyone in such a way that’s so touching. His affection, and his rapport, and how he absolutely knows what’s going on around him—it’s just fantastic.”
Lynn acquired Rupert as a baby in 1986, and since then, the parrot has become a central part of her life. In fact, she literally wouldn’t be alive today if it weren’t for Rupert.
It all began in February of 1998, when Lynn put Rupert in his cage for the night, and went to bed herself. What she didn’t know was that in just a few hours she would wake to a living nightmare.
“I was lying there and I heard a very loud thud. Rupert fell off his perch, and then I heard him squawking very loudly. It was definitely an alarm sound. I mean, there wasn’t any doubt in my mind that there was a problem,” she remembers.
Lynn went to investigate, but got no farther than the bedroom door, which opened to reveal smoke and flames. “I was faced with a wall of smoke that was horrible-smelling, and I couldn’t see anything.”
She knew that Rupert was in danger. Not thinking of the consequences, she rushed to free him from his cage as the room filled with smoke.
“When I got to the cage, I was extremely panicked, and I was sure that Rupert wouldn’t make it. This parrot can take only a little bit of smoke. I couldn’t find the door of the cage because I couldn’t see, and I couldn’t get a breath, either. But somehow I fumbled and found the cage, and I grabbed Rupert out from the bottom.”
With Rupert tucked under her arm, Lynn rushed out to her patio for air. She took a deep breath, and ran back into the smoke-filled house to rescue her dogs, Alex and Panther, who were still trapped in the fire. The dogs were frantic, and in the middle of all the chaos, Lynn felt Rupert go lifeless in her arms.
“I was sure that Rupert had died,” says Lynn. “I felt horrible, because Rupert was such a part of my life for so long, and I couldn’t just drop him on the floor.” With the fire burning around her, Lynn didn’t have a lot of time to make a decision. “I wrapped Rupert in a bathrobe, and gave him the only burial I could at the moment. I put him in the bottom of the shower stall.”
Lynn could hear the flames crackling in the hallway outside the door. She put a wet shirt over her face, grabbed her dogs, and tried to make a run for it.
“I put Alex under my arm and grabbed Panther by the collar. I planned on going out the bedroom door, but when I opened the door again, I was hit with a wall of smoke and an explosion. I realized then that the house was bursting into flames, and I knew I had to escape through one of the windows of my second-story bedroom.”
Thankfully, Lynn and the dogs dropped safely to the ground, leaving the house in flames. Firefighters doused the fire, but only after the inside had been totally gutted.
“It was terrifying, and it was horrible. I was watching my house exploding and smoke coming out of the roof,” remembers Lynn.
The next morning, with the support of friends, Lynn returned home to see the devastation the fire had caused. The building was still standing, but it was merely a shell. There was little left in its charred interior. For Lynn, however, the greatest loss was Rupert.
“It seemed that nothing in the house could possibly survive,” she says. “The windows were all blown out. In order to fight the fire, the firefighters had thrown everything out the window—my grandmother’s things, and my paintings, and all that—but they really didn’t matter. I mean, really, truly, the only thing I felt bad about was the bird.”
Lynn didn’t have the heart to go into the bathroom, so her friend Laurie Moore went in to remove the dead bird. Blackened debris had filled the shower stall after firefighters had doused the blaze, and Laurie pulled away the remains of crumbled walls.
“I started rummaging through the tile and the plaster and the fiberglass,” Laurie recalls. “I moved some of it away, and found Rupert plastered up in the corner, looking at me. ‘Rupert!’ I screamed. Both of us were very surprised, looking at each other, and when I reached down to pick him up, he bit me.” Laurie yelled out to Lynn to come quickly, that Rupert was alive.
“When I heard her scream, I couldn’t believe my ears,” says Lynn. “I ran into the bathroom, and there was Rupert, sitting in the corner of the shower stall on top of a pile of debris. He was shaking, and looked horrible.” But finding the bird living, Lynn declares, “It was really a miracle…. No one could believe the bird was alive.”
Today, Lynn and Rupert are living happily together in a new home. Lynn owes her life to her pet bird. It was Rupert’s warning calls that saved her from the fire. But what saved Rupert?
“I don’t know how the bird’s alive,” Lynn reflects. “It’s a miracle that this bird lived through that. I mean, it’s totally astounding. Between everything that Rupert inhaled, and everything that happened to him … if even a small part of any of those things had happened to any other bird, it would never have had a chance to live. And everything that happened to Rupert was so intense. It was just really a miracle.”
DOG ANGEL (#ulink_51eb57ca-5918-5fdc-8a0e-4babd2ff81b7)
In 1993, John and Toni Sheridan shared their home in rural Virginia with a very special companion, a dog named Sailor who had been a member of the family for more than a decade.
Toni says, “I guess I loved Sailor so much because we really got him as a little pup. He was just five weeks old. We brought him up, we nourished him, and he was just closer to us than a baby.”
Sailor may have been Toni’s baby, but he was John’s best friend.
“Every time I hopped into my pickup to go somewhere,” John explains, “he’d be right there alongside me with his head on my knee.”
And then, returning from a drive one morning, Sailor waited a moment before his normal routine of jumping out the passenger side of the truck. But this time, something went wrong.
John remembers, “He hit the ground, and he let out a yip, and he just laid there. So I figured, well, in a few minutes he’ll get up and walk around, but he just laid there the way he hit the ground. And I knew darn well something had happened. He was paralyzed.”
John and Toni rushed Sailor to the local vet.
Toni continues, “The vet said he was hurt internally, and, you know, there was very little he could do. And he suggested putting him to sleep, and there’s no way we wanted that. We wanted to keep him and see what would happen.”
“So we took him home,” says John. “We put him in the bedroom there and made a nice bed for him and he just laid there. I tried to give him some water and he wouldn’t drink. I tried to give him some food and he wouldn’t eat. After two days or so, he got steadily worse. His eyes were closed half the time and I told Toni, ‘He’s paralyzed. He can’t move. So … I think tomorrow morning when the vet opens up, we’ll have to take Sailor there and put him to sleep.’”
But Toni refused to give up hope. She told John, “‘I’m going to go and say a prayer. I’m going to ask God to send us an angel.’ I prayed and I prayed and I prayed for him.”
But Sailor wasn’t getting any better. And it was killing John to watch his faithful friend suffer.
“So I looked at Sailor, and I said, ‘Well, I guess you know it’s the end.’ So I slipped off his collar, and I went out to the shed. I had a couple of dog collars from previous dogs I had, and I hung Sailor’s collar next to them. It was something I hated to do, but it brought tears to my eyes. Those three collars represented almost forty years of faithful companionship.”
The next morning, John was up an hour before taking Sailor to the vet. And that’s when something entirely unexpected happened.
John recounts, “I looked up and I saw this little brown dog coming down the driveway. She looked lost. And I looked, but there was no collar on the dog. So I said, Well, heck, she must be hungry. I took her in the house, but she wouldn’t eat anything. She started walking around the house. She walked into the bedroom where Sailor was, and she sat down right in front of Sailor, just looking at him. After a minute or so, she went up and she nudged Sailor. And believe it or not, he slowly tried to get to his feet. He was shaky as all heck. He got up and he walked to the door, and that little dog went out, and Sailor followed her out. I couldn’t believe it, that Sailor was almost ready to be put to sleep, and here he was walking around wagging his tail and all.
“So I called Toni, and she came out and she said, ‘Oh, my God, Sailor’s alive! God must have sent an angel.’”
Toni agrees. “Something happened. I don’t know what kind of angel He sent, but He sent something to get Sailor up and moving and following that little dog the way he was, and I was just overjoyed.”
But there was still the question of this stray dog. Where had it come from? And was some anxious owner desperately searching for it? John called the local radio station to report a lost dog. A few hours later, the dog’s owner called to retrieve her pet. Her name was Karen Jarett.
John explains, “She had just moved up recently from Atlanta, Georgia. They lived three or four miles away, with a big wooded section between us. The dog didn’t know this area, and ran into the woods and never came back. Something brought that dog through those woods right to my house, and right to Sailor. And in my opinion, that dog saved Sailor’s life.”
As the owner thanked John for saving her dog, she pulled a collar from her bag. And at that moment, John understood what had happened.
“She had a collar in her hand, and she put it on the dog,” John says. “And I looked at the collar and I called Toni. There was ‘Angel’ written on the name tag. Toni saw it, and she said, ‘That’s God’s angel.’”
Toni says, “I thanked God because I knew it was through Him that this happened with Sailor. And I knew that if it wasn’t for Him, this miracle would never have happened, because to me it was a miracle.”
John wonders, “How could a dog come through three or four miles of woods in a strange place? And come right up, nudge my dog, and bring him back to life? This is something that happened without any help from mankind. Something stronger than a human being saved Sailor.
“And it was that little dog.”
WOMAN’S BEST FRIEND (#ulink_263f12a8-1065-56cc-90ba-1154b2700d9a)
Nestled among the majestic redwoods of Northern California is the quaint town of Garberville. In 1999, Nancy and Jeff Best were raising a family there, while running a popular coffee shop, the Java Joint.
“Our lives were a little hectic at the time,” recalls Nancy. “We had three kids going to three different schools. My husband had taken a job in the Bay Area, which is a good four-and-a-half-hour drive away, so during the week he’d be gone and I would have to run the shop.”
Even with her active schedule, however, Nancy dreamed of adding another member to her family.
“I’ve always been an animal lover,” she says. “My mom used to call me ‘Dr. Doolittle’ when I was little, because I always had animals around me.
“I’m particularly fond of dogs,” says Nancy. “I had been pestering my husband about getting a yellow Lab every time I would see one. I would hint, ‘Christmas is coming, I want a yellow Lab.’ But he kept saying that we really shouldn’t get one at that time.”
