The dog that disappeared on Christmas Day
And left an aching void in one family for ever
have to try not to think it. It took about a week for our confidence to wobble. If all our efforts, combined with all that fervent collective desire, hadn’t been enough to find Bonnie, then what would it take?
‘What if she doesn’t come back, Dad?’ said 19-year-old Joe, gloomily, staring into his cereal bowl one morning. It was entirely rhetorical. There was no point saying that life would go on.
There are lots of dog-owners hereabouts, so plenty of folk understood the emotional impact on a family when a much- loved dog goes missing. Even so, the level of community concern was touching, and the occasional cold shoulder commensurately startling.
‘Excuse me, have we given you a poster about our missing dog?’ my wife Jane asked a woman taking Christmas decorations down from the village hall. The reply, perhaps fittingly, came as a short, sharp bark. ‘Yes, yes, everyone’s had one of your blinking posters!’
At the opposite end of the spectrum, but almost as disconcerting, were the people who seemed as heartbroken as we were by her disappearance.
One woman we’d never met phoned every few days updating us on her own search operation. And for a short while, before those posters in pubs and shops became what I suppose I should call dogeared, Bonnie assumed the status of a canine Lord Lucan, with phantom sightings across the county.
Another woman (it was always women who called, never men), phoned to say she’d just seen a little white dog running pell-mell down a lane, about six miles away.
We leapt into the car and were soon roaming the area, calling her name. I don’t know how many plaintive cries of ‘Bonnnnnnie’ rang out over the wintry Herefordshire countryside last December and January, but I’m guessing several thousand, every one of them a small bloom and wither of hope.
It’s so odd, losing a dog. Underpinning your emotions is a sense of perspective; this is not a missing child, not even close. Yet that doesn’t alter the fact Bonnie was loving and loved, and now she is gone.
It is terribly sad when an adored family pet dies, but at least there’s a finality to it. Not knowing what had become of Bonnie was and still is a nagging torment.
Had she simply left the garden and got disorientated or stuck in a field or wood? And if so, why was she never found? My parents-in-law remain convinced that a fox killed her. I’ve constructed a different scenario, however.
It was Christmas night, so I imagine her trotting down our drive towards the road and being hit by a car, maybe driven by someone who was over the alcohol limit, didn’t want to admit responsibility, and disposed of the body.
Theories abound. One considerate soul told us that some dogs, when they know they are ailing, quietly take themselves off to die. Which was rather a soothing thought, except Bonnie had been the picture of health.
Another, less considerate soul informed us there had been a rash of thefts of spaniels and terriers to be used as bait in criminal dog fights. We didn’t share that theory with the children. If she had been stolen, we preferred to think of her being cherished by another family.
Whatever, if she was still alive then we needed to do all we could to find her. Many people recommended the website DogLost, which bills itself as the UK’s biggest ‘lost-and-found dog service’.
We registered her and were contacted by Jenny, who assured us her beagle, Tiga, had an extraordinary record of tracking lost dogs. By then, three weeks had passed since Bonnie’s disappearance, yet she was confident Tiga would hunt her down. She didn’t, and Bonnie didn’t turn up on DogLost either. We got briefly excited at the end of January when we heard a Westie had been found not far away in Malvern, and taken to a veterinary surgery, but by the time we spoke to the receptionist, the dog had been claimed by its owner.
Other Westies turned up as far afield as Plymouth and Middlesbrough; each time we went through the same ritual: hope, phone call, dejection. By spring we were just about reconciled to what in our hearts we had known after just a week, that we would never see Bonnie again.
One shouldn’t project human emotions onto dogs, but her big friend Fergus also seemed to have spent those few months in a state of melancholy, probably, we reasoned, because he knew what had happened. He was outside with Bonnie that night. Those doleful, soulful eyes must have seen something.
We’d also had to break the news to our daughter, Eleanor, who was working abroad over the winter. That conversation was another little heartbreak: a sharp intake of breath down the phone, then instant, copious tears.
BY MAY we knew that, barring a miracle, Bonnie was conclusively, emphatically gone. Jane started muttering about getting another dog, which seemed disrespectful, but it was a step forward, further away from the heartache.
Fergus was beginning to look old as well as sad; we felt he needed a younger playmate. And although we considered getting a rescue dog, and had a look at several, Jane became wedded to the idea of a schnauzerpoodle cross, a schnoodle.
The poodle gene means schnoodles don’t moult, an appealing characteristic. If we were so inclined, we could stuff cushions with the fur Fergus sheds around the house.
We were directed towards a breeder in Pembrokeshire, who posted an online video of a new litter of seven schnoodles. We wanted a female, like Bonnie, but the only girl had already been sold.
So we chose the cutest remaining boy, entirely black but for white paws and a white chest.
After a lively family debate, and in keeping with our custom of giving Scottish or Irish names to our pets, we decided to call our new puppy Finnegan. He was eight weeks old, as Bonnie had been, when he became part of the family.
Eleanor and Joe, having moved away, will never bond with him quite as they did with Bonnie. But they take huge pleasure in him when they visit, and there’s always Christmas to look forward to, when his job, little though he knows it, will be to ensure that none of us gets too despondent, thinking of our little Westie who never came home.