Do pets have a 6th sense in the wild?
The search for a lost friend in the great outdoors can eat away at your insides.
Over the years, I’ve searched for lost hikers, youngsters and survivors of downed airplanes, and they’ve always turned up. But dogs and cats, which I’ve invariably treated like family members and love just as much, don’t always get found or come home when they vanish.
Anybody who has searched for a lost friend won’t forget how it feels, to call out, over and over, and not get an answer. The empty response after your call can feel like the world has just bored a hole in your heart that won’t be filled again.
It happened once more for me this month. In open space on a warm April evening at dusk, tracing game trails used by coyotes, deer and fox, we called for my girlfriend’s house cat, a shy, scared fellow named Sherman, who ran out the door one evening and disappeared. Going on 10 days of searching, there was no answer.
Sherman, like many cats, dogs and a lot of people, is kept inside. It has made me wonder if the indoor socialization of pets and people has diminished outdoors skills. Or are we all, people and pets alike, born with innate senses for the wild from our ancestral roots, something like a built-in homing device, to get us home?
It seems like everybody has a story, or knows of one, of a wayward dog or cat coming home after being given up for lost.
Dog in the wilderness
My favorite is the story of lifetime pal Steve Dunckel, who was riding his horse as his dog trotted alongside for hundreds of miles on the Pacific Crest Trail. They’d left from the Dunckel cabin in the wilderness near Sierra Village above Sonora, then trekked north past Tahoe and into Plumas National Forest.
One night at camp as the yipping and howling of coyotes echoed up a remote canyon, Steve’s dog put its head back, nose to the stars, and howled back. The next night, the dog trotted down the trail into the darkness and didn’t return.
“It really bothered me,” Steve said. “For the next week or so, I kept going north on the PCT, expecting my dog to show up at any time, like at night at camp. But he never did. I ended up stopping. Missed my dog too much. Couldn’t go on without him. I wrote my dad ( Ed Dunckel) at the cabin that my dog had run off, that I was coming back.”
It took Steve a while to return, of course. Finally came the day when Steve walked down that 4-wheel-drive road in the wild and reached the cabin. Guess what? His dog was waiting for him. “Showed up trotting down the road to the cabin two days ago,” Ed Dunckel told me at the time. The dog had traversed hundreds of miles on his own to return.
Deeply personal
When I was 8, my dog, Sport, took off, and in a class assignment to write about “the most important thing in the world,” I penned “Searching for a Lost Friend.” The teacher gave it to the old Palo Alto Times and it became my first published story. The next day, Sport came home.
Same thing happened with Rebel, my pal for 17 years of roaming around. He even had his own sleeping bag and slept on my feet as I wrote every day. Then he jumped the fence at my home in Moss Beach and disappeared for two weeks. I gave up all hope, so heartbroken that I quit writing. But just as I was ready to jump ship and take a job as a guide in the Arctic, he arrived at the front door.
I love cats, too, and have been adopted by a stray, Calvinator, whom I’ve taught to catch-and-release so that he doesn’t kill birds, ground squirrels and chipmunks. Cal brings them to me, unhurt, and I then let them go.
Sherman, my girlfriend Denese’s cat, has had a rough go. Scared and solitary, he was boarded with me to become socialized. He was orphaned at 2 days old and, according to a previous owner, wrapped in a blanket at 3 weeks old and accidentally tossed out a second-story window. At a new house, backed by several miles of open space, he escaped one evening this month and didn’t return.
In the next week, I walked game trails for hours, looking and calling for a lost friend. I found fresh coyote scat and owl pellets, and also sighted fox and deer. With a stick, I broke apart the scat and found no cat hair. Then the game trails ended and it was difficult to imagine Sherman, or any house cat, going farther. Finally, we put out a “missing cat alert” to neighbors.
Finding their way
Then, at my old house, several miles away, at dusk one evening, I heard a meow. I felt a bit foolish, but I meowed back, trying to speak cat. I looked up and Sherman emerged from a wood pile, then turned and ran back.
With a toy and a treat, Denese was able to lure him out of the wood pile and nabbed him. He was bony from weight loss, eyes like saucers from fright, and appeared disoriented.
Somehow, this cat, whose world has not been bigger than the inside of a home, found his way for miles across wild terrain — that he knew nothing about — back to a place where he had lived only a short time.
Some scientists have told me they believe that most animals, including dogs and cats, are born with a GPS-like sense that allows them to find their way for great distances.
We humans, on the other hand, have no such brain implant. We cannot stay inside. We have to learn our way, enduring failures while hiking, tracking and camping to build outdoors skills.