Our favorite spot was Sope Creek—a rushing stream that tumbles down to the river over a series of granite boulders. In the decade before the Civil War, a ferry shuttled people and lumber across the Chattahoochee where the creek met the river. Next to the creek, the ruins of an antebellum paper mill had been overtaken with kudzu, the aggressive southern version of English ivy. We spread out our towels beneath the ruins while Helen and Maddy jumped from rock to rock across the creek. It had rained a few days earlier, so the flow was higher than usual.
Lyra, despite her golden retriever genes, would wade into the water only until it touched her belly. Since she had no interest in swimming, I let her off-leash. She just milled about, sniffing rocks and plants and nosing around for bits of food other people had left behind.
I looked at Callie. Her prey instinct was on red alert. She sat stiffly at the end of the leash, head like a periscope, twisting in lightning-fast jerks toward every sound and motion in the woods. She looked up at me and whimpered. I didn’t need an MRI to know what she wanted. She wanted to be off-leash like Lyra.
Figuring she would hang around the picnic spread that Kat had been setting up, I reached down to unclip her. The world seemed to spin down. As I pulled back on the leash clip, Kat screamed out in slow motion “Nooooo!”
With the opening of the clip, everything kicked into high speed. With that telltale click, Callie knew she was free.
She never looked back. Like a cheetah, Callie arched her back and released all of her pent-up energy into a massive sprint. Until that moment, I’d had no idea she could swim. But what it really looked like was a twenty-pound stone skipping across the creek. In three bounds, before anyone could react, she had hopped across the water and disappeared into the woods on the other side.
“Dad!” Helen screamed. “Callie is running away!”
I jumped into the creek. The current was strong, so I faced upstream and crab-walked as fast as I could, grabbing on to boulders for support. It must have taken at least a minute to wade across, and I could mentally tick off the distance that Callie was covering with each second.
The other side of the creek was thick with kudzu and poison ivy, but a thin path headed downstream toward the Chattahoochee. If Callie made it that far, her next stop would be the Gulf of Mexico. I couldn’t bear the thought of losing another dog so soon. Never mind that the only dog in the world that had voluntarily sat for an MRI, even if only a dress rehearsal, had just escaped because of my own stupidity.
Kat pulled herself up the bank right behind me and we both set off down the footpath, yelling, “Callie, wanna treat?”
I ran ahead of Kat. Not fifty yards away, I couldn’t hear even her behind me; the sound of rushing water from the creek bounced off the trees and seemed to come from everywhere. There was no way Callie could hear us. A sense of panic started rising in my chest. I couldn’t go back to Helen and Maddy without Callie.
The path came to an end at the edge of a side stream feeding into Sope Creek. With nowhere else to go, I slid down an embankment and waded back into the creek. Hopping from rock to rock, I made my way slowly downstream toward the Hooch. Kat was at least a hundred yards back. I continued to call out for Callie, but even if she was nearby, I doubted that she heard me.
A couple was sunbathing on a rock in the middle of the creek.
“Did you see a little black dog?” I asked.
They shook their heads.
The search operation had now been going on for ten minutes. Callie was nowhere to be seen. I tried to listen for the jangling of her dog tags, but all I could hear was the water and the laughter of a group of teenagers a little farther down the creek.
Keep going or turn back? Callie was in unfamiliar territory. There was no way to know what she would do. Given her fascination with squirrels and chipmunks, she could have gone anywhere in the forest.
The teenagers’ laughter got louder. Foolishly, I resented it. I had just lost another dog, and it was all my fault. What was there to laugh about?
Then I saw why the teens were laughing. They were pointing at something moving at high speed through the creek.
It was Callie. She was half jumping and half swimming, in hot pursuit of a gaggle of young geese.
“Callie!” I screamed. “Come here, girl!”
She didn’t hear me.
The geese were not particularly coordinated and couldn’t fly very well. The whole group was moving erratically from one side of the creek to the other. And then the geese turned to backtrack upstream.
They flew by, barely above the water. A second later, Callie screamed by, just out of reach. With her attention focused on the geese, she didn’t even notice me.
“Callie!”
The scrum was headed for Kat.
Kat made a leap to grab Callie, but her timing was off, and Kat splayed out on a rock, empty-handed.
I started making my way upstream again. It would have been faster if I could get to the bank and run up the path, but I would risk missing Callie in the water. I could make out her splashing about a hundred yards away, still in pursuit of the geese. Kat was wading through the rapids but not making much progress either.
“She’s coming back!” Kat yelled.
For reasons only the geese knew, they had decided to make another 180-degree change in course. Four fluffy goslings were flapping straight at me. This was going to be my last chance.
Not wanting to frighten the geese into another course change, I remained motionless in the center of the water. They whizzed by in a chorus of discontent. The bounding water dog was a few seconds behind them, oblivious to anything but the chase.
As she closed to within ten yards, I called out in my happy voice, “Callie! Good Girl!”
It was enough to momentarily divert her attention from the birds. She glanced over at me. I lunged out and snagged her collar with a finger.
Drawing her in for a hug, I gloried in the smell of wet dog.
“Callie, you crazy dog. We almost lost you!”
She let out a heavy sigh as she watched her prey vanish downriver.
I carried her back to the bank and towed her to where the girls were waiting. Helen immediately buried her face in Callie’s slicked-back fur.
Callie after shootin’ the Hooch.
(Gregory Berns)
“Dad!” she exclaimed. “Don’t ever do that again!”
Kat pulled up, holding her hand.
“What happened?” I asked. She held out her left hand. Her ring finger was bent at an awkward angle. She had dislocated her finger trying to catch Callie. It was beginning to swell.
“I have to take off my wedding ring,” she said, “or it might have to be cut off.” I didn’t know it at the time, but it would be a year before that finger returned to normal size and she could wear her ring again.
I was relieved that we had Callie back. The episode made me realize that despite all of our high-tech training for the MRI, I still didn’t have a clue as to what she was thinking.
By the time we got home, Callie had already shrugged off her trip downriver, and the kids had taken to exercising their creativity on the stack of boogie boards in the basement. The nearest ocean was three hundred miles away, so something else had to substitute for water. It didn’t take them long to figure out that sliding down the carpeted steps was a hoot.