Biscuit was active

This is our dog, Biscuit. She never bites, rarely barks, never steals food and rarely makes a mess. She’ll do a dozen different tricks if you pay her in treats. She only has one vice—she loves to chase critters. Rabbits, squirrels, chipmunks--if it has fur and it scurries around, it’s prey. Whatever breeds she comes from, there must be a healthy dose of hunting-dog DNA in her. Not only does she have the desire, she’s got some hunting skill to go with it, which is why one corner of our yard is now a rabbit cemetery. There’s no getting her attention once she has caught the sight or smell of some critter. As such, we only trust her indoors, on a leash, or in our fenced-in yard.

Now I’m an obsessive dog owner and an early adopter, so a while back I bought her a GPS dog tracker. You clip this to her collar and it updates her location now and then via smartphone app, generating a notification if she has left some pre-defined safe zones. It has a cell phone plan so that it can communicate from almost anywhere. Plus it has activity tracking like a fitness band if you want to obsess over how many calories your pup is burning. We had her wearing this for a while but it’s a bit bulky and needs recharging every few days so we stopped putting it on her.

Earlier this summer I was driving home from a meeting and my wife called in a panic. Biscuit had escaped from the back yard. She frantically searched the neighborhood for an hour or so while I helplessly sat in traffic trying to get home. We live on a cul-de-sac but it’s just off of a fairly busy road that would be very dangerous. Eventually my wife spotted her at the neighbor’s house and grabbed her, to our great relief.

That close call prompted some corrective actions: First I inspected the backyard fence and found a pretty big gap in an area of known rodent activity. No doubt Biscuit saw a critter scurry under the fence and pushed her way through. I patched over the gap and any others I could find with plastic mesh. And secondly, from now on she’s going to wear that GPS tracker!

This false sense of security lasted about three weeks until one Saturday morning when my wife generously offered to take Biscuit out and let me sleep in. She escaped again! But, this time we had GPS tracking. We both activated our apps and set out into the neighborhood.

Pretty quickly we realized that getting our pup back was still going to be a challenge, real-time location tracking or not. The app has a “track” button that will change the refresh rate to once per minute or so. But Biscuit can cover a lot of ground in a minute, and she can go a lot of places that we can’t go. Strictly speaking we shouldn’t be trespassing on people’s property, for one thing. But worse than that, we live in a woodsy area with thick underbrush, poison ivy and a creek snaking around behind houses. She has no problem traversing all of this terrain. Once I caught a glimpse of her happily crisscrossing the stream. The same dog who gives you the look as if she’s being tortured when you gently wet her down in the shower…

Our plan was to station ourselves with treats and a leash on the street at a couple places where she might come out of the woods. I grabbed a bike—my wife’s was the only one with air in the tires so it wasn’t the ideal size—to try to cover more ground. We shared GPS locations with each other. Not on the same app, unfortunately.  

Biscuit’s plan was apparently to zigzag randomly across three cul-de-sacs in pursuit of critters and completely ignore our calls. A couple times we got close enough to spot her, but couldn’t get her attention.

Once I saw a location update pretty close to the house so I ventured into the woods out of our backyard, onto some conservation land. After 15 minutes of slogging through branches and mud, I was dirty, sweaty and bruised, and Biscuit was on the other side of the neighborhood already. I gave up and returned home dejectedly.

At some point we had Biscuit localized behind a couple of houses and one of our neighbors that we know was coming out. We asked him if he had seen her. He hadn’t. We asked if we could go into his yard to look for her and he consented. By way of explanation, I told him, “We have a GPS tracker on her so I know she’s back there.” “A GPS tracker on a dog?! Huh!” was his reply. Not really in the mood to reflect on these amazing times we live in, we continued our search.

An hour and forty minutes after the escape, the GPS location stopped updating. It gave the message “we’re having trouble communicating” with a spinning wheel icon. Searching the neighborhood was already starting to seem like a lost cause. Without location updates, there seemed no point to do anything but go home and wait for her to return or for someone to find her and call the number on her tag.  We felt helpless and defeated. We sat and hit refresh. We restarted the app. We called customer support but they couldn’t do anything. We imagined the worst.

I did manage to get some coffee in me and it cleared my head a bit. What if she got stuck at the last reported location? Perhaps a long shot but if she was moving around, she would have eventually gotten out of the pocket of bad cell coverage. (AT&T was called some unpleasant names, at some point). I drove down to the next cul-de-sac and found the nearest house to that location. I rang the doorbell and the dad of the house came out to meet me with a puzzled look. After my explanation, he led me through the house and to the back of their fenced in yard to a gate.

“It’s all poison ivy back there.”

“Yeah, I guess I’ll take my chances.”

I walk through the gate and I see Biscuit, sniffing around, without her collar. I approach her slowly, call her (Biscuit: shrug), and eventually hold out a treat for her and hug her tight.  I carry her back to the neighbor’s house. She’s hot, tired and filthy, but unhurt. I call my wife. I bring her home. Water and showers all around. Biscuit stares blankly at the wall during a warm-hearted scolding. We’re all safe.

Lying in bed later I try to process the whole sequence of events. How had she escaped? (Ans: another gap under the fence, genius.) How did she lose her collar? Why had the collar lost signal? It occurred to me that losing signal and losing the collar might be related. In which case, the collar would still be at the last reported location. The location was on conservation land, so I didn’t need anyone’s permission to go look for it. Thus I resolved to stage a recovery mission the next morning.

Again I set out clambering through the woods, trying to stay reasonably dry and free of poison ivy and mosquito bites. I approached the last known location and recognized the neighbor’s backyard that I had cut through. There was a big rock there and some dead branches. I expected to find the collar snagged on a branch but nothing red caught my eye. After circling the perimeter of the region on the map, I circled back to find the exact center point. Then I spotted a hole under a pile of rocks, with freshly dug dirt leading to a den. A fox hole? A coyote den? Home for a groundhog or raccoon?  We’ve seen all of these around the neighborhood. I shone my phone flashlight into the hole to look for the collar but didn’t see anything. I thought about reaching my hand in to fish around for it, but thought better of it, given the risk of a coyote bite. At any rate, I think the circumstantial evidence is clear enough. Biscuit wriggled her way into this fox hole as far as she could, then backed out, leaving the collar behind with a few feet of solid granite in the path of the satellite signal.

Here’s the track of Biscuit’s adventures. New personal best!

I can’t figure out what lesson to take from this story. I was glad we had the GPS tracker on her, but knowing her location was pointless without a way to catch her. Then when it went dead, we probably felt worse than we would have if she wasn’t wearing it. We spent good money on this gadget and the one time we need it to work, it fails! Then the technology was redeemed when we found Biscuit close to the last location. But wait a sec, that GPS tracker is pretty bulky. It’s probably what got snagged inside the foxhole. If not for that, maybe she wouldn’t have lost her collar with our phone numbers on it. So that’s my 3-star review, I guess.