I happened upon this rather gorgeous little gem of a news story from the mid-1950s while browsing some dark and dusty corridors of the online newspaper morgue.
Thus begins the story of "The Case of the Stowaway Dog: Hector Finds His Master," from an actual newspaper article that I found in archives dated May 12, 1956 (which means the recounted incident took place in the early 1920s), and printed in the "Youngstown Vindicator" newspaper, though it was originally written for The Christian Science Monitor "in collaboration with the Readers Digest."
Now, there are many heart-tugging dog tales that I take with huge grains of salt. Huge. Grains. -- usually those of the "faithful dog who never leaves the master's/mistress' graveside variety," or others than require us to believe that the dog has mastered certain abstract and/or metaphysical concepts that are so very peculiar to the human species. Now, if the dog himself had buried the master's bones, I might be more inclined to go along with some of those stories, but poochy hanging out graveside for years (or by some other marker that could never be recognized by the dog as having anything to do with the owner in actual life)... well, no, not so much.
Yet this vintage story of a dog reunited with his master through what appear to be astonishing and epic machinations and maneuvers on the part of the canine somehow has the ring of truth for me. I can imagine the ways that a dog negotiates such challenges possibly ending in such a mythic way, and, also, the recounting of the specific behavior of the dog seems so very, very familiar to me as a dog owner... and the narration is attributed to a Capt. Kenneth Dodson, instead of, say, an ambitious reporter with a vivid imagination and a deadline to meet. Also, The Christian Science Monitor has long had a reputation as an upstanding journal.
Of course, Captain Dodson may have simply been an especially observant dog lover, with a penchant for romanticizing and telling tallish tales, but I'll rely on his honor as an officer and a gentleman. :) At any rate, it's a great story, a bit challenging to read in this old scanned format, but worth it, I think.
