Alki

Alki’s Story

Nancy Heller

February 27, 2013

Alki went missing on a Monday night when she was let out to pee, which was her normal routine.  Tonia went out looking for her immediately, looking up and down the street for her since she always came right back.  She ran into a group of raccoons a few houses down and decided that they must have scared Alki. 

Alki and Tonia

When I saw the flyers for Alki, I pulled over and got the phone number, and called to offer help with the search. As it turns out, Tonia lives 2 blocks from me. Her husband is on a job out of state, she has a 3 year old daughter, and she's doing a teaching internship.  Boy, was she open to help!!!  She was over within 15 minutes with her daughter and a friend who was helping look for her dog.

I was on my lunch break at the time, so I spoke with them briefly about their next steps and went back to work.  They went home, made up a bunch of posters, went out to post them and to blanket the area where Alki was last seen with flyers door-to-door.

Tonia and I talked regularly, and one day when she had gotten out of school and I was on a break, she brought her car over and we tagged both of our cars.  She called in her friends, called in sick and literally spent hours going door-to-door with flyers (daughter in a backpack) and putting up posters.  And an intersection alert was in the plans.

The first call that came in was from a runner who had seen Alki several blocks from home that night (and kept on running - what's that about?).  That got us headed in the right direction.  Tonia put posters in each direction from the intersection at which she was last seen.

While out knocking on doors, Tonia ran into a woman who reported seeing Alki at her bus stop that morning. That took us several more blocks with posters and flyers. Suddenly we got a few sightings all from the same little cul-de-sac.  Tonia immediately went and put up posters in the cul-de-sac,  knocked on doors, met neighbors and left her address with a few people.

Then came 2½ very long days of silence.  We got a sighting from a very different location, and although it seemed improbable, we felt we couldn't ignore it. So I went over to Tonia's and we started making more posters. 

We were both working away when we heard a little, faint dog whine. We both froze and yelled, "Did you hear that?" We scattered out opposite doors of her house, scouring the yard and the alley behind her home. Nothing!  I had to leave a short time after this.

My home is 2 blocks from Tonia's and while I was still en route, she called me crying and yelling "Alki's home!!!....She's here!!!"  After a few minutes of sharing her joy, I asked if that was what we had heard. "Where was she?"  

"You're not going to believe this.....she was in the bathroom!"  

What followed were 24 hours of Tonia and her friends all brainstorming how and when Alki could have gotten closed in the bathroom without them seeing her.  The next day, Tonia found a message on her phone that had come in the day Alki had mysteriously appeared in the bathroom but that she had somehow missed in all of the excitement.

A man who lived in the cul-de-sac with all the sightings had picked up Alki and, to keep her safe (everyone down there warned us of the resident pack of coyotes) had taken her with him. But he went to visit his aging mother out on one of the nearby islands.

When he returned to his neighborhood, he saw all of our posters. He talked with his neighbors, and got Tonia's address from one of them. He drove to Alki's home, and  finding no one home, he boldly tried all of the doors and found the back door unlocked. He slipped Alki into the bathroom and left Tonia the  message on her phone that she didn't get right away.

I guess you just never know where you might find the pet you're searching for!  But I DO know that we couldn't have done it without the posters!!! And Tonia's incredible persistence.