Hip Hip Hooray! Livvie Lives!

Hello everyone,


I am delighted to write with excellent news:  
Olivia is alive and kicking (well, sniffing)!  


For almost six months now, we've been in a dry spell, the longest one of the whole search (now 18 months, so the dry spell was fully 1/3 of the time since she's been lost).  Then I got a call from someone who said he thought he'd seen her when he was driving along Potomac Avenue one afternoon.  He thought she was a black lab at first, but when he got closer he saw that she was too big to be a lab. When I asked what she was doing when he saw her, he said she was just sniffing. (Olivia is nothing - except maybe elusive - if not consistent!)  


He called me because he had seen one of our fliers, so thank you again to everyone who helped put up fliers during our big search party in December.  I have tried to keep up since then, but I'm pretty sure it was the group effort that got us this sighting.


Anyway, Sam and I thought that the report sounded pretty credible, based mainly on the location - the last sighting was also near the Potomac Avenue metro stop; the description - she's really dark brindle, more black than brown, and if you were driving by and didn't get a good look and had to pick only one color, it would be black); and the activity - just standing there, sniffing, hanging out.  Sounded like Livvie!  That, coupled with the amount of time that has elapsed since the last sighting, made us really eager to have Salsa check it out and see if it was actually Olivia.  There was, however, a complication:  Salsa had recently had surgery (that went well) and wasn't allowed back to work yet.  Her sister Briana is now certified to track, but she's not as good with older scents, so she might give us a false negative if Olivia had been there but too long ago for Bri to pick up the scent.  Not to worry, though, we worked out a plan.  We would have Salsa check for the scent (and by now she knows Olivia's scent so well that she barks rather impatiently when presented with one of Olivia's scent items) then, if she found it, we would (put Salsa back in the car and) take Bri there and have her track from that spot if she could.  Even if she couldn't, though, the most important part would be finding out whether the dog the man saw was indeed Olivia.


We drove to the intersection the man had specified.  It was a spot with a little park on one side of the street and, on the other, a strip of grass in front of the fence surrounding Congressional Cemetery. He had said she was on the same side as the cemetery, so we took Salsa there and she found the track almost immediately. (Yay Salsa!) When we took her back to the car and brought out Briana, she too found it right away and we started to track.  We walked around that neighborhood and found one house in particular where Olivia had been (likely more than once, maybe a lot, maybe all winter....).  She had gone under the porch, which would have provided shelter from bad weather and her most perplexing feature:  invisibility.  We spoke to the woman who lives there and she was wonderfully sympathetic, even agreeing to let us set up a feeding station.  She said she'd heard something big (she thought it might have been a person) under there either last night or the night before.


It's pretty incredible:  in two days, I have gone from wondering if I should assume that Olivia had been hit by a car or something because no one had seen her in so long, to having a  confirmed sighting, successful track, and even a viable feeding station, complete with camera, set up!  Of course, that leads back to another search phase requiring frequent checks of the feeding station to replenish the food, water, and treats and to monitor the pictures the camera is taking.  It also involves, as ever, more fliering, business card distribution, and constant vigilance.  That said, I'll take the work and extra responsibilities any day if it means it gets us closer to finding Livvie.  As you know by now, I'd do almost anything to bring this sweet girl home!  At least now I can keep the faith and keep up the search with renewed hope.



Thanks again, everyone, for hanging in there this long and helping with words of encouragement, fliers, money, feeding station checks, outreach, and everything else you do to help find Olivia. I especially want to thank Sam and Carmen, Karen, and everyone else at A Forever Home.  I don't know how I got so lucky as to have you take on Olivia after she was already lost and keep up the search this long, but I sure am grateful!*  I don't think I can adequately communicate how much I appreciate it, or at least not right now, so I'll just have to hope you know. 

Laura








*In case anyone else wants to help out with funding, I'm sure A Forever Home will happily welcome your donation!  There's a link to donate in the column on the right side, a little under the pictures.