Found! This Beaufort pooch can thank Facebook, faith & strangers for family reunion

June Connelly has her dog back, and that’s at once the most important and smallest piece of this story.

The dog wasn’t rescued in dramatic fashion, wasn’t pulled from a swamp or snared in a trap.

She wasn’t, as far as we know, kidnapped by anyone.

She wasn’t attacked by animals out in the wild.

Yet her journey was no less harrowing, for her and Connelly. And the pair’s reunion — aided by faith, Facebook, serendipity and strangers — is remarkable.

“Frankly, I was amazed she was still alive,” said Beaufort’s Rebecca Bass, a real estate agent and dog trainer — and a stranger who played a critical role in the dog’s return. “She’s ... by any standard, a senior dog. And she was used to living in a family. And she was all alone.”

It all started with a storm.

“Envie,” a Belgian Tervuren — picture a collision between a German shepherd and a collie — is 13.

Her name, in French, means “desire.”

And on a recent summer afternoon, she wanted to get away from the thunder.

The dog had never liked thunder, the thing that would send her on a week-long trek that ended in a darkened back room of a garage. She would travel at least three miles, as the crow flies, to get there. She would cross major roadways.

She would be sighted.

And she would disappear.

She vanished suddenly, quietly, on the afternoon of July 10, from the home off Possum Hill Road in Beaufort. Connelly and her dogs, Envie among them, were in the barn. The woman was cleaning out stalls and readying food for the horses when the storm arrived. It worsened. The dogs were nervous. And Connelly knew it was time to go.

It’s maybe 50 feet from the barn to the house, Connelly said Tuesday. She’s always let the dogs run loose on the 20-acre property; her Tervurens don’t stray far. They’re herding dogs, “affectionate and possessive with loved ones,” according to the American Kennel Club.

She walked toward the house, the dogs trailing her. She opened the door and ordered the dogs inside. One rushed in. Then a second.

Then ... nothing.

No Envie.

Connelly called the dog. Nothing.

And while the dog had a collar, she did not have tags.

“You could always find (Envie) behind a couch or (hiding) in a closet during a storm,” said Caitlynn Smith, Connelly’s 20-year-old niece, who grew up with the dog.

“Every time June comes home,” Smith continued, “Envie likes to nip at her pants. ... June would put a stop to it.”

Later that evening, Smith learned her aunt’s dog was missing. She and a friend had planned to hang out with their boyfriends, but instead the crew walked along roads and through woods, searching. A friend spotted Envie traveling down a nearby road and followed in her car, but the dog wouldn’t come to her.

Before she went to bed, Connelly stood in her doorway and called the dog. And for the next six nights, that was her bedtime ritual.

The search resumed the next day. The family would eventually scour the area north to south between Laurel Bay and Broad River Roads, and east to west between Trask Parkway and Joe Frazier Road.

That was their search grid for the week. Smith rode with her aunt, in the truck that didn’t have air conditioning. They talked to a man who’d spotted the dog near his property — there was a nearby pond, and he’d seen Envie drinking water, and taking a dip to cool off.

Connelly asked if she could set up a camera on his property. He said yes. All she found were deer.

She got a trap — a cage with a sliding hatch — from the county. She caught a raccoon.

She posted lost-dog flyers all over town. Only a couple of gas stations and an apartment complex told her she couldn’t.

She made Facebook posts — including a picture of Envie she sent to the Beaufort County Animal Shelter — and she went door to door.

An Uber driver offered to take some flyers — “‘I drive all over this town,’” she’d told Connelly.

A Beaufort County Sheriff’s Deputy came by G&G Feed and Seed, where she works part-time, and took some flyers. “‘I know what it feels like to lose a dog,’” he’d told her.

She consulted a pet detective from Florida, who told her, given the terrain and the roadways, the dog could “easily move from one place to another.”

She met people she’d never known — two little girls, her neighbors, volunteered for the search and started knocking on doors in a nearby subdivision.

And at 64, the Beaufort native went down roads she’d never traveled and saw parts of the county she’d never seen.

Meanwhile, Envie was surviving.

She’d had to survive before — the dog had a bout with spinal meningitis when she was a puppy, and it had aged her. Now she was out in the elements, weathering afternoon thunderstorms.

She got into some pluff mud at some point.

She was covered in it when she snuck into Marjorie Peterson’s garage.

On Monday afternoon, Peterson’s husband pulled his car in and saw a pair of eyes, which darted toward an adjoining back room. He called to his wife.

“He didn’t know if it was a wolf, a coyote, a raccoon or a dog,” Peterson said.

They went to the back room, turned on the lights and moved some things around.

“I heard this funny noise,” Peterson said, “and it was her teeth chattering, and I’d never heard anything like that before.”

She first called the animal shelter, where she volunteers every Sunday, and left a description.

And then she remembered that a neighbor had just moved, and that she’d had a dog. Maybe it was hers... There was a realtor’s sign in the yard, and Peterson called the number.

Bass answered. She knew the woman who’d moved had taken her dog with her. She asked Peterson to describe the dog.

Then, Bass said she was on the way.

She remembered seeing a lost-dog post about a Belgian Tervuren on Facebook.

She arrived at Peterson’s home, having tried to call Connelly several times on the way over. No answer.

The shelter, now with Peterson’s description, had been trying to reach Smith, but she was away from her phone.

Smith saw the missed calls and tried to call the shelter, but it had just closed. She messaged it on Facebook. The shelter responded with Bass’ number.

Smith called Bass. Bass asked her to describe the dog. Smith did.

Smith drove to Sandy Ridge Road to pick up Envie.

She video-called her aunt over Facetime and showed her the dog, and everybody cried.

“Facebook was used for good instead of people complaining about their headaches ... or their extreme political views that alienate half their friends,” Bass said Tuesday. She added that she hoped all dog owners had up-to-date tags on their pets.

Peterson said, given how everything played out, that she might finally get on Facebook — the call to Bass was lucky, “a series of fortunate events.”

As for Connelly, she said all of her dogs would be getting a microchip tracking device implant soon, just in case.

And, she said, she’d no longer scold Envie for nipping at her.

That’s love.

This story was originally published July 18, 2017 at 5:15 PM with the headline "Found! This Beaufort pooch can thank Facebook, faith & strangers for family reunion."