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The greater danger

By Liz Farrell

Beaufort County Animal Services director Tallulah Trice walked slowly through the thick woods of Spring Island.

It was late in the evening, and the sliver of a mid-March moon was no help at all.

On Trice’s face were the night-vision goggles she had borrowed from the Sheriff’s Office.

She heard a sound.

A snap. A rustle.

“Finn?” she called out in a thin voice.

Another sound.

“Finn?”

She turned her head and looked. All she could see were beady eyes. Sets of them there, there and there, peering at her either out of curiosity or with menace. She didn’t know.

None, though, belonged to the dog that had gone missing nearly three months earlier in Old Town Bluffton.

Click or tap the image above for our interactive map of Finn's 3-month journey in Bluffton and on Spring Island.

The dog that Trice and Jennifer Smith had just accidentally drugged and sent running into the waiting jaws of Spring Island’s woods.

Finn’s owners lived an hour away in Isle of Hope, Ga. They had looked for their dog through the middle of January, when Smith, founder of Noah’s Arks Rescue and a Spring Island resident, took over the search.

“I got this,” she said.

The elusive black-and-white Labrador/border collie mix needed to build trust with one person and to be fed in one place if there was any hope of guiding him into capture before the island’s less-friendly and more toothy residents awakened from their winter slumber, which was any day now, if not already.

Finn had first been seen in the area Jan. 8. For weeks, Spring Island’s residents left out food and blankets for him.

Finn was a rescue dog that the Staies family had only for 2 1/2 months. Before that he showed signs of neglect and a lack of socialization, possibly even abuse. He was timid around strangers and, as his owners had found out the hard way, was easily spooked and programmed to run when scared.

Smith took over a well-meaning but chaotic search, asking everyone to back off so she could build trust with Finn. And over the course of eight weeks, Smith became hyper-focused on his rescue. She became obsessed.

Jennifer Smith replenishes Finn’s rations late afternoon March 8. Finn came to rely on Smith’s consistent schedule. She would come once in the morning, once in the late afternoon. (Jennifer Smith/Submitted photos)

She was Wyle E. Coyote to Finn’s Road Runner.

She was Thomas Edison.

Every trick. Every idea. Every strategy.

She lost all of them.

Finn was winning, which meant he, too, was losing this game.

He would not survive a life roaming on this island.

Every day Smith monitored four cameras positioned around the encampment she had created for Finn, who was largely nocturnal. She made sure he was fed and warm, and she even kept up with his heartworm and flea treatments.

She was consistent, and so was he. He knew that if he did this, she would do that.

Soon Smith noticed that Finn was starting to loosen up. Smith could see through the surveillance cameras the dog’s growing ease and confidence. So a few days after Daylight Saving Time, she and Trice executed their plan to drug him and then track him, with a tranquilizer gun at the ready, and then capture him.

But they were the ones who got spooked this time.

They called off the plan mid-operation, and when they went to retrieve the drugged treat from Finn’s dog bed, they found that, in the time it had taken them to walk over to his bed, he had eaten it and run.

This meant the dog’s senses would be deadened and that he was now at risk of getting hurt or killed.

Trice and Smith searched for hours that night.

Trice got turned around and lost her sense of place.

To make matters worse, her phone was dead.

“I was about to have a nervous breakdown,” she said.

Beyond that, she was exhausted.

She had been helping Smith with the search and rescue on her own time. Back in January, neither knew just how much time that would actually mean.

And now it looked like it had all been for nothing.

Both women went home that night a wreck.

They just knew they had killed this dog, the one they so desperately wanted to catch, the one that had taken over their lives, the one that so many people had tried to capture.

“I’m going to have to move,” Smith thought. “I’m going to have to leave the country.”

. . .

The next morning, Trice got a text.

It was from Smith. She had checked the cameras.

And there he was.

Finn.

“He’s alive! He’s eating!”

The morning after Finn ran off with a drug-laced treat, Jennifer Smith checked the cameras set up around Finn’s encampment at the Colleton Nature Preserve on Spring Island. After seeing photos showing that he had survived the perilous night before, she texted Beaufort County Animal Services director Tallulah Trice, “He’s alive!” (Jennifer Smith/Submitted photos)

The two women were relieved, but they now felt the pressure of time more than ever. Spring was less than a week away.

The gators and snakes were starting to move around.

And this dog had now lived on Spring Island longer than he had lived with the Staies.

Local hunters advised Smith and Trice that they needed to use a boar trap, the big kind with a trap door.

Finn sniffs around the area outside the new kennel March 22 at his encampment on Spring Island. (Jennifer Smith/Submitted photos)

Instead, Smith used a 10-foot-by-10-foot kennel with a door that swings shut.

She set it up at Finn’s encampment and moved his food and bedding in there.

She gave Finn a few days to get used to going in the kennel to get his food, his water, his treats and to have a little rest.

Then she went to the store and bought all sorts of camouflage gear. She attached a long camouflage rope to the door and prepared to get down and dirty.

Then she thought about it.

“My husband is going to murder me. I have gone mental. Totally and completely mental.”

So she went to Samuel, the caretaker at her house and husband of her housekeeper, Sandy. “We’ve all had to do something. It’s your turn to step it up,” she told him.

Sandy translated this into Spanish.

Smith told him what her little project for him was.

Sandy translated.

Samuel looked at her like, “Are you totally and completely nuts?”

Smith said she’d pay him to do it.

“One hundred dollars,” Samuel said.

On the evening of March 23, Samuel assumed the prone position a short distance from the cage door.

“I’m going to bury you,” Smith told him. “Don’t move. I’m not kidding with you. Do not spook Finn.”

She got Samuel situated and covered him in a camouflage blanket.

Then she left.

When Finn went in the kennel for his dinner, Samuel was to pull the rope so the door would shut, and this game would be over.

Smith would be outsmarting this dog tonight. Yes, she would.

Samuel waited.

In the woods.

In the dark.

Lying on the ground.

Brave, brave Samuel waited.

Then he felt a tug on the rope.

. . .

When she pulled up in her car, Samuel came running out of the bushes and jumped in very nearly before she stopped it.

He was not happy.

“You crazy woman.”

He got in Smith’s car and called his wife to translate.

“I could’ve died.”

He tugged at the camo gear he was wearing.

“No protection!”

First, the good news.

Samuel didn’t have a heart attack when he very well could have — and though it kind of seemed like he was having one now.

And his hair didn’t turn immediately white like it would’ve if this were a cartoon.

Now the bad news.

In an effort to finally catch Finn, this man had had the scare of his life ... of all our lives, really.

Mere feet from where Samuel had been belly-down on the ground, a 12-foot alligator — most likely a male, most likely born during the Reagan administration, most likely a little grumpy about this current election — walked by Samuel’s face.

And as this monster gator did that, it got caught in the rope. Just a little. Just enough to make his presence known in the palm of Samuel’s hand.

Smith apologized again.

She knew that gator.

“I never had any idea that thing was going over from Goose Pond,” she said.

The scoreboard that Smith had been keeping in her mind got updated once again.

Jennifer: 0

Alligator: 1

Dog: 932

Samuel: Sigh

. . .

So, as it turned out, shutting the swinging door vis-a-vis using a live human being to pull a rope in the dark near Gator Boulevard was not going to be the winning idea.

Smith, though, has lots of ideas.

And lots of backup ideas.

Her next one involved a Thinkers Pacific Salmon dog treat hanging from a string that, when pulled by a treat-eating dog, would release a greased-up pin that would then allow a guillotine trap door to shut, locking the dog in the kennel.

First she had someone on Callawassie Island build the guillotine.

It was a thick, heavy plywood that seemed fit for King Henry VIII.

She installed it herself and, somehow, did not get stuck in the kennel or beheaded.

Then, over the next two days, she tested it over and over and over and over and over and over again.

This thing was not going to hurt that dog. It was not going to hurt anyone stopping for a looky-loo.

She filed down some metal. She made sure the pin was appropriately greased — enough so that the pin would pull, not so much that it would come out too soon.

“I can’t make this thing slipperier than sin,” she thought.

Then she spray-painted “WARNING KEEP OFF” on the plywood, because a camera check showed her that there were some very curious people on Spring Island.

The guillotine door shuts on Finn on the evening of March 25. Three months after running away from his owner in Old Town Bluffton, Finn has been captured. (Jennifer Smith/Submitted photos)

“I wasn’t taking any chances. That thing was giving me nightmares.”

On March 24, she tied the string to the pin and weaved it through the bars of the kennel so that the treat on the end of it and the treat’s eater would be far from the guillotine when it dropped.

Once again, she waited.

Once again, the score was not good.

Jennifer: 0

Dog: 940

Finn had taken the treat — essentially hanging from the thing like a pinata. He had also taken half the string with him.

And yet, the guillotine did not fall.

“Are you kidding with me?” Smith said when she saw the cameras. “Are you kidding with me?”

She tried again the next night.

Every two hours she drove to the bottom of the hill to see if the guillotine had dropped.

Every two hours.

She did not sleep.

Then at 7:48 a.m. March 26, 88 days after Finn broke loose from his owner, Smith finally noticed the thing she had somehow missed for the past 11 hours.

. . .

Before Smith left the house, she grabbed her dog Liza Jane. All night long she had been checking on Finn’s kennel to see if the guillotine had fallen. She hadn’t ever brought a dog with her for support.

This time she did.

“I must’ve known,” she said later.

As she pulled up to Finn’s encampment she saw it immediately, the thing she hadn’t seen since 8 p.m. the night before.

The guillotine had dropped.

Finn was in the kennel.

Jennifer Smith took this photo of Finn on March 26, the morning he was finally caught. When the guillotine door of the cage shut on him, Finn patiently waited for Smith to come get him. He knew she’d be there in the morning, because she always was. (Jennifer Smith/Submitted photos)

Waiting patiently on his dog bed.

He knew she would come.

She always did.

He stood up when she got out of the car.

“Oh my Godddddddd,” she said. “Look who it is. It’s you. Hey, buddy.”

They stared at each other.

She sat down on the ground outside the kennel, and he walked over to her and Liza Jane.

He sniffed Smith’s hair. He chewed it a little.

She pet him through the slats of the kennel.

Jennifer Smith, with her dog Liza Jane, offers Finn a treat through the kennel on March 26. The time on the camera had not been adjusted for Daylight Saving Time two weeks earlier. (Jennifer Smith/Submitted photos)

His fur was soft and dirty.

It was the first time he had been touched in three months.

It began to drizzle.

Smith texted Trice.

“I got him!”

She attached a pony leash to Finn’s collar through the kennel and brought him to her house.

“Well?” her husband asked when she got there.

She grinned.

“I got him!”

She introduced him to Finn, who was in their laundry room with Liza Jane.

“I got him.” Jennifer Smith snaps a photo March 26 of the dog that took three months to capture. (Jennifer Smith/Submitted photos)

“You brought him in the house?” he said, laughing.

Then Smith surprised herself.

She looked at Finn and knew where he belonged.

She called the Staies.

“Well,” she told them. “Happy Easter. He’s coming home.”

They were stunned.

Smith also told them the truth.

“I want to see how he is with you first.”

When the Staies got to Smith’s house, Finn was shy at first but then he warmed up to them.

Smith watched him closely and knew he’d be OK. The Staies would take care of him.

“They didn’t do anything wrong,” she said.

Finally, it was unavoidable.

The dog she had worked so hard to capture had to leave Spring Island.

Smith walked the Staies to their car.

She gave Finn a kiss on his head.

Then she stood up.

“Well, you better go,” she said to the Staies, “because here comes the crying.”

A few weeks later, Smith met up with the Staies at Daffin Park dog park in Savannah.

She immediately went for Finn.

She hugged him.

Jennifer Smith reunites with Finn at the Daffin Park dog park in Savannah on April 7, nearly two weeks after she captured him on Spring Island. (Josh Mitelman/Staff photo)

And she gave the Staies a gift.

A GPS collar.

So they’d always know where Finn is.

And so she’d never have to spend three months rescuing him again.

They talked about his first vet visit after coming home.

“Her jaw just dropped,” Rick Staie told Smith. “He had gained three pounds.”

“He looks fabulous,” Smith told them.

The Staies joked that Finn came out of this adventure a better dog, more confident and friendly, less skittish.

Rick Staie reassures Finn before they sit for a photograph on Aug. 30, 2016, at the Staies' Isle of Hope, Ga., home. The Staies' other dog, Gracie, waits patiently in front. (Drew Martin/Staff photo)

Before Smith left, the Staies gave her a gift basket.

After she left, they talked about how frustrating it had been knowing where their dog was the whole time but not knowing if they would ever be reunited.

“He got lost in the right place,” Missy Staie said.

Her husband nodded.

“Without her, we never would’ve gotten him back.”

Since rescuing Finn, Smith has been asked to give presentations on her adventures — and her misadventures — with the elusive dog.

She doesn’t want to talk about it.

She’s had news stations show up at her security gate.

She has nothing to say.

She just wants to live her life and rescue dogs.

“I got him. That’s the story,” she says to people who want to know more. “Now go tell your own story.”

She doesn’t want the attention.

She doesn’t want the glory.

But that’s because Finn already gave her both these things.

On the morning he was captured, Smith loaded Finn and Liza Jane into the back of her car.

She opened her own door and got in.

And she started bawling.

All the emotion from the last three months came forth.

I got him.

He’s going to get off this island.

She wiped her tears and then felt something heavy on her right shoulder.

It was Finn.

He rested his chin on her.

And she drove him home.

Gracie, front, gives her owner Missy Staie kisses as Missy's husband, Rick Staie, reassures Finn that he's safe as they sit on the front steps of their Isle of Hope, Ga., home Aug. 30, 2016. (Drew Martin/Staff photo)