The talk of Spring Island

By Liz Farrell

Spring Island is an upscale private neighborhood where the wild Lowcountry has held onto its fortress despite development.

Nature maintains self-rule there.

Trees grow up and out as they please. Centuries of decomposing leaves carpet the ground. Palm fronds, Spanish moss and unruly overgrowth form a verdant wall. Treetops touch to make a dappled ceiling.

Depending on your frame of mind — and the weather — the effect will take your breath away for being either overwhelmingly beautiful or simply haunting.

Much like the homeowners there, the wildlife on Spring Island enjoys certain luxuries.

Fat little fox squirrels have the right of way. Rookeries flourish by the edges of ponds. And turkeys take afternoon strolls as if Thanksgiving were never invented.

Missy and Rick Staie’s lost dog, Finn, had found himself in a quiet paradise apart from the world.

He had run away two weeks earlier after getting spooked at a restaurant in Old Town Bluffton. And during that time, his owners had made the drive back-and-forth from their Isle of Hope, Ga., home in the hopes of finding him.

Again and again, they were disappointed.

Then, on Jan. 8, came the word they had so desperately wanted to hear.

Finn was alive.

He was on Spring Island.

And he still had on the retractable leash he had been wearing on Dec. 29, the day he ran away.

No one knew exactly how Finn had gotten there.

No one will ever know.

There are theories, though.

• He walked there, dodging terrible drivers on two busy highways and then taking all the necessary turns for 19 miles.

• Someone found him and dumped him in one of the nicest gated neighborhoods in the state.

• Someone found him and kept him but then lost him again.

The most interesting theory, though, comes from Beaufort County Animal Services director Tallulah Trice.

“This dog swam over,” she said. “I think he wanted to get away from the ruckus. You can see Spring Island (from Bluffton). ... I think he was trying to get away from everyone.”

Regardless of how Finn, who is fearful of people, got to other side of the Colleton River, one thing is for certain, he had found the only place on Earth where he could not hide for long.

For one, the island is teeming with wildlife, including great-granddaddy alligators that could swallow the 60-pound dog whole and still ask if they should keep their fork for pie.

And second, the entire island was on the lookout for him.

. . .

Denise Eckert and her husband, Henry, never once saw Finn.

They felt like the only ones on Spring Island who hadn’t.

“He was so elusive,” Denise Eckert said.

In early January, she went on Facebook to look at photos of her grandkids and happened upon the posting from animal control that said Finn had been spotted nearby.

She reached out to the Staies to see how she could help.

“We are desperate to get our boy home,” Missy Staie wrote her in an email Jan. 10, now nearly two weeks after Finn ran away.

Denise Eckert distributed fliers for the Staies, posting them in common areas around Spring Island. Henry Eckert checked traps. They left out chicken for Finn when they were out on their walks. Whenever they got a call that he had been seen, they’d hop in the car with the hopes that this would be the time.

After Finn was first spotted in the area, Rick Staie had driven straight there. Security let him in and allowed him to search for his dog.

Staie, though, was not prepared for how untouched most of Spring Island is.

“I had on flip-flops,” Staie said later of his searches. “And these guys there would have snake boots on.”

On the second day of Staie’s Spring Island search, security told him no more. They couldn’t just let nonresidents wander around to look for a dog.

Animal control intervened, and Staie was allowed to set one of the pressure-plate traps he had borrowed from them. He set it up by the horse stables at Sunshine Farm on the south-end of the island, where Finn seemed to be seen the most.

After that, Denise Eckert stepped in.

“(Security) did give them a hard time. It was silly. ‘You know what? I’m just calling (passes) in,’ ” she said.

She did this for both the Staies and for the people who were helping them search.

A few days after that initial sighting, though, Finn seemed to disappear again.

The island was conducting controlled burns Jan. 12 on the south end. Parts of the woods were on fire right in the area that Finn roamed.

Missy Staie was worried.

“He hasn’t been seen since the night before the burns started,” she emailed Denise Eckert. “Not sure what he will have done with all that heavy smoke.”

Soon after, he was spotted again.

The county laid out more traps on the south end. Residents and volunteers offered ideas on how to capture the timid dog. One island resident suggested that the Staies try a “deer drive,” a hunting technique used to flush deer out of thick woods by surrounding them and giving them nowhere to run.

Volunteers posted updates on Facebook.

“We walked the woods’ edge and the ponds on all sides … checked the side roads,” one volunteer wrote after a 4 1/2 hour search Jan. 14. “Went on to Spring Island and checked the cage trap by the stables. Food and treats untouched. Went to the stables and the golf course. Nothing. Went to Mobley Oak Road area. Nothing. Sure gets dark out there fast.”

Stephanie Lewis of Bluffton had never met the Staies. She walked around Old Town Bluffton calling Finn’s name for hours at a time. And when Finn was spotted 30 minutes away on Spring Island, she drove there, returning multiple times a day so she could walk the island and try to lure him with hot dogs.

It got to the point that the people in her life questioned why she was doing this for strangers.

Lewis kept putting herself in the Staies’ place, though. They had only had Finn for 2 1/2 months when he ran away.

If this were her dog, she’d be devastated.

“I just had to find this dog,” she said. “I was almost obsessive about it. It started to consume me.”

She spent more than 20 days searching for Finn.

Spring Island residents reported their sightings to The Spring Island Club and to Denise Eckert. And to each other. Finn was a hot topic of conversation.

A golfer who had seen Finn several times took Missy Staie around on his golf cart. They searched areas that would otherwise be inaccessible.

Residents put out food and blankets for Finn in their yards.

“That went on for a long time,” Denise Eckert said.

Finn was out there.

And he was making himself at home.

He slept on homeowners’ nice outdoor furniture. He even peeped in their windows.

At a certain point, Rick Staie started to have the unsettling thought that Finn might not come back at all.

His dog had it too good there.

“I really thought he’d be a Spring Island dog,” he said.

Like with all guests, though, eventually Finn started to wear out his welcome.

The dog food and bits of meat left about were attracting scavengers.

And residents worried that the county’s traps would catch other animals.

The search effort, though, was disorganized and not at all productive.

There was too much chaos involved in Finn’s rescue. Too many cooks in the dog kitchen.

And animal control had reached its breaking point.

It was just after mid-January, and this search was already among the longest the county had taken part in for a pet.

The county, Trice said, simply does not have the resources to search for one family’s dog for such a prolonged period. The shelter is busy; Trice herself can receive up to 80 phone calls a day. And her skeleton staff did not have the time to make the long, daily drives to Spring Island to move, set and check traps, especially for a dog that was proving himself to be too cunning to fall for any of it.

Besides all this, the Lowcountry’s spring was just around the corner.

Warmer temperatures would start setting off alarm clocks for the randy, hungry swamp monsters and poisonous slitherers that lurked.

Already Finn was losing weight.

He was in survivalist mode and had become nocturnal. At some point soon, Trice feared, he might start killing for food, which could lead to him going feral. And if that happened, she wasn’t entirely sure he would return from it.

“He’s really not going to get off this island alive,” Trice thought.

She knew what she had to do.

It was time to activate a warrior.

Someone who would not stop until that dog was safe and sound.

Someone who would follow this search through to the end.

No matter what.

It was time to call Jennifer Smith.