By the fifth day, they had lost hope. His wife gathered flowers for the pet cemetery. He thought about adding Walter’s name to the gravestone he was making for their first Dachshund, Guido, who had died just a week before.
It wasn’t like Walter to run off. Gordon Bryan had walked him at Millerton Point hundreds of times. An avid mushroom hunter and fisherman, Gordon had taken him on long hikes in the backwoods of the Sierra. Whenever he strayed into the bushes or chased a squirrel, wire-haired Walter—spirited at five years old—came right back.
But on that fateful day at Millerton, the popular dog-walking spot overlooking Tomales Bay, Walter disappeared. One minute, they were walking with Gordon’s friend Laura Arndt and her dog, Pepper. The next minute, he was gone.
They had paused to watch a kite surfer. Perhaps the loud flapping of the kite scared Walter off as it rose over the bluff. Perhaps he had stumbled upon a beehive.
They began circling the southern end of the trail. Laura went one way, Gordon went the other. He whistled. No response. They circled wider and wider along the 1.2-mile loop. No luck.
Laura returned to the parking lot. Maybe Walter would turn up at the car. Two people there had seen him racing on the Highway 1 side of the trail. They’d tried to stop him, but Walter just sped past. Guido would have stopped to say hello, but Walter feared strangers.
Gordon’s phone rang. It was Laura. Walter had been seen racing down Highway 1, with its blind curves and vehicles whizzing past. Cars had backed up on both sides of the road as people tried to snag him.
He eluded their grasp.
More sightings came in. Walter was running toward Point Reyes Station, heading home. No, he was back in the park, running toward the beach.
Several friends arrived and formed a posse. Gordon’s daughter, Phoebe, whose Facebook profile picture shows her cradling Walter in her arms, drove in from Sebastopol. She made fliers that they posted at Millerton, at a ranch across the way, and just down the road at the Tomales Bay Oyster Company.
They searched the park until dusk, then went home, spirits sinking. Gordon’s wife, Pamela Bridges, had returned from Los Altos after visiting her 102-year-old father. Tears flowed.
At 10:30 p.m., Gordon put on a headlamp and drove to Millerton to make another circuit. At 3:30 a.m., Pamela, tired of tossing and turning, grabbed the headlamp and went to the park.
“Walter!” she called. “Walter!”
Still no luck.
At 8:30 a.m., a call came in. Walter had been spotted two miles up a ranch road across from Millerton, high in the hills where Tammy and Kevin Furlong have a cattle barn.
Tammy tried to grab him, but he raced past, a man on a mission. “She couldn’t believe there was this little brown wiener dog with a pink harness up at her ranch going toward the bull pen,” Pamela said.
Undeterred by the bull inside, Walter sped through the pen and disappeared into a stand of greenery.
Phoebe, Gordon and his friend Kurt arrived. “They went down one road, and I went down another,” Gordon recalled. “We’re calling, calling, calling.”
Coyote scat littered their path. Phoebe and Kurt looked up and saw one sunbathing on a rock.
At the top of the hill, they looked eastward at the vast expanse below. “The ranch road just ends in the plateau with vistas going off in all directions,” Gordon said. “He could be anywhere out there.”
As the hours ticked by, Pamela wondered how Walter could survive. He’s accustomed to eating homemade food with organic chicken livers and veggies from their bountiful garden. At night, he sleeps atop their organic Coyuchi bedding.
On Thursday and Friday, they posted more signs, 41 in all, from Point Reyes Station up to the Marshall-Petaluma Road. There, they spoke with Evan Shively, a wood craftsman, who showed them maps of trails and backroads leading from his mill back toward the Furlong ranch. Gordon scoured the area while Pamela and Laura returned to the Furlongs for another look.
Their spirits soared when they heard barking, but it wasn’t Walter. It was a coyote, for whom Walter would make a satisfying meal.
Phoebe had put out word of the search on social media. On the West Marin Feed’s Facebook page, people cheered them on. “Oh please be okay sweet Walter,” read one post with a heart emoji. “He’s a warrior,” read another.
More calls came in, even from people they hadn’t met during 40 years in town. Among them was Connie Giammona, who lives on a ranch near the Furlongs. Worried about coyotes and mountain lions, she planned to scour the property on horseback and by A.T.V.
“She doesn’t even know me, but she cares about this little 17-pound weiner dog,” Pamela said. “It was just so sweet.”
Walter had disappeared on Wednesday, July 16. By Saturday, Gordon was thinking of a lyric by folksinger Greg Brown: “You Got to Let the Dog Find You.”
They would wait.
On Monday, one more call came in, but the signal was lousy. All Gordon could hear were the words “Walter” and “Millerton.” He raced to the park in his Honda Fit, adorned with a bumper sticker that reads: “Money can’t buy happiness but it can buy a weiner dog.” He imagined Walter bounding toward him to the dramatic “Chariots of Fire” theme song.
Walter had been spotted near a bridge on the trail. The search party strategically stationed Slim Jims, hoping to lure him out of hiding. They also used a half Cubano sandwich from the IP Market as bait.
By nightfall, still no luck. Gordon planned to spend the night in the parking lot. He set Walter’s bed on the ground next to the driver’s seat.
Volunteers were en route. They arrived in a white pickup truck, and Gordon went to greet them. A woman in the truck pointed toward his car and asked, “Is that your dog?”
Walter bounded toward him. “We had our Chariots of Fire moment,” Gordon said.
Walter was covered in dirt, burs and ticks. He had lost his collar and a quarter of his body weight, but he was safe and sound.
You can find Walter on his Instagram account, @walter_the_weeniee.