July 10, 2014

 

Conkers was a 4 year old beagle that was visiting family with the owners, when he had his first ever epileptic fit and bolted from the garden scared. He was spotted a short while after running along the railway tracks by a train driver who sounded the hooter to shoo him off the line.  This was the last sighting until we were called down to track and we dropped everything after being up at 4 a.m. for work that morning and just sitting down to watch the Wimbledon final. It was a 140 mile dash to try and find Conkers before it was too late.

We arrived at the parent’s farm by 7 p.m. and Tiga was given Conkers bed for which he wasn’t particularly interested in. We then went off and Tiga tracked around the garden and to the place where he was seen to jump over the garden fence and off.  We headed off to the railway track where he was spotted but obviously could not track along the lines but we tried to pick up where and if he managed to get off the railway line. It was now getting late and we had had no luck but we soon got a call of a possible sighting in the opposite direction. So we jumped in cars and off to pick up scent at the new sighting. We carried on tracking into the night and had a BBQ close to where the sighting was but this did not encourage Conkers to come out of hiding. Time went on and we had reports of other sightings not far away and so we followed up on these.

At one point we were tracking along a busy road where there had been a sighting and we heard a noise which the owners thought sounded like Conkers while he was having a fit, so the owners stayed road side while I went with Tiga to investigate what was the other side of the hedge. We got to the point where the owners were shining a torch through and again they repeated it sounded just like Conkers. Sadly I had to inform them it was a pig lying down snoring!

Deflated we carried on searching and seeing it was soon to be getting light we carried on without sleeping. There was no more news until early afternoon we got reports of first one sighting and then another which at first didn’t seem possible but then we could see they were in fact close together so we continued to search and track and with lots of volunteers we had a series of BBQ’s throughout the evening and on into the night. We also set up three camps where we were going to stake out watching.

It was at 5.15 in the morning that we had a the result we wanted and Conkers had given himself up by walking into the tent and although he went out and wandered off and around the noise of his favourite squeaky toy and some treats eventually gave him the confidence to go to his owner.

With many tears of joy that he was safe and had survived his scary adventure we packed up the camps and BBQ’s and thanked the landowner for letting us take over their fields.  We all looked forward to getting some sleep sooner than later.

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