“Our chances psychically or otherwise were one in a billion,” Paula says. “I could have been totally wrong through this whole thing. It was a miracle that Boris was found.”
“I’m a believer,” Barbara says. “There are some powers out there that you can’t dismiss. To find a lost dog in New York City? Anything could have happened to him. Anything. For me to be reunited with him is a total miracle to me.”
Lynn Norley of Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, has a very special relationship with Rupert, her African Gray Parrot.
“There’s definitely something magical about this bird,” she says. “I mean, the bird just interacts with everyone in such a way that’s so touching. His affection, and his rapport, and how he absolutely knows what’s going on around him—it’s just fantastic.”
Lynn acquired Rupert as a baby in 1986, and since then, the parrot has become a central part of her life. In fact, she literally wouldn’t be alive today if it weren’t for Rupert.
It all began in February of 1998, when Lynn put Rupert in his cage for the night, and went to bed herself. What she didn’t know was that in just a few hours she would wake to a living nightmare.
“I was lying there and I heard a very loud thud. Rupert fell off his perch, and then I heard him squawking very loudly. It was definitely an alarm sound. I mean, there wasn’t any doubt in my mind that there was a problem,” she remembers.
Lynn went to investigate, but got no farther than the bedroom door, which opened to reveal smoke and flames. “I was faced with a wall of smoke that was horrible-smelling, and I couldn’t see anything.”
She knew that Rupert was in danger. Not thinking of the consequences, she rushed to free him from his cage as the room filled with smoke.
“When I got to the cage, I was extremely panicked, and I was sure that Rupert wouldn’t make it. This parrot can take only a little bit of smoke. I couldn’t find the door of the cage because I couldn’t see, and I couldn’t get a breath, either. But somehow I fumbled and found the cage, and I grabbed Rupert out from the bottom.”
With Rupert tucked under her arm, Lynn rushed out to her patio for air. She took a deep breath, and ran back into the smoke-filled house to rescue her dogs, Alex and Panther, who were still trapped in the fire. The dogs were frantic, and in the middle of all the chaos, Lynn felt Rupert go lifeless in her arms.
“I was sure that Rupert had died,” says Lynn. “I felt horrible, because Rupert was such a part of my life for so long, and I couldn’t just drop him on the floor.” With the fire burning around her, Lynn didn’t have a lot of time to make a decision. “I wrapped Rupert in a bathrobe, and gave him the only burial I could at the moment. I put him in the bottom of the shower stall.”
Lynn could hear the flames crackling in the hallway outside the door. She put a wet shirt over her face, grabbed her dogs, and tried to make a run for it.
“I put Alex under my arm and grabbed Panther by the collar. I planned on going out the bedroom door, but when I opened the door again, I was hit with a wall of smoke and an explosion. I realized then that the house was bursting into flames, and I knew I had to escape through one of the windows of my second-story bedroom.”
Thankfully, Lynn and the dogs dropped safely to the ground, leaving the house in flames. Firefighters doused the fire, but only after the inside had been totally gutted.
“It was terrifying, and it was horrible. I was watching my house exploding and smoke coming out of the roof,” remembers Lynn.
The next morning, with the support of friends, Lynn returned home to see the devastation the fire had caused. The building was still standing, but it was merely a shell. There was little left in its charred interior. For Lynn, however, the greatest loss was Rupert.
“It seemed that nothing in the house could possibly survive,” she says. “The windows were all blown out. In order to fight the fire, the firefighters had thrown everything out the window—my grandmother’s things, and my paintings, and all that—but they really didn’t matter. I mean, really, truly, the only thing I felt bad about was the bird.”
Lynn didn’t have the heart to go into the bathroom, so her friend Laurie Moore went in to remove the dead bird. Blackened debris had filled the shower stall after firefighters had doused the blaze, and Laurie pulled away the remains of crumbled walls.
“I started rummaging through the tile and the plaster and the fiberglass,” Laurie recalls. “I moved some of it away, and found Rupert plastered up in the corner, looking at me. ‘Rupert!’ I screamed. Both of us were very surprised, looking at each other, and when I reached down to pick him up, he bit me.” Laurie yelled out to Lynn to come quickly, that Rupert was alive.
“When I heard her scream, I couldn’t believe my ears,” says Lynn. “I ran into the bathroom, and there was Rupert, sitting in the corner of the shower stall on top of a pile of debris. He was shaking, and looked horrible.” But finding the bird living, Lynn declares, “It was really a miracle…. No one could believe the bird was alive.”
Today, Lynn and Rupert are living happily together in a new home. Lynn owes her life to her pet bird. It was Rupert’s warning calls that saved her from the fire. But what saved Rupert?
“I don’t know how the bird’s alive,” Lynn reflects. “It’s a miracle that this bird lived through that. I mean, it’s totally astounding. Between everything that Rupert inhaled, and everything that happened to him … if even a small part of any of those things had happened to any other bird, it would never have had a chance to live. And everything that happened to Rupert was so intense. It was just really a miracle.”
In 1993, John and Toni Sheridan shared their home in rural Virginia with a very special companion, a dog named Sailor who had been a member of the family for more than a decade.
Toni says, “I guess I loved Sailor so much because we really got him as a little pup. He was just five weeks old. We brought him up, we nourished him, and he was just closer to us than a baby.”
Sailor may have been Toni’s baby, but he was John’s best friend.
“Every time I hopped into my pickup to go somewhere,” John explains, “he’d be right there alongside me with his head on my knee.”
And then, returning from a drive one morning, Sailor waited a moment before his normal routine of jumping out the passenger side of the truck. But this time, something went wrong.
John remembers, “He hit the ground, and he let out a yip, and he just laid there. So I figured, well, in a few minutes he’ll get up and walk around, but he just laid there the way he hit the ground. And I knew darn well something had happened. He was paralyzed.”
John and Toni rushed Sailor to the local vet.
Toni continues, “The vet said he was hurt internally, and, you know, there was very little he could do. And he suggested putting him to sleep, and there’s no way we wanted that. We wanted to keep him and see what would happen.”
“So we took him home,” says John. “We put him in the bedroom there and made a nice bed for him and he just laid there. I tried to give him some water and he wouldn’t drink. I tried to give him some food and he wouldn’t eat. After two days or so, he got steadily worse. His eyes were closed half the time and I told Toni, ‘He’s paralyzed. He can’t move. So … I think tomorrow morning when the vet opens up, we’ll have to take Sailor there and put him to sleep.’”
But