“So I looked at Sailor, and I said, ‘Well, I guess you know it’s the end.’ So I slipped off his collar, and I went out to the shed. I had a couple of dog collars from previous dogs I had, and I hung Sailor’s collar next to them. It was something I hated to do, but it brought tears to my eyes. Those three collars represented almost forty years of faithful companionship.”
The next morning, John was up an hour before taking Sailor to the vet. And that’s when something entirely unexpected happened.
John recounts, “I looked up and I saw this little brown dog coming down the driveway. She looked lost. And I looked, but there was no collar on the dog. So I said, Well, heck, she must be hungry. I took her in the house, but she wouldn’t eat anything. She started walking around the house. She walked into the bedroom where Sailor was, and she sat down right in front of Sailor, just looking at him. After a minute or so, she went up and she nudged Sailor. And believe it or not, he slowly tried to get to his feet. He was shaky as all heck. He got up and he walked to the door, and that little dog went out, and Sailor followed her out. I couldn’t believe it, that Sailor was almost ready to be put to sleep, and here he was walking around wagging his tail and all.
“So I called Toni, and she came out and she said, ‘Oh, my God, Sailor’s alive! God must have sent an angel.’”
Toni agrees. “Something happened. I don’t know what kind of angel He sent, but He sent something to get Sailor up and moving and following that little dog the way he was, and I was just overjoyed.”
But there was still the question of this stray dog. Where had it come from? And was some anxious owner desperately searching for it? John called the local radio station to report a lost dog. A few hours later, the dog’s owner called to retrieve her pet. Her name was Karen Jarett.
John explains, “She had just moved up recently from Atlanta, Georgia. They lived three or four miles away, with a big wooded section between us. The dog didn’t know this area, and ran into the woods and never came back. Something brought that dog through those woods right to my house, and right to Sailor. And in my opinion, that dog saved Sailor’s life.”
As the owner thanked John for saving her dog, she pulled a collar from her bag. And at that moment, John understood what had happened.
“She had a collar in her hand, and she put it on the dog,” John says. “And I looked at the collar and I called Toni. There was ‘Angel’ written on the name tag. Toni saw it, and she said, ‘That’s God’s angel.’”
Toni says, “I thanked God because I knew it was through Him that this happened with Sailor. And I knew that if it wasn’t for Him, this miracle would never have happened, because to me it was a miracle.”
John wonders, “How could a dog come through three or four miles of woods in a strange place? And come right up, nudge my dog, and bring him back to life? This is something that happened without any help from mankind. Something stronger than a human being saved Sailor.
“And it was that little dog.”
Nestled among the majestic redwoods of Northern California is the quaint town of Garberville. In 1999, Nancy and Jeff Best were raising a family there, while running a popular coffee shop, the Java Joint.
“Our lives were a little hectic at the time,” recalls Nancy. “We had three kids going to three different schools. My husband had taken a job in the Bay Area, which is a good four-and-a-half-hour drive away, so during the week he’d be gone and I would have to run the shop.”
Even with her active schedule, however, Nancy dreamed of adding another member to her family.
“I’ve always been an animal lover,” she says. “My mom used to call me ‘Dr. Doolittle’ when I was little, because I always had animals around me.
“I’m particularly fond of dogs,” says Nancy. “I had been pestering my husband about getting a yellow Lab every time I would see one. I would hint, ‘Christmas is coming, I want a yellow Lab.’ But he kept saying that we really shouldn’t get one at that time.”
“I didn’t want a dog, because our lives were kind of in flux then,” Jeff says. “We were renting the house and we just didn’t need a dog.”
But a few weeks before Christmas, opportunity rang.
“I received a phone call from a friend of mine who had spotted some yellow Labs,” says Nancy. “She said, ‘Nancy, these dogs are just beautiful. You have to come down here right now. The man who’s selling them is just here for a minute, he’s traveling. If you don’t come now, you’re going to miss your opportunity.’”
Nancy decided that she wasn’t going to let the opportunity pass her by, and she took off to meet her friend without telling Jeff where she was headed.
“I got in the car and drove to the park,” says Nancy, “and as I drove up, I saw these beautiful puppies. They were so cute, they were the most darling yellow Labs. They were healthy, and their tails were wagging, and they were all running around in a little bunch. I knew that I wasn’t going to leave without a puppy.
“And at this point I didn’t know if I wanted a boy or a girl,” says Nancy, but she bonded instantly with one of the puppies. “When I held her, I knew she was the one I was going to take home.”
“So anyway, she showed up with this puppy, and I was not happy about it at all,” recalls Jeff. “I wanted her to take it back.”
“Which I couldn’t do, because the owner of the dogs had already left,” counters Nancy. “So that worked out really well.”
It didn’t take long for the puppy to soften Jeff’s hard heart.
“I mean, puppies, you know, you fall in love with a puppy almost immediately, so it worked out pretty good that way,” admits Jeff.
Nancy named the pup Mia. And Mia grew to become a true member of the family.
“Mia’s kind of like Nancy,” says Jeff. “She likes to have fun, she likes to be with people. She’s just a nice dog, always friendly, ready to cuddle up or be scratched behind the ear or whatever.”
When Mia was about fourteen months old, Nancy started to feel run-down, and her dog’s behavior began to change.
“With my life so hectic at that time, I was feeling a little tired. I was just getting worn out. I was physically tired. I knew if I didn’t start taking a rest during the day I couldn’t continue,” says Nancy. “When I would lay on the couch, Mia would usually lay next to me, and it would be pretty uneventful. But during this particular time when I was starting to feel really tired, Mia would come up and lay her nose on my chest and start sniffing. And at the time I didn’t think anything of it. I thought maybe she was smelling meat or some kind of food from the Java Joint that I might have had still on my shirt,” explains Nancy.
“This proceeded again. She came back to me a couple of days later, and did the same sniffing and licking in the same spot. I was so tired and I was so bothered by the fact that she was doing this, that I actually got mad and put her outside,” Nancy admits.
And she kept her outside the next day as well, but eventually Mia snuck back into the house.
“My daughter had come home from school,” says Nancy, “and after she opened the door, Mia came barreling into the house. She dove into my chest, with her nose again in the area she had been sniffing and licking before. I started to rub it with my hand, because it did cause a great deal of pain.
“And at that instant, I felt the lump.”
“Despite having had a mammogram before that was negative, indeed there was a lump of tissue there that was new and different from