Finding Bella

Lost (July 1st 2020, 8pm)

My buddy Carl has been co-owner of a house on Stonysheim Lane (I will call this GZ, as in Ground Zero, no relation to September 11th) for almost ten years now.  Our decision to come out and have a drink around the campfire on July 1st 2020 didn't require too much thinking, but turned out to be a fateful one.  In attendance were Carl, our mutual friend Ray, his kids and several other friends/acquaintances.  Our dog Bella accompanied us.  Another member of our party also had a dog with them.

The best single word to describe Bella is sweet.  She loves all people and all dogs.  Likely because she is half beagle, she also likes to chase pretty much everything that moves.  Squirrels and chipmunks are her favorite, but she also loves to shoo away the deer when they wander near the outskirts of our fenced in yard.  While hiking on sparsely populated trails, I will let her off leash so she can get additional exercise.  This has NEVER been an issue with Bella, she runs ahead, but never out of sight and always returns when called.  Now that she's reached her eighth year, hikes like this usually wear her out in a positive way, providing ample excuse for a good nap once we return home.  She has NEVER been the kind of dog we would expect to lose, she is just too attached to us.

One issue she does have, which I now understand affects many dogs, is a severe aversion to loud noises.  Thunder tends to be the worst, prompting an immediate move to a comforting spot as far into the interior of the house as possible.  And of course, there are the fireworks.

As we sat around the campfire, I realized someone in our party planned to set off one of the sparkly type fire works that make loud noises but don't really have much potential to cause injury as say a bottle rocket, M80 or firecracker might.  Bella sat next to me and was off leash, but I wrapped my fingers in her collar.  Not tight enough though because as soon as noise started she took off away from the river up Stonysheim Drive.

I did not jump up and go after her immediately.  After all, Bella is attached to us and it seemed sound to conclude that she would run for a bit and then come back to us.  After a few minutes though, I got up to go look for her.  I called and called but she did not appear.  I went back to the campfire and waited, still quite sure that she wouldn't go far.  I had seven years of precedence to go on after all, she always came back!  By now it had also started to get dark, so the members of our party started assisting in the search.  We yelled Beeeelaaaa while pretty much walking in every direction possible.  After several hours of searching in the dark, we finally gave up for the night, concluding that she was probably cowering in the woods until all the noise stopped and that she would return in the morning.  I went to bed, sad and concerned but still not yet frantic with worry.

The next morning, she did not return.  More treks around the neighborhood looking for her, loudly calling her name did not produce results.  It now became evident that we now had a lost dog on our hands.

The search, Phase 1 (July 2nd)

All life long dog owners know the very first things you do when you've lost a dog...you call the local animal shelter and see if they have her.  I called Jefferson County animal control and got a recording.  I then called the Jefferson County communications line and they promised that someone from animal control would call me back.  Forty five minutes later, an officer called back.  Did they have Bella?  No.  Would I like to file a lost dog report?  Yes!  Any suggestions what else we should do?  Yes, the county has a very active Lost and found pets group that I should post on.  Of course, social media would play into this, it is the best way for folks who were previously strangers to come together on a problem!  I found the group, Jefferson County WV Lost and Found Pets and proceeded to work up a post:

Initial Post.  I posted several times to this page, every time receiving empathetic, encouraging advice from these wonderful people!

Next step, which is obvious given how many others I've seen, was to work up a flyer.  I'm a computer person, so this wasn't to difficult.  Here's what the first flyer looked like:

Jinhye (my wife) and I proceeded to post this flyer in places we thought were obvious, the sign at the nearby park and boat ramp, telephone poles, etc.  We handed them out in the neighborhood behind the Millville Road area on Falcon Ridge Drive, including to the owners of Mountain View Polo, a very nice couple who spend their weekends training folks to play polo.  We still had really not been indoctrinated into the strategy for flyer posting, so naturally our initial efforts were not ideal.

Ragar (July 3rd, 4th)

Ragar and his companion Corinne!

In the meantime, I started to get action on my Facebook post, in fact a surprising amount of it!  Much advice in the form of comments emanated from the JC WV Lost and Found Pets FB group.  One piece of advice was to contact Dogs Finding Dogs.  I googled them and discovered what they were, codified in their motto "Our Noses Know Where Your Pet goes".  I called and emailed and a bit later Jennifer from DFD got back to me with a set of questions that would help them understand how to proceed, basically who, what, where and when.  At the time she told me it likely wouldn't be until July 5th (Sunday) before they could get a tracker to me.  Being in a "I'll take whatever I could get" mode, I said fine and proceeded to move forward with paying their suggested donation to secure our spot.

I spent the rest of July 3rd in the car.  I'm fairly sure I put 500 miles on the car driving to Animal shelters and Humane societies in Jefferson (WV), Berkeley (WV), Clarke(VA), Loudoun (VA) and Washington (MD) counties, ensuring that they had a copy of our flyer.  I didn't want there to be ANY doubt if Bella came in that she was someone's dog who very much wanted her back.

I was pleased when, towards the end of the day, DFD got back to me and told me a tracker would be available the next morning (July 4th).  At this point, I felt like I was working against the clock since we were headed to firework hell on July 4th night.  The tracker wanted to meet me the next morning at 6am, a tall order given that I did not, at least that weekend, have a place to stay.  I went back home to Reston and tried hard to get to sleep much earlier than I was used to and managed to get myself out of bed at 04:30 to make it back to Charles Town by 6am.

Ragar and his all important human companion Corinne arrived at 6:10 (after missing Carl's difficult to find house a few times) and we proceeded to talk about how this would go.  Ragar is a Belgian Malinois (pronounced Mal eh nu waa, french fashion!), a dog well known for it's tracking abilities.  It's interesting that, despite being a lifelong dog owner, this was the first real "working" dog I had close contact with. 

Ragar is VERY intense, reminding me very much of the bloodhounds you see in old detective stories, nose to the ground or in the air, clearly able to sniff out whatever he's asked to.  I had previously been asked to bag up items that smelled like Bella.  I did so with the two harnesses we had and that is where we started.  Corinne had me drop the item on the ground, Ragar sniffed it and off we went.  I'd been instructed to remain 20 feet behind at all times so as not to distract Ragar.  Below is the initial path Ragar took us on:

Ragar's first track

  
We reached the farm at the end of this trail and Ragar seemed to lose the scent.  In retrospect, this made sense (pun intended).  If I had to guess, I'd say Bella had probably already run a good five miles, albeit probably around in circles, as we will discover soon by the location of her first spotting.  Just for the heck of it, we went back to GZ and then walked back the other way down Millville Road (the road along the river), on the off chance that she had doubled back to the river for a water source.  Unfortunately, we didn't end up picking up a new scent.

Now, I would be remiss if I didn't dedicate a paragraph to Corinne.  Corinne was the glue that kept me in the fight early on.  She proceeded to explain the next steps, food stations and then eventually a trap.  Corinne NEVER gave up and continued when our spirits got the lowest to prod us on.  Corinne is an amazing individual and succinctly dedicated to her craft, that of a Pet detective.  As I would find out later, she is an example of a number of individuals that fit this bill.  I like the term Pet Detective, which previously would have conjured up images of Jim Carrey being goofy.  That is really what these people are, and the most amazing part is that they are, for the most part, volunteers.  We did pay DFD a fee at the beginning, but after that Corinne resisted my attempts to give her more money.  She was one of the critical keys to our success in this endeavor.

I should also say that when she first mentioned a trap, I was very skeptical.  I was going to need to trap my dog?  My dog who follows me around the house constantly as I move from room to room?  It would take me awhile to really understand why this was going to be required.

The daylight left on July 4th with me furiously setting up food stations according to Corinne's directions.  A food station is basically a piece of card board about the size of sidewalk section with food in the middle and flour spread all around it.  The flour is designed to pick up prints, but I would soon discover that ideally, we wanted trail cams at them.

Once the food stations were set up, I packed up to head home.  As I drove away, I could hear fireworks starting in earnest, and I cursed the phenomenon I previously had an appreciation for.  I now HATE fireworks.  I don't think I will ever enjoy them again because most of the four-legged creatures readers of this blog love are deftly terrified of them.  I was feeling very down about what I believed had been a day of much effort but very little success.

Sighting number 1 (July 5th, 8am)

I woke super early on Sunday morning and did my standard checks of all the animal shelter/humane society sites and Facebook groups hoping to find that Bella had decided to trust some human who was now posting that they had her.  No luck.  I drove to the GZ house (which I now had keys for and was allowed to stay at for the foreseeable future) to check the food stations.  Shortly after I arrived I received the following text message:

    We saw your dog just now on Falcon Ridge Dr in Charles Town heading east to end of road toward the power lines.

This was sent by the owner of Mountain View Polo, whose husband had seen Bella while training the local HS Polo team.  I jumped in my car for the very quick drive to the next street over and talked to the owner who had seen her.  He pointed out where she had been and I proceeded to set up a chair in the shade, hoping she would appear again and come to me.  No such luck.  In the meantime, I called Corinne who agreed to come back out that evening to do another track, this time from the spotting point.

6pm came around and again Ragar and Corinne showed up and again Ragar picked up her scent.  And again, it led us pretty much in circles, once again not surprising given how far Bella likely traveled since she had been spotted.  She was no longer on my part of her big circle!

Week of silence (July 6th - July 10th)

Monday (July 6th) I had to go back to work.  I guess I'm lucky that this really meant go back home; as an IT executive my work is pretty much something I perform via a laptop, good internet connection and Zoom in today's Covid-19 climate.  Each night I returned to WV to refresh the food stations, hike around the area and gently call Bella's name.  Most land/home owners eyed me suspiciously until I managed to thrust a hand flyer into their faces, a which point hearts melted as people realized the pain we were feeling.

Its worth mentioning at this point that the pain I'm talking about was not just centered on our corner of VA/WV.  My daughter, Elisha Suzi Clark, is a Navy Pilot deployed on the USS Antietam somewhere in the Pacific Ocean.  She is also very close to Bella and continuously queried us for updates on the search.  A number of times when we were ready to give up on the search, she prodded us back into the fight from her far away station.

By this time, we had improved the look of our flyer, with a much clearer emphasis on Bella's picture, and sound advice to post them on stop signs where all but the most aggressive drives would be forced to notice them.  We also printed them on sturdier paper, hoping they would last longer.  Lastly, we printed hand flyers, four to a 8.5x11 page to hand out to people, door to door or campsite to campsite.

Improved flyer, bigger picture, less to read!

Saturday, July 11th, second sighting (probably fake)

Jinhye and I traveled from stop sign to stop sign in my Honda Clarity, which perhaps unwisely had a bumper sticker which probably didn't contribute to making us friends in Red State West Virginia.


As we posted a flyer at the corner of Millville Road and Charlestown Pike, a high wheeled black truck pulled up with two women in it, one I'd guess in her mid thirties and the other in her mid twenties.  The driver proceeded to tell us she had seen Bella in Shannondale, across the river, and five miles to the South.  She said Bella was wet and running down Mission Road near Upper Clubhouse Drive.  At the time, we assumed this was a legitimate sighting and that Bella had somehow managed to get across the Shenandoah River!  I called Corinne and asked her if she could again come out and track with Ragar, which she agreed to do that evening.

In the meantime, my good friend Dan Clark came out from Vienna Virginia with his dog Ripley.  Ripley and Bella are very good friends and our hope was that perhaps if we took him for a walk in the area where she had last been spotted, that maybe she would appear.  We moved forward with this, all the while calling her name and handing out 50-70 flyers to the very friendly Shannondale residents.

Later, just before Corinne arrived, I called the woman who said she spotted Bella in Shannondale and asked her if she had been wearing a collar.  She said, "Yes, she was, and I could see her name on the tag and your cell phone numbers on the back".  For some strange reason, I didn't think much of this very odd account at the time.  Had I thought about it, I would have seen through this ruse.  You'd have to be standing on top of Bella to be able to read anything on her tag!  My best guess now is this young lady was trolling us, perhaps her way of messing with the Northern Virginia liberal who lost his doggy.  At any rate, I'm now certain her efforts cost us a day and a half of searching in a place Bella had never been.  Corinne and Ragar arrived and we did another rather fruitless track to end the day.

A note on politics. Yes, I am a Northern Virginia liberal (moderate really).  Yes, I voted for Gore, Obama and Hillary (though I wasn't too enthusiastic about that last one).  But other than this one incident, politics NEVER came up, not before it for after it.  I don't know the politics of anyone else in this story save for my friend Dan, and, of course my wife.  If anyone did have a problem with my bumper sticker, it did nothing to quell the sincere empathy we received from everyone we came in contact with in the great county of Jefferson, West Virginia!

Sunday, July 12th 2020, third sighting.

Late Saturday night I drove home to Reston again.  Jinhye agreed to return with me in the morning to re-post flyers on stop signs and hand them out to additional people.  While we prepared to leave, I received a call from a person whose daughter was doing early morning lessons at Mountain View Polo.  She had seen Bella and called her name.  Bella looked back for a minute in recognition and then fled up the driveway of one of the houses in the neighborhood on Falcon Ridge Drive.  This was actually a relief because it proved what I suspected, that the sighting in Shannondale was a ruse and that Bella was still in the general area where she had been lost.  This spot was a mere 1/3rd mile from the point where we lost her, more than a week earlier!

It was at this point that I began to take the idea of trapping seriously.  This was really fueled by my conversion over to the position that lost dogs, especially ones lost in wooded areas, descend into a "feral" mode where their fear of people becomes heightened (like a wild animal) and they even resist recognizing their owners.  This means all the times I spent hiking in the woods, gently calling Bella's name, she could easily have been nearby but just as afraid of me as a deer spotted on a hike.  Accepting this to be true meant that the only way we were going to get Bella back was 1) She became so hungry that she snapped out of this mode for survival purposes, realizing that trusting people was the only way she was going to eat or 2) We trapped her.  In retrospect, I think it really would have been quite some time before number 1 happened.  The area we lost Bella is full of farmland and meadows, teeming with deer and foxes, and thus probably presented at least a subsistence level of food for a resourceful dog.

Friends in the Facebook group had also begin to suggest trapping her was the way to go.  Indeed one sent me a link for a trap:

After some calling around, I finally found one at the Leesburg Tractor Supply Store.  The one I purchased is a pretty typical box trap, with spring controlled door held open by a mechanism connected to a plate on the floor.  Dog steps on plate, door on side snaps shut.

After receiving permission from the property owner, we set the trap up in a small clearing near where Bella had been spotted.  Per advice from Corinne, we placed chunky cat food on the ground and then smushed the end of the trap over it.  This caused the food to seep through the metal mesh on the bottom of the trap, ready for whatever animal found it appealing.  We were told at the time that cat food was the best because of its strong smell.  Can't argue with that, though why any living creature finds that smell appealing is beyond me!  We also "chummed" near the site in trails leading up to the trap from different directions.  Chum is some kind of strong smelling food diluted by warm water that creates a food scent trail.  We also put down "scent strips," pieces of fabric that smell like us (e.g. a cut up sheet) with the notion that that would also attract our dog.

It was around this time that Donna Franklin, who had reached out to us from the Facebook group began to get involved.  This is important to note because Donna and her fiance Nick would be key to the success of the is entire operation, more on that to come.

That night Jinhye stayed in West Virginia while I went home to Reston.  Next morning Donna met Jinhye before work and they checked the trap and several additional food stations we had set up.  No takers on the trap, likely activity from raccoons at the food stations. 

Monday July 13th, forth and fifth sighting

That same morning at I received a call at 7:38 am from Rodney Sharpe saying he had seen Bella just a few minutes earlier.   We had met Rodney previously, he lives just two houses down from GZ where Bella was lost!  Rodney said he called Bella's name and she turned for a second and then took off.  I called Jinhye (who was still at the trap) and asked her to make contact with Rodney immediately.

(Note: This is why all flyers say "Do not approach" and don't have the dog's name on them.  Strange,  people-like creatures exclaiming their name only contribute to the fleeing instinct in the now feral dog.  A trick I learned the hard way from the gurus!  This, in no way, is meant to disparage these wonderful people who spotted Bella.  After all, it was the spottings that kept us going!)
 
Thirty minutes later, I received another call from someone who had seen Bella's flyer...Bella was spotted at the boat ramp, about 200-300 yards the other direction down Millville road.  She was headed up the driveway of the property on the other side of the road towards the woods.  Again, I called Jinhye and transmitted advice I had received from Corinne, to find a spot close to where she had been seen, sit down in the grass with some food and gently say Bella's name.  Jinhye did this for an hour to no avail.

An additional development was a downed tree blocking Stonysheim Drive as a result of the storm from the night before.  Donna committed to have Nick and a friend come out that evening to clear the tree, which they did.  I tried my best to give them some cash for this effort, but they vehemently refused!

Monday night we moved the trap back over to a spot near GZ, with the same general setup as the day before.  Next morning we found a lethargic raccoon had taken the bait.  This guy was pretty funny, BTW. I opened the trap door and asked him to exit.  He looked at me like an overweight house cat looks at you when its sleep has been disturbed.  I finally extricated him by tipping the trap so he was forced downward towards the door.


We set the trap for Tuesday night again, this time a bit further back in the woods.  The next morning the trap was sprung but no animal was inside!  Some astute investigation by Jinhye and Donna found several hairs lodged in the door mechanism that looked VERY much like Bella's.  Here is the message Donna sent to the group:

I'm thinking she may have been the one that messed the cage up I think she might have been half-way in and half-way out and it triggered it and she backed  out that's why it was bent.  I had to bend it back in order to reset it. I don't think a fox could have had that strength and there was hair on the trap.

I later saw the hair and was certain it was Bella's.  On the surface, this seemed like perhaps good news, but in truth it was really bad news for two reasons; 1) The trap was not likely big enough to actually catch her and  2) The likelihood she would enter this trap again had dropped significantly since she already new it was, well, a trap!  This may very well have been a low point for me.  Having concluded that the only way to get her back was to trap her AND having exhausted what I then thought were our only trapping possibilities, I was having a hard time seeing a chance for success.

Wednesday and Thursday night we did more of the same.  We did manage to catch a cute but very stinky possum, but nothing else.  In the meantime, Bella was again spotted (Thursday morning), very close to GZ, this time by the neighbor at the end of Stonysheim.  Well, at least she was staying in the area!

A bigger trap! (Friday, July 17th 2020)

 When the stunned Brody backs into the cabin and tells Shaw’s Quint, "You’re gonna need a bigger boat," shocked expression on his face, cigarette clamped between his lips, it’s such a droll, human, perfect reaction that it had to be that shot.  - Spielberg, Jaws, 1976

Early Friday, Donna began prepping us for the possibility that she might know a guy with a bigger trap.  At first she acted as go between on Messenger between a conversation she was having with the trap's owner (Russell Neff) and the Messenger conversation we had going.  Finally, we all agree to meet that evening at Russell's house in Boonsboro, Maryland.  Nick Moore, having already contributed greatly to our cause by clearing the tree, again came to the rescue, offering the use of his truck to transport the trap.

I arrived to find Russell, Donna and Nick standing around the trap. I would estimate the size of the trap to be about 4 feet (Length) by 3 feet (Width) by 4.5 feet (Height), four-sided with one width side shorter than the other, that side being the side with the door.  At the back of the trap (the long side, width wise) is a piece of plywood that attached to a metal pole that sits on the ground, threaded through the bars of the sides.  That piece acts as the trap's trigger.  Attached to the back of the trap almost to the top of is a short T-shaped wooden structure with a nail driven through it.  In the front of the trap is a doorway and, of course, a door.  The door has a line attached to it designed to extend to the T-shaped structure's nail.  The trigger plywood also has a line that also gets connected to the nail.  Lastly, an additional line is run across the trap, creating a second trigger.  This line is also connected to the T-shaped structure's nail.  Each of the lines has a metal ring (probably as big as a large man's ring finger) attached to the end which perfectly rests on the nail when given pressure.  Thus when either trigger is pulled on, it also pulls the ring off that is connected to the door and, viola, enclosed animal is trapped!

One initial worry was whether we would trap Bella and then she would jump over the sides.  As recently as two days before we lost her, I witnessed Bella jumping over our fence from a standstill and that is perhaps 1/2 foot shorter than the sides of the trap.  Nonetheless, we decided to move forward, as is.

The visit to Russell's really felt like a visit with a true dog finding Guru.  Russell built the trap after his Great Pyrenees K.C. became lost.  Indeed, he even calls the trap the "Kc" trap.  Russell is an absolute wealth of information on finding lost dogs.  I will resist the urge to give up too much here, as I very seriously recommended to him that he write a book.  I truly believe that had I met Russell on day one of this ordeal, that we probably would have shortened it by a week or more.

Russell and Kc a few weeks before she was lost 😔

So on with the new trap.  We transported it back to GZ and Nick and I set it up while Donna, Corinne and Jinhye put down additional Chum, prepared rotisserie chicken (Russell's best recommended trap bait) and laid down additional scent strips.

Saturday morning found the trap completely ignored, door still open, food untouched.  However, we had a huge bonus, thanks to the outdoor skills of Nick Moore.  Nick and Donna had set up a food station further up in the woods in a flat area I still don't understand how they found.  Pointed at the feed station was a trail cam that took the first picture we'd had of Bella in seventeen days!

(Note: The time on the trail cam was about 2.5 hours slow.  e.g. the picture below, showing a 3:06 am time was really taken about about 5:15 am.)


It was readily apparent that the logical thing to do was to set up the trap in that new location! We planned to do so that evening.  In the meantime, Dan again came out with Ripley and we again left the scent of Dan, myself and Ripley leading back to the planned new trap location.

Saturday evening we moved the trap to the site of the last picture.  Donna actually found a tennis ball close by with some smushed down grass that we theorized might have been Bella as well.

In the meantime, I had purchased a "Cell Link" which is designed to send pictures taken by trail cams back to a cell phone using an app.  The Cell Link turned out to be less dependable than might have been desired, but did end up playing a fateful part.

Sunday morning we woke to a closed trap but no animal inside.  Again, we were clearly racooned!  In retrospect, is is another advantage of these traps that raccoons can jump out, meaning that the task of getting these fellas out is avoided.  Sunday was spent spent doing more flyers.  Flyers really only last at most a week, YMMV depending on weather and flyer location.  We actually had flyers that lasted the entire ordeal...these were posted on a Red Box in front of 7-Eleven and the ice storage box in front of Dollar General.  But most stop sign flyers lasted a week at best and thus had to be redone.

Again we went to bed hopeful on Sunday night and again woke Monday morning to find a tripped, empty trap.  I closed the trap door for the day and headed back to Reston for work.  Closing the trap door was essential...the last thing we wanted to do was trap Bella (or any other animal) and have her stuck in a trap for the majority of a 100 degree (real feel) day.

 

Caught! (July 19th, 20th 2020)

Monday night, Jinhye and I returned with plans to stay overnight and monitor the trap.  We set the trap at 8:30 and went back to GZ house to eat dinner and watch a movie.  The movie ended at about 10:30 and we decided to check the trap before we went to bed.  Again, tripped by a procyon lotor, who again had fled the scene.  But in the back of my mind I had an interesting thought.  Perhaps the raccoon would not return again that night, having discovered that his food source came with the aggravation of being trapped and having to devise an escape plan.  We reset the trap with fresh chicken and returned to GZ house to bed for the evening.

5 am alarm.  Check my phone.  And guess what picture I found:



Get up, Get up, Get up!  Bella is in the trap!  Could it really be?  How fast can I pull on my shorts and shoes and get down there?!  Gotta grab my "go bag" (bag with leash, harness, extra water and snacks, etc.).  Walk (don't run and kill yourself in the dark) up the road and then up through the woods to the trap.  Is she in there?  Darn right she is!!!  Approach the trap slowly, hands extended through the bars as Russell instructed.  Bella recognizes me almost immediately!  She then goes crazy, jumping up and begging to be let out.  Slow and calm now as you prepare the harness to slip her head in as you open the side of the trap.  Job done and Bella now at the end of a leash again!  Ecstatic, need to get down and let Bella wake up Jinhye.  Bella licking Jinhye's face...Jinhye initially freaked out as she moves from a sleeping to an awake state and now she is ecstatic as well!

Bella had a fifty cent piece sized "gash" in her back so, after giving her water and a little food, we jumped in the car, destination, emergency vet in Fairfax.  The ride home went very fast as we basked in the glow of our success!

Here are several other "Bella Trap" pictures (again, remember to add 2.5 hours to each time):

Setting the trap again.

Initial Approach

Still considering, 50 minutes later.

Caught!

And finally, I got two movies of the moment I let Bella out:

Prologue

All told, Bella came through this ordeal pretty well.  The vet stitched (really stapled) up her back, where she will always have a scar as a reminder of what she and we went through.  In the next couple of days we found about 30 ticks and two tick larvae embedded in her fur...you don't want to see those pictures, trust me!  She lost weight, but I wouldn't say she was completely emaciated.  She did, of course sleep for most of the next several days.


On Saturday, we returned to Jefferson County to clean up.  We removed signs, picked up scent strips and took Bella around to meet a few of the helpful neighbors who probably wondered to a certain extent what all the fuss was about.  And we passed by the trail leading up to the trap location.  Bella proceeded to pull me up the hill, as if she just had to get one more look at the place where she had been caught.  In retrospect, if I had to guess, her hiding place probably wasn't too far from this location.  It's where she returned several times until she was finally caught and brought back to us.

Taking down the signs!

Many factors ultimately led to us getting Bella back, not necessarily in order of importance:

1. The embrace of the many wonderful people on the Jefferson County WV Lost and Found Pets Facebook page.
2. Advice from the Facebook group to contact Dogs Finding Dogs.
3. Corinne and Ragar.  Though Ragar's tracks were not ultimately successful, Corinne was critical to teaching us the ways of the Pet Detective and keeping us from giving up!  And Ragar, well he is just awesome in so many ways!
4. Giving in to the notion that trapping was going to be necessary, another credit to Corinne and DFD.
5. Donna Franklin and her never give up attitude.  Sacrificing lunch breaks and after work time for us!  Advising us to a huge extent and ultimately hooking us up with Russell.
6. Nick Moore and his brilliance that led to our first picture of Bella and the ultimate trap location.
7. My friend Dan Clark who came out every weekend with Ripley and my friend Carl who gave us his place, no questions asked, for the duration of our search.
8. Russell Neff and Kc, a Great Pyrenees and the king off all traps!  This is what they call in sports the clincher which everything previously ultimately led up to.  Perhaps this article can one day be a forward or chapter in Russell's book.  Either way we are eternally grateful!
9. Last but not least, Bella, who in the end was very happy to be found.