Lost dog helps woman discover her neighbors

It was scarcely above zero outside as Lisa Williksen’s headlights cut through the darkness on Idaho Road. She turned down every cattle-guarded driveway, passed every no trespassing sign, ready to beg forgiveness and ask a favor: “Have you seen my dog?”

Hulk, a 150-pound bull mastiff slipped through Williksen’s front gate Jan. 10 along with Buddy, the family Great Pyrenees. Williksen had spent the first three days of the big chill searching her neighborhood in Liberty Lake, thinking the dogs couldn’t have gone far, but then she got a call from a farmer four miles away on the Idaho state line. Buddy and Hulk had crossed the mountain ridge separating the two communities. Buddy was sleeping on the farmer’s porch. Hulk had run deeper into Idaho.

“Hi. I’m looking for my dog …” Those six simple words can be hard to deliver standing on a stranger’s doorstep in the dark of night. You don’t talk to your neighbors for a while and you fall out of practice. You stop poking your head through a neighbor’s backdoor and suddenly you’re knocking on the front door, no longer a familiar face. The front door is locked.

Williksen was knocking on doors four to six miles from home, but she might as well have been knocking on doors just down the street. She knew no better those neighbors a few houses removed from her own. It was something she and her husband, Al, had talked about, that neighbors these days did not interact as they once did.

Maybe all they needed was a reason to need each other. Behind every door on which she knocked, Williksen found good neighbors willing to help and many who had spotted the lumbering canine, without realizing what Hulk was.

“I opened my window and this polar bear was looking back at me,” one elderly woman told Williksen. The woman spotted Hulk while putting out food for some neighborhood raccoons. “It had the biggest brown eyes.”

Farther down the road, Williksen ran into a woman who offered the services of a psychic acquaintance who would, if Williksen was willing, “journey” with the dog. The friend saw a dog tied to a string inside a drug house. The medium also saw some street names but advised Williksen not to investigate the area alone.

Other neighbors were having visions of cougars galloping in the woods, and that vision is what eventually brought the animal home. There are cougars to the south of the Spokane River in the Post Falls area. Not too many years ago, a big cat prowled the rocks above St. Dominic’s Girls School on West Riverview Drive before a rancher shot the animal.

With that big cat tale in mind, Post Falls-area resident Jim Morrison spotted a large, buckskin- colored animal charging through the woods, and later giant paw prints on his porch, and assumed the worst.

“I caught a glimpse of him late at night just blasting through the forest behind our house,” Morrison said. “The next morning, I got up, and on the porch next to the back door there were tracks. His track is 4 inches long by 3.5 inches wide. We measured it.”

Morrison and his wife, Sandi, couldn’t think of any domestic animal capable of making a track that big. And to Jim the blur he spotted in the woods resembled a big cat in the way its rope-like tail dipped into the snow, punctuating its massive paw prints like an exclamation mark.

Jim called on a neighbor who looked over the tracks, then announced it had to be a dog. But the Morrisons had to be sure, so Jim set up a motion-triggered camera he’d bought for filming deer. He positioned the camera in the backyard so it would photograph the back end of his one-ton pickup as well as whatever tripped its shutter.

Jim figured having the back of the pickup in the frame would give him a better idea of how big this animal was, which it did. He used half a wild goose breast as bait and when he woke up in the morning, there was the answer to his cougar problem. The camera had captured a dog as big as a pony munching goose breast in the murky darkness.

Shortly thereafter, Sandi Morrison spotted one of Williksen’s neon fliers and knew they had the right animal. They called and relayed their cat tale.

“Jim told me when he thought it was a cougar, he didn’t want to let his dog outside, but when he saw that it was Hulk, Jim didn’t want to let himself outside,” Williksen said.

After seven cold nights in which the temperature escaped the teens only once, Hulk was back at home, 10 pounds lighter.

After getting her dog home OK, Williksen went door to door, thanking everyone who helped along the way and promising not to be a stranger.