It was a happy ending to a long, sad story that began on Jan. 1, 2019, when Ms. Lundquist’s cousin – Chickamauga resident Rachel Noble – brought Ms. Beasley to her home to take care of her while her cousin dealt with an emergency.
“The very next day I took her out in the yard to go to the bathroom,” Mrs. Noble recalled, “and she jumped over the fence and ran away.”
Had her cousin been here when the incident happened, she said, she could have called Ms. Beasley and the dog probably would have run right back to her. But Ms. Lundquist was on her way back to Arkansas; her frightened, disoriented dog ignored Mrs. Noble’s calls and just kept running.
Eleven days ago, almost fourteen months later – despite the photos of her plastered to telephone poles throughout Chickamauga and numerous messages on Facebook asking whether anybody had seen her – Ms. Beasley was still missing.
That’s when a resident of Lookout Valley, more than 16 miles away, posted a photo on Facebook asking whether anybody knew anything about a frightened stray dog that had been roaming the streets there for about a year.
“Does anyone know ANYTHING about this stray pup that is always on Brown’s Ferry?” the woman wrote..
“I see this poor thing every morning and tried to at-least give it some treats this morning. He/she won’t even let me come near. It’s so matted and it breaks my heart!”
The post, accompanied by a photo of a dejected, badly matted black dog went viral. Last Wednesday, a friend familiar with Mrs. Noble’s long search for her sister’s dog, sent her a screen shot of it.
The dog looked like Ms. Beasley.
“There is only about 30 to 45 minutes between Chickamauga and (Lookout Valley),” Mrs. Noble mused. “What if . . . ?”
She forwarded the message on to her cousin in Arkansas, who looked at the photos and immediately began planning a trip to Chattanooga.
Five days later, she has her dog.
On Facebook, North Georgia and Chattanooga area supporters, who have been helping look for the dog since it disappeared on Jan. 1, 2019, from the home of Ms. Lundquist’s cousin in Chickamauga, soon filled in the details on how the rescue occurred.
“Here’s the gist of it,” Jan Wright explained in a post early this morning.
“(Melanee) got a call from a lady at Mapco, she . . . went there, acting like (she) didn’t know (Beasley); bought beef jerky.”
Keeping her back to the dog, Ms. Lundquist then kept crinkling the beef jerky bag, according to the Facebook post.
At that point somebody pulled up to the station to buy gas, it continued, and the driver started throwing bread to the dog.
“Melanee said (without turning around) ‘that’s my dog, please keep feeding her,” Ms. Wright’s post continued.
“She had the jerky behind her back. Beasley took it.”
At that point Ms. Lundquist sat down, Ms. Wright wrote, “and it clicked . . . Beasley knew! She went crazy all over Melanee, kissing her and jumping on her.”
Soon the dog was in Ms. Lundquist’s vehicle, safe at last – and more than ready to go home.