Doing their best? I had serious doubts about that and was upset that Gobi had been able to escape. I’d had so much time to think about Gobi, I’d run every possible scenario through my head. I was paranoid. The version of events that the organizers were relaying didn’t seem quite right to me. Nurali had been quiet for so long, I was worried Gobi had gone missing a lot earlier, and they didn’t tell me about it because they thought they would find her. If I was right, that meant Gobi had already been on the run for ten days or more.
All kinds of scenarios flashed across my mind. None of them were good, and I did my best to shut them out. This was no time for panic. I needed to act.
“So what can we do?” I asked, not having a clue what should happen next.
“Nurali’s doing all she can.”
Somehow, that didn’t seem like enough.
I phoned Lucja at work and told her that Gobi had gone and that I seriously doubted whether Nurali was looking for her as had been suggested. Then I phoned Kiki and went through the story all over again.
“Let me speak with Nurali,” she said. That was the first suggestion I’d heard all morning that made any sense.
When she called back, Kiki told me she had her doubts about the whole story. It just didn’t add up.
“Okay,” I said, putting my suspicions aside for a moment. “But what’s next?”
“What we need to do is get more people involved in the search.”
“How can we do that? Nurali’s the only person I know in Urumqi.”
“I know someone here in Beijing who has experience finding dogs. He runs an adoption shelter in Beijing. Maybe he can help.”
I didn’t have to wait long for Kiki to call back a second time. She had spoken to her friend Chris Barden from Beijing’s Little Adoption Shop, and as I listened to the advice she relayed, I knew he was the right man for the job.
“First, we need a poster. It has to have recent photos of Gobi, a good description of her, and the location where she went missing. It needs a contact number and, most important, a reward.”
“How much?” I asked.
“He says five thousand RMB to start.”
I did my calculations. Five hundred pounds. I’d gladly pay ten times that if we needed to. After giving it some thought, I settled on ￡1,000 for the reward.
“We have to get the poster everywhere, especially digitally. Do you have WeChat?”
I’d not heard of it, but Kiki filled me in on the WhatsApp/Twitter hybrid that the Chinese authorities did not block.
“Someone needs to set up a WeChat group to start sharing the news. And then we need people on the street handing out the posters. Chris says that most dogs are found within two to three miles of the place they went missing. That’s where we need to concentrate all our efforts.”
The thought of putting this plan into action and expecting it to work made my head spin. I knew from experience that Gobi could easily cover two or three miles in twenty minutes, so she could be way beyond Chris’s boundary. But even if I put that to one side, I couldn’t imagine where Gobi might be because I had no idea where in the city Nurali lived. All I knew for sure was that Urumqi was about as densely packed as anywhere I’d been in Asia. A two-or three-mile radius could contain tens—if not hundreds—of thousands of people. Nurali was my only hope for getting the word out on the street, but I didn’t know if she could do it.
Thankfully, Kiki saved the best news until last.
She told me that Chris knew someone who lived in Urumqi, a woman called Lu Xin. When her own dog had gone missing, Chris had helped with the search. He’d already asked her, and she said she’d help, even though she’d never led a dog search before.
I exhaled a great breath of gratitude.
“That’s amazing, Kiki. Thank you so much.” I was blown away by the kindness of these people I’d never even met, who had jumped into action at a moment’s notice. I hadn’t prayed since I was a kid, but I certainly said a few words of thanks right there and then.
I went back to waiting for news. It was lunchtime in Scotland, but the end of the workday in China. I knew I wouldn’t hear anything more from Kiki until the next morning.
I’d been home from China for nearly four weeks and had started back at work almost immediately, squeezing in the interviews and e-mails in the early mornings, late evenings, and weekends. I work from home some of the week, and on the other days I’m in the office, down in the south of England. On the day I found out Gobi was lost, I was in the flat, but as the afternoon dragged on, I wished I was anywhere but there. Being at home alone was hard. Harder than running across the black Gobi Desert. All I could think about was Gobi.
When the working day finished and Lucja came home, we talked about what to do. Both of us knew we had to let people know about Gobi being lost, but phrasing it the right way was hard. We knew so little, but we didn’t want people filling in the blanks.
After a few false starts, late that night, I finally posted the words I hoped would alert people and help get Gobi back safely: Yesterday we received a phone call that Gobi has been missing in Urumqi, China, for a number of days, and she has still not been found. We are simply devastated and shocked to hear that she is now on the streets of the city, and our plans to get her to the UK are up in the air. It has literally been the worst 24 hours, and I know that my pain and grief will be shared by you all. Please understand Gobi was well cared for and looked after in Urumqi, and this has been an unfortunate incident.
Today the below information and reward has been released on Chinese WeChat. The Urumqi animal shelter has also kindly assisted in providing a group to look for Gobi, and we are also organizing to employ locals to look for Gobi across the streets and parks of the city.
If anyone can provide any information on Gobi’s whereabouts, please contact us as soon as possible. We hope and pray Gobi can be found safe soon and will keep you updated with any progress.
Just like to say we are so appreciative of all the funding and support provided to Gobi so far. I can confirm there are still 33 days to go on the crowdfunding page, and if Gobi is not found during this time, then no money will be taken from the pledges.
Dion
Within minutes I could hear my phone alert me to the responses as they came in. It was slow at first, then faster and faster, like a slow jog turning into an all-out sprint.
For a while I didn’t pick up. I didn’t want to read what people were writing. Not that I didn’t care what they thought. I did care. I cared a lot. But I had no more news to give them, and there was nothing else I could do.
My only option was to sit and hope. Hope that Gobi was still okay. Hope that this woman Lu Xin—whom I’d never even heard of before I woke up that morning—would work miracles and build up a big enough search team to flood the area with posters so that someone somewhere who had seen Gobi and who cared enough to act would phone in and claim the reward.
Who was I kidding? There was no hope of success.
As the last light of the summer evening slipped from the sky, my thoughts turned darker. I remembered something else that Kiki had told me during our last call of the day. She said that Chris met Lu Xin when her own dog went missing. He was the one who had advised her on the search.
Lu Xin’s dog was never found.
PART 4