Finding Gobi

by Dion Leonard

  “I could hardly run past you as you’re giving her a drink, could I?”

  I smiled back. “Thanks,” I said.

  I put the bottle back in its holder on my bag’s shoulder strap, gave Brett a nod, and carried on racing as though nothing had happened.

  We stayed like that for the rest of the stage. I finished the stage fifth, Brett sixth, with Gobi between us. Medals were given out and photos taken straightaway, and soon afterward a celebration feast ensued with beer and a traditional barbecue, kebabs, and breads as big as pizzas stuffed with herbs and meat and all kinds of delicious things. I savoured mouthfuls of delicious mutton and let Gobi lick the grease from my fingers. There was a lot of laughing and hugging and the kind of smiles you get only when you know you’re surrounded by good people, enjoying a moment that you’re going to remember for years to come.

  I had started the race as I always did, keeping to myself, focusing on the run and nothing else. I ended it as I have ended every other race, surrounded by friends.

  But the race across the Gobi Desert was different. The lows had been lower, and the highs had been higher. The experience had changed my life. So it was only right that in return I should do everything I could to help change Gobi’s.

  PART 3

  10

  I watched Gobi from out of the bus window. She was busy eating up all the scraps of kebab that had been left behind from the barbecue. Nurali was organizing the rest of the volunteers who had just loaded the last of the runners onto the other bus. Gobi stopped. She looked up. Was it just me, or had she worked out that something was wrong? The bus engine kicked into life. Gobi, startled a little, started running up and down. She looked just like she did when I turned back at the river. She was looking for something. For someone. For me. Her tail was down, and her ears pinned back. I felt an almost irresistible urge to haul my aching body out of the seat, climb down out of the bus, and go and scoop her up into my arms again.

  This is ridiculous, I thought to myself. I felt like a dad watching his kid walk through the gates for his first day of school.

  The bus began to pull away as I watched Nurali call Gobi to her side, give her a bit of meat, and ruffle the shaggy brown mop of fur that sat like a bird’s nest on the top of her head.

  I sat back and tried to think of something else. Anything.

  The bus journey back to Hami could not have been more different from the drive we had made away from it a week earlier. Back then I’d sat and only said a few words to my neighbour. I’d grown increasingly frustrated with the noise of the Macau boys behind me, and more than once I’d turned around hoping they’d get the hint and shut up.

  On the drive to Hami, I would have paid good money to sit near the Macau boys and hear them laughing and chatting. I would have welcomed the distraction. Sadly, the three of them were on a different bus, and in the quiet that fell upon my fellow passengers as they gave in to the post-race, post-barbecue, post-beer drowsiness, I was left alone with my thoughts.

  Why was this so hard? I had no idea I was going to feel this way. And this wasn’t goodbye. I was going to see Gobi again in a couple of hours.

  That plan was about as simple as any plan could be. Nurali, the woman who’d been kind of dismissive during the sandstorm, was going to drive Gobi back to Hami, where we’d have the award dinner, and I’d be able to say a proper goodbye to the dog. After that Nurali would take Gobi back home with her to Urumqi as I flew back to Edinburgh. I was then going to make all the arrangements to have Gobi flown back to begin her new life with Lucja, me, and Lara the cat back in the UK.

  How long would it take? I didn’t know.

  How much would it cost? No idea.

  Would Nurali look after her? Absolutely. That was one thing of which I was confident. Nurali might have been a little off with me when the camp was blowing apart, but I’d seen the way she ordered people around and got things done. She was a fixer, and I could tell that without her the whole Gobi race never would have happened. She was exactly the kind of person I was going to need to get things done. Besides, I’d seen her slip Gobi enough food treats over the week to know that Nurali had a soft spot for the dog. Gobi would be fine with her. I was sure of it—just like I was sure that I was bringing Gobi home, even if it cost me a thousand pounds and took a month or two.

  Gather together a bunch of runners who haven’t showered, washed, or changed their clothes for a week as they’ve sweated their way across a desert, and they’ll smell bad. Put them all on a hot bus for two hours, and the air inside will turn about as foul and putrid as you can possibly imagine.

  So as soon as we arrived back in Hami, I was desperate for a shower. I cleaned myself up and rested a little, guessing that I’d catch up with Nurali and Gobi at the meal in the evening.

  By the time I arrived at the restaurant, I was kind of missing Gobi already, even though it had been only a few hours. Besides, I’d only ever seen her out in the open or in a tent. How would she cope being in a town, with roads and traffic, restaurants and hotels?

  I realized that there was so much I didn’t know about her. Where had she been living before she joined the race? Had she ever even been inside a house before? How would she react to being shut inside from time to time? How old was she? Perhaps most important of all, did she like cats?

  So much had happened the week of the race, but months, maybe even years, of Gobi’s life before the race would forever be a mystery to me. I’d watched her playing when she thought I wasn’t looking, and I was pretty sure that she was less than a year or two old. As for what had happened to her beforehand, I was at a total loss. If she had been mistreated, she didn’t have any scars and certainly wasn’t carrying any injuries that had stopped her from running well over seventy-seven miles in total. So why had she run away? Had she got lost? Was there an owner somewhere out near the sand dune on the edge of the Gobi Desert currently fretting about his little dog who had gone missing?

  Everyone I had spoken to thought this was unlikely. Gobi wasn’t the only dog I’d seen on the run, and even the few hours I’d spent in Urumqi and Hami told me there must have been thousands of dogs roaming the streets in both places. Stray dogs were everywhere, and all the Chinese I had spoken to told me that Gobi must have been one of them.

  At the restaurant I looked for Nurali and Gobi, but there was no sign of either of them. None of her team was there either, only the race organizers. I found one of them and asked about Nurali.

  “I thought she was supposed to be coming here and bringing Gobi with her,” I said.

  She looked confused. “No, Nurali was never going to be coming here. She’s got too much to do back at the finish line.”

  “Is she coming here at all before we leave tomorrow?”

  “I can’t think why she would.”

  I walked away, deflated.

  It bothered me that I wasn’t going to get to see Gobi to say goodbye properly. And it bothered me that the plan we’d sketched out wasn’t being followed. Had something been lost in translation? Had something gone wrong already? Was Gobi still okay?

  The thing that bothered me most was the fact that I could feel myself starting to stress about it. Part of me wanted to do what I normally did after a race and switch off from everything for a few weeks—from dieting, from running, from having to force myself to become so laser-focused on the one goal ahead of me. I wanted to relax and not care.

  But that wasn’t even an option. I did care. Feeling protective of Gobi wasn’t a switch I could simply flick off.

  I was distracted throughout much of the awards night, but I listened hard as Brett got up to receive his third-place medal and gave a powerful but brief speech. “What I’d like to say is that for everyone who has sacrificed their race to help other people, I take my hat off to you. It shows what great human beings are in this world.”

  I couldn’t have put it better myself. I’d been able to do something to help Tommy, but I was far from the only one. Filippo had stopped too, and
there had been so many other examples of people’s putting themselves second and choosing to put someone else first. From the way the Macau boys looked out for one another to the ways people who had been total strangers at the start of the week gave constant encouragement to one another. One of the things I love most about these events is that as you push yourself to the absolute limits of physical endurance, you make some of the deepest friendships of your life.

  Of course, I didn’t know any of that when I signed up for my first multi-stage ultra. In fact, I wasn’t even sure I’d make it to the start line, let alone finish the whole thing.

  Our ultra-marathon journey began around Christmas 2012. Lucja’s birthday is on 23 December, and in the months beforehand she’d been talking about wanting to move up from marathons and take on something tougher. So I’d bought her a beautiful coffee-table book called The World’s Toughest Endurance Challenges. I’d looked through it before wrapping it, astounded by events such as the Marathon des Sables, the Yukon Arctic Ultra, and the Yak Attack in Nepal, billed as the highest (and, I guessed, the most dangerous) bike race in the world.

  This was before I’d taken part in the half marathon where I ran myself into the ground to win a free meal from my friend, so I was utterly convinced that every single one of the events in the book was beyond me. Still, I thought it might be kind of fun to dream about doing one of them one day a decade or more down the road. And in the festive atmosphere, with a bottle of champagne open beside us, I was feeling pretty good about life as I watched Lucja open the book, so I said these fateful words: “Whatever page you open to, that’s the one we’re going to do together.”

  I sat back, took a drink, and watched Lucja’s eyes grow wide as she saw the cover.

  “Wow,” she said, looking at it front and back, “this is amazing.”

  She closed her eyes, opened the book to a random page, and stared.

  Silence. I watched her scan the page, absorbing every detail.

  “Well, Dion, it looks like we’re doing the Ka-la-har-ree Extreme Marathon.”

  “What the hell’s that?” I asked.

  She didn’t look up but carried on, staring at the page, calling out the brutal facts: “Northwest of South Africa, near the Namibian border … you run 155 miles … six stages over seven days … temperature is in the 120s … carry your own food … only get water at certain times … and it’s in the desert.”

  I thought hard about my response. This was her birthday after all, and I wanted the gift to be a nice thing.

  “No chance.”

  “What?” she said, looking up at me. “I reckon it sounds pretty good.”

  “Listen, Lucja, there’s no way we could do that. What if something happens to one of us? And what do you mean you have to carry your own food? They don’t give you anything at all? How is that even possible?”

  She looked back at the book, flipped a couple of pages, and then slid it over to me and pulled out her iPad. I stared at the pages, a feeling of dread starting to grow within my guts.

  “There’s a whole bunch of blogs from last summer’s race up here on the site,” Lucja said. “And there’s a Facebook page … and a contact form.”

  I stopped her. “Lucja, it says it’s a couple of thousand pounds each. And that’s without flights.”

  “So?”

  “So we could just have a nice holiday in the sun somewhere. Why would we want to do something stupid like running across a desert?”

  Lucja looked hard at me. It was the same look she’d given me as I lay on the couch in New Zealand and she challenged me to the run. I knew that this was one of those pivotal moments in our lives.

  “You said we’re doing it, Dion. So we’re doing it.”

  I backed off, figuring that saying no was only going to make her more determined. I stopped talking about it and assumed that by the time Christmas was over, she’d have forgotten all about it.

  I was wrong. After Christmas, Lucja was more determined than ever, and with the race only ten months away, she felt she had to move fast. She contacted the race rep, downloaded the application form, and told me she was ready to do it.

  It was my last chance to stop her, and I threw the very best reason I could think of at her.

  “How are you going to go without having a shower? What about your hair? Your nails?”

  “I don’t care about that. I’m not bothered. The Orange River runs through one of the stages, and I can wash my hair that day.”

  I tried a different line of attack: “Johannesburg’s got one of the highest murder rates of any city in the world. Do you really want to fly in and out of a city like that?”

  “Dion, I’m doing it. Are you going to come with me?”

  I thought for a while.

  “We’ve got to work off all our Christmas fat.”

  She just stared.

  It was New Zealand all over again. I knew I wasn’t going to be able to stop her, and I didn’t want to. I’d always loved Lucja’s courage and her enthusiasm, and I knew my life had been so much better since I met her. I wanted to make sure she was going to be okay out there, too, even if it meant doing something as ridiculous as running across the Kalahari Desert.

  “Okay,” I said. “I’m in.”

  I hadn’t spoken to Lucja since the night I stayed in Urumqi. Some runners had paid fifty pounds to be able to send e-mails and post blogs during the race, but not me. I didn’t want to be distracted, and I knew Lucja would be able to check the race organizer’s website for daily updates on my times and race position. So it was in Hami, after the awards dinner, that I finally got to phone her after more than a week apart.

  I was actually a little nervous. I had to find a way to tell her I wanted to bring a stray Chinese dog back to live with us. We hadn’t had a dog since Curtly the Saint Bernard. Both of us had taken his death badly; we had an unspoken agreement that neither of us really wanted to go through that kind of pain again.

  As I prepared to dial, I ran through my speech one more time. “Isn’t it great that I finished second? And something weird happened too. A little dog followed me, and I’m beginning to wonder about maybe bringing her home to live with us.”

  If Lucja was on my side, I knew it would happen. If she wasn’t, bringing Gobi home would be a lot harder than I thought.

  The phone rang, and I took a deep breath.

  Even before I could say much more than hello, Lucja started talking.

  “How’s Gobi?”

  I was stunned. “You know about Gobi?”

  “Yeah! A lot of the other runners have mentioned her in their blogs, and she’s even made it into a few official race updates. She’s a pretty little thing, too, isn’t she?”

  “Yes, she is. I wanted to talk to you about something—”

  “You’re bringing her home? As soon as I heard about her, I knew you’d want to.”

  Having been away from cities and civilization for a week, the transfer from the Urumqi train station to the airport left my head spinning. I had forgotten how crowded the city was and how impossible it was to make myself understood. Even something as simple as checking in for my three-leg flight back home took three times as long as it should have. Everywhere I went there were crowds of people, and every official stared at me with thinly veiled suspicion.

  I remembered why I’d vowed never to return to China.

  Had meeting Gobi changed how I felt? Perhaps. The run had matched my previous best—second place in the 2014 Kalahari Augrabies Extreme Marathon—and it had brought Gobi into my life. But I still found it hard to imagine myself coming back. Without knowing any of the language, it was just too hard to get things done.

  I was approaching the gate for my flight back to Beijing when I saw all the race organizers waiting to board.

  I knew the boss had taken an interest in Gobi, and I wanted to make sure she didn’t forget once she got back from the race. I thanked her for getting Nurali to look after Gobi while I went back home to make the arrangements
.

  She handed me her business card. “It’s been fantastic to see the story of you and Gobi take shape. If we can help make it happen, we will.”

  It was only when I got on the plane that I wondered why I hadn’t asked the boss about why Nurali hadn’t shown up at the awards dinner in Hami. I guessed I didn’t want to appear pushy or like I was going to be an awkward person to deal with. But as the plane taxied and I drifted off, I wondered whether maybe there was something more to it than that. I was trusting Nurali to take good care of Gobi, but did I know her that well? Why hadn’t she come to Hami? Was it really just an error of communication, or was it a sign that things might not go so smoothly after all?

  Don’t be paranoid, I told myself. Sleep on it. These things always look better in the morning.

  11

  Lucja met me at the Edinburgh airport with some bad news. While I’d been flying, she’d looked into the process of bringing a dog into the UK.

  “It’s not going to be easy,” she said. “You’d have thought the hardest part of the whole thing would be getting Gobi out of China, but from what I can tell it’s getting her into Britain that’s going to be tough. There’s more red tape than you can imagine.”

  In between missing Gobi and looking forward to seeing Lucja again, I’d done a fair bit of imagining. I’d imagined Gobi held in quarantine, our having to pay astronomical vet bills, and the whole thing’s taking months on end.

  It turned out I was pretty much correct.

  She’d need to spend four months in quarantine, and that wasn’t going to be cheap. But the really bad news was where she would have to serve her time.

  “Heathrow,” said Lucja. “That’s the only option.”

  By Chinese or American standards, the four hundred miles that separate our home in Edinburgh from London’s main airport isn’t all that much. But in the UK, it’s an epic journey that costs hundreds of pounds in petrol or flights, plus even more for hotels and taxis. Life in London isn’t cheap, even for dogs.