Finding Gobi

by Dion Leonard

  Nurali was as good as her word. When she was back in China a few days later, she e-mailed Kiki and promised to get things happening quickly.

  Great, I thought, when Kiki told me the news. Not long now.

  A day later I checked in with Kiki: Any word from Nurali on when you can send your person out to Urumqi?

  Her reply was quick.

  Dion, I have not heard back from Nurali. Kiki.

  I waited another day.

  Any news today, Kiki?

  Again, Kiki got straight back.

  No.

  I e-mailed the race organizer again: Why’s this all taking so long? Don’t tell me something’s happened.

  The next day, Kiki had nothing to report, and my inbox didn’t get anything from the race organizer either.

  Another day passed, and from the moment I woke up, I knew something wasn’t right. Sitting in bed, waiting for the alarm again, I was as wired as if I were already on my third coffee. I couldn’t tell Lucja exactly what I thought was wrong. “But there’s a problem,” I said. “I just know there is.”

  I got up and checked my phone, knowing it was already late afternoon in China. Among the handful of e-mails from journalists and the great pile of notifications from the crowdfunding page, one stood out:

  To: Dion Leonard

  From: **** ****

  Date: August 15, 2016

  Subject: Gobi

  Dion, I need to ring you.

  When the race organizer and I spoke later that morning, there was a part of me that wasn’t surprised by what I heard. She told me that while Nurali had been away in the United States, her father-in-law had been looking after Gobi. She’d run away for a day or two but come back for food. Then she had gone missing again and hadn’t returned at all. Gobi had been missing for several days now.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said. I was trying to remain calm and not explode with a barrage of expletives. I was bloody furious. “What are they doing to find her?”

  “Nurali’s got people out there looking. They’re doing their best to find her.”

  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 k
eep 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

  13

  There’s barely an Australian alive who hasn’t heard of the ultra-runner Cliff Young. The man’s an inspiration to all of us, not just endurance athletes. To anyone who has ever faced an insurmountable challenge that nobody believes can be overcome, Cliff’s story offers hope.

  On Wednesday, 27 April, 1983, Cliff Young turned up at the Westfield shopping mall in the western suburbs of Sydney, looking for the start line to a remarkable race. The route led to another Westfield shopping mall, 543.7 miles away in Melbourne.

  The race was widely considered to be the toughest of its kind, and the assembled field included some of the best in the world, men in their prime who had trained for months to reach peak physical condition for the event.

  Cliff stood out from the handful of runners who had gathered for the brutal race. He was sixty-one years old, wore overalls and work boots, and had removed his dentures because he didn’t like the way they rattled when he ran.

  While most people assumed he was either a spectator or a maintenance guy who’d gotten slightly lost, Cliff collected his race number and joined the other runners.

  “Mate,” said one of the journalists when he saw Cliff on the line, “d’you think you can finish the race?”

  “Yes, I can,” said Cliff. “See, I grew up on a farm where we couldn’t afford horses or tractors, and the whole time I was growing up, whenever the storms would roll in, I’d have to go out and round up the sheep. We had two thousand sheep on two thousand acres. Sometimes I would have to run those sheep for two or three days. It took a long time, but I’d always catch them. I believe I can run this race.”

  The race started, and Cliff was left behind. He didn’t even run right; he had this weird-looking shuffle where he barely lifted his feet from the ground. By the end of the first day, when all the runners decided to stop and get some sleep, Cliff was miles and miles behind them.

  The pros knew how to pace themselves for the run, and they all worked the same plan of running for eighteen hours a day and sleeping for six. That way the fastest among them hoped to reach the end in about seven days.

  Cliff was working with a different plan. When they resumed the race the next morning, the other runners were shocked to hear that Cliff was still in the race. He’d not slept and had shuffled his way right through the night.

  He did the same thing the second night as well as the third. With each morning came more news of how Cliff had jogged through the night, breaking down the lead that the runners half his age tried to stretch out in the day.

  Eventually Cliff overtook them, and after five days, fifteen hours, and four minutes, he crossed the finish line. He had broken the record by almost two full days, beating the five other runners who finished the race.

  To Cliff’s surprise, he was handed a winner’s cheque for $10,000. He said he didn’t know that there was a prize and insisted he had not entered the race for the money. He refused to take a cent for himself and instead divided it equally among the other five finishers.

  Cliff became nothing short of a legend. It was hard to know what footage of him people loved most: the shots of him shuffling along highways in slacks and a casual T-shirt or the images of him chasing sheep around the pasture, wearing gum boots and a look of pure determination.

  I was a kid when the Aussie news networks covered Cliff’s story. He was a celebrity, a genuine one-of-a-kind who had done something amazing that made the whole nation take notice. It wasn’t until I became a runner myself that I appreciated how remarkable his achievement was. And it wasn’t until Gobi went missing and I found myself on a flight back to China that I returned to his story and drew inspiration from it.

  The day after I posted the news that Gobi was missing, we were flooded with messages from people all over the world. Some were positive and full of sympathy, prayers, and good wishes. Other posts expressed fears that Gobi would eventually end up being eaten. It was the first time I’d ever thought about the possibility, but it didn’t strike me as very likely. Even though I’d spent only ten days in China, I had a feeling that the rumour of the Chinese as dog eaters was probably off the mark. Sure, I’d seen stray dogs around the place, but I’d seen the same in Morocco, India, and even Spain. Instead of being cruel, every Chinese person who’d taken an interest in Gobi had treated her with care and affection, nothing less.

  While I appreciated people’s warm wishes and could handle their panic, there was a third type of message that I just didn’t know what to do with:

  How the hell did that happen?! Seriously????

  I knew something like this would happen … What a horrible place for that dog to be lost too. I’m disgusted for how this was handled.

  How on earth was the dog able to escape????

  These “caregivers” had one job to keep this precious small dog safe and these [supposed] guardians failed her! … How do you lose a dog you were supposed to be watching until she could be ADOPTED!

  I felt bad. In fact, I felt terrible. So many people had given so much money—about £20,000 by the time she went missing—and now Gobi was gone. I knew that in the eyes of the public I was fully responsible for Gobi. I accepted that and knew the blame stuck with me.

  If I’d handled things differently, Gobi wouldn’t have gone missing. Yet what else could I have done? When I finished the race and left Gobi with Nurali, I assumed it would take only a few weeks before we’d be reunited in Britain so Gobi could begin the quarantine process. Had I known how hard it was going to be to get her across China and then out of the country, I would have hired a driver and taken Gobi back to Beijing myself. But all I knew, at the time I finished the race, was that Nurali—who seemed to me the very best person for the job—was happy to help. At the time it seemed enough.

  I was tempted to reply to each message, but they were coming in even faster than they had after the Daily Mirror article had hit. Every few minutes there was a new comment, and I knew that it was best just to give people the space they needed to vent their anger. There was no point in getting drawn into any arguments.

  Besides, there was another type of comment that started to get my attention.

  I wonder if it’s a kidnap situation due to all the publicity surrounding her story.

  Even though I can get annoyed with people when they mess up, I’m generally a very trusting person. I’d never thought of Gobi’s escape as anything other than an accident. The more I read of these messages, however, the more I started to wonder.

  I hope this wasn’t intentional or that someone wasn’t behind this. Forgive my suspicion, bu
t I don’t understand how this could happen! Gobi’s story went global, and I just hope someone (not Dion) isn’t trying to make money off taking her. Missing for days, and you were just notified?

  The comments did make a good point. Thousands of people around the world were following the story, and the crowdfunding total was visible to all. Was it hard to imagine someone trying to make some easy money by dognapping Gobi and hoping we’d pay a reward for her safe return?

  I was supposed to be working, and I tried my best to get on with the reports I had to write, but it was hard going. I must have spent most of the day distracted by all these thoughts and questions. I felt like a feather in a storm: powerless and at the mercy of forces far, far stronger than me. By the time Lucja came home from work, I was exhausted.

  She’d been following the feedback throughout the day, and while I had been sidetracked by the posts that looked for someone to blame, she’d been struck by the ones that tried to find a solution:

  Can you fly there to look? She’ll feel you and find you! Please use the funds to keep her safe until she flies home with you. This is devastating.

  She is looking for you. Heartbreaking. I am praying she is found safe. I don’t think anyone would think twice if you used some of that crowdfunding money to offer a reward for her safe return. Has this been put out to the media outlets to get the word out?

  I’d been home for six weeks and had about the same amount of time left before going to another 155-mile race in the Atacama Desert in Chile that October. I’d not picked up any injuries in China, and I’d been able to resume my training almost as soon as I got home. I was convinced that I was going to be in the best possible condition to go out and win Atacama, especially now that I knew some of the runners I was going to be up against, such as Tommy and Julian. And if I won Atacama, I’d go to Marathon des Sables in 2017, ready to score a top-twenty place. In the whole history of the race, no Australian had ever finished higher.