Finding Gobi

by Dion Leonard

Making a sudden trip to China to search for a lost dog was not part of my training plan. Six weeks out from Atacama, I should have been clocking one hundred miles a week on the treadmill in my improvised homemade sauna. Instead, I was doing nothing. All my training had fallen away as the search for Gobi overtook my life.

  Putting Atacama aside, I had other good reasons for not going back to China. I’d hardly been at my best at work in the previous weeks, and asking for even more vacation time without giving my employers any notice would be pushing their goodwill to the absolute max. If I were in their position, I knew exactly what I’d say.

  And if I did go, what could I honestly hope to achieve? I couldn’t speak the language, I couldn’t read Chinese, or whatever version of Arabic it was that I’d seen in Urumqi, and I had even less experience searching for lost dogs than the woman who was leading the search. If I went, I’d be wasting their time as well as mine.

  In the end it didn’t take long for me to change my mind. It wasn’t that all my doubts were suddenly answered or that I had a profound sense that if I went, I’d find Gobi. I decided to go because of a simple, compelling fact I shared with Lucja late on the second night after I’d been told Gobi was missing: “If I don’t go, and we never find her, I don’t think I’d ever be able to live with myself.”

  And so it was that I found myself sitting by a departure gate in the Edinburgh airport, ready to embark on a three-flight, thirty-plus-hour journey back to Urumqi. I snapped a photo of my flight itinerary and posted it online. With so many people being kind and generous in the previous days, I wanted them to know I was doing all I could to help.

  Only four days had passed since the phone call, but I flew with the knowledge that the people who had given so generously to help bring Gobi home wanted me to go back and find her. We had set up a second crowdfunding site, called Finding Gobi, to pay for my travel as well as the costs that the search party was already incurring—printing, gas, drivers, staff, and food. As with the Bring Gobi Home site, people’s generosity had left both Lucja and me speechless. We smashed our target of £5,000 within the first couple of days.

  I went with the blessing of my boss as well. When I’d started to tell him that Gobi had gone missing, he didn’t wait for me to finish. “Just go,” he said. “Find the dog. Sort it out. Take whatever time you need.”

  As for Atacama, that was the one problem to which I couldn’t find a solution. I knew that going back to China would be pushing my time-off allowance at work and meant cancelling my plans to race in Chile, but I decided there was no use worrying about it. If I lost Atacama but found Gobi, all would be worthwhile.

  I boarded and checked Facebook one final time. Dozens of messages had come in, all of them full of encouragement, positivity, and good faith. Many of the comments said the same thing: these people were praying for a miracle.

  I agreed. That was exactly what we needed. Nothing less would do.

  Somewhere in the sleepless fog of the all-night flight, the story of Cliff Young came into my mind again.

  Like me, he had no idea that he was going to cause such a stir when he ambled up to the start line in 1983. I’m guessing he didn’t have a clue that he was going to win it either. But he knew he could make the distance. Experience, self-belief, and a little bit of not knowing what he was up against all helped give him the confidence he needed.

  Was I going to find Gobi? I didn’t know. Was I going to be able to do what people suggested and get the local media to cover the story? I didn’t know that either. Did I have any experience of ever having done anything like this before? None at all.

  But I knew I had the heart for the fight. I knew my desire to find Gobi was as strong as any desire I’d ever had within me. Whatever it took, I knew I wasn’t going to rest until there was nowhere left to search.

  14

  Ten minutes after we drove away from the airport, I finally worked out what I didn’t like about Urumqi. I’d been too distracted to notice when I came through the city as I’d been travelling to and from the race, but as I sat in the back of Lu Xin’s car next to the translator, I listened to her explain the reasons why every street light and bridge was covered with closed-circuit TV cameras. I finally understood. Urumqi felt oppressive. It felt dangerous. In an odd way, it reminded me of living in the hostel in Warwick when I was fifteen. The threat of violence was all around, and I felt powerless to defend myself.

  According to my translator, Urumqi is a model for how the Chinese state tackles political unrest and ethnic tensions. There’s a history of violence between the indigenous Uighur people, who practise Sunni Islam and who see themselves as separate from mainstream China, and the Han Chinese people, who have been encouraged by the Chinese state to migrate into the area with the incentive of tax breaks.

  In 2009, Uighur and Han took to the streets, fighting each other with iron pipes and meat cleavers. More than one hundred people died, and almost two thousand were wounded.

  “You see that place?” asked my translator, whom I nicknamed Lil. She was a local girl who happened to be studying English at the university in Shanghai. When she heard about Gobi, she signed up, and right from the start I connected with her.

  We had hit traffic and were crawling past a wide patch of open ground bordered by razor-wire fence and guarded by soldiers holding automatic weapons at the entrance. The soldiers were carefully watching people as they lined up to pass through an airport scanner. To me, it looked like a military facility.

  “That’s a park,” Lil told me. “Have you been to one of the train stations here?”

  “Oh yeah,” I smiled. “That was fun trying to get through. What are there, two layers of security to go through?”

  “Three,” said Lil. “Two years ago Uighur separatists launched an attack. They used knives and set off bombs. They killed three and injured seventy-nine. Then, a few weeks later, they killed thirty-one and wounded ninety at a market.”

  In the wake of the 2009 violence, the Chinese authorities installed thousands of high-definition closed-circuit TV cameras. And when the knife attacks, bombings, and riots resumed a few years later, they installed even more, as well as putting up scanners and miles of razor wire and flooding the streets with heavily armed soldiers.

  Lil pointed out a new police station that was being built on a tiny scrap of land, then another identical one under construction farther down the road. “This month we have a new Communist Party secretary. He was the top official in Tibet, so he knows how to manage ethnic tension. All these new police stations and security checks are thanks to him.”

  I didn’t think Lil was being sarcastic, but I couldn’t be sure. As she continued talking, I got the sense that she thought little of the Uighur people.

  “When Communist forces arrived in the Xinjiang region sixty years ago, Chairman Mao put the clock forward permanently. He wanted every region to be on the same time as Beijing. But Uighur people resisted, and their restaurants and mosques still run two hours behind. When Han Chinese wake up and start work, most Uighur are still asleep. We’re like two different families living in the same house.”

  It was all very interesting, but I hadn’t slept on the flights. All I wanted to do was get to my hotel and hibernate for a few hours.

  Lil said there wasn’t time for the hotel.

  “Lu Xin wants you to meet the team. They spend the afternoons looking in the streets around where Gobi went missing and handing out posters. We’ll take you to the hotel later.”

  Ever since I’d heard about Gobi’s disappearance, I’d been frustrated at what seemed to be a lack of action, so I couldn’t complain now.

  “All right,” I said, as we pulled up at a traffic light alongside an armoured vehicle packing enough firepower to take down a bank. “Let’s do it.”

  When we parked at the top of a residential street and I finally saw the area where Gobi had gone missing, my heart sank. Blocks of flats eight or ten storeys high lined the street. Traffic surged along the main road behind
us, and in the near distance I could see an area of scrubland that looked like it led all the way off to a series of mountains in the distance. Not only was the area densely packed with people and dangerous traffic, but if Gobi had decided to head for familiar territory and run off in the direction of the mountains, she could be miles and miles away. But if she’d stayed in the three-to five-mile radius as Chris had suggested, we’d have to knock on thousands upon thousands of doors.

  I’d not talked to Lu Xin much in the car, but as I stared about, she stood beside me and smiled. She started talking, and I looked to Lil for help.

  “She is telling you about when she lost her dog. She says that she felt just like you do now. She also says that Gobi is out there. She knows it, and she says that together we will find her.”

  I thanked her for her kindness, although I couldn’t share her optimism. The city was even bigger than I remembered, and one look was enough to tell me that the area that Nurali lived in was full of places a dog could go missing. If Gobi was injured and had found somewhere safe to hide, or if she was being kept against her will, we’d never find her.

  Lu Xin and Lil were deep in conversation as they led the way down the street. I followed on behind with the rest of the search team: a handful of people about my age, mainly women, all clutching posters and smiling eagerly at me. I nodded back and said nee-how a few times, but conversation was limited. I didn’t mind so much. Somehow the prospect of finally being able to walk the streets and put up some posters—to actually do something for once—made me feel better.

  We turned a corner, and I saw my first stray dog of the day. It was bigger than Gobi and looked more like a Labrador than a terrier, with teats hanging low on the ground, like a sow.

  “Gobi?” queried one of the ladies next to me. She was wearing a white lab coat and clutching a stack of posters; she smiled and nodded eagerly as I stared back at her. “Gobi?” she asked again.

  “What? Oh no. Not Gobi,” I said. I pointed to the pictures of Gobi on the poster. “Gobi small. Not big.”

  The woman smiled back and nodded with even more enthusiasm.

  I felt the last ounce of hope evaporate like steam.

  We spent the rest of the afternoon walking, putting up posters, and trying to calm down the woman in the white coat—who Lil told me was a doctor of Chinese medicine—whenever she saw a dog of any kind.

  We must have looked like a strange collection of freaks as we followed behind Lu Xin and Lil—the sensible, normal-looking ones. There was me, the only non-Chinese I’d seen since leaving the airport, standing a foot taller than anyone else, looking worried and sad. Alongside me was Mae-Lin, a particularly glamorous woman (a hairdresser, apparently) who carried herself like a 1950s movie star and was accompanied by a poodle with blue dye on its ears and a summer skirt around its waist. Then there was the woman whom I nicknamed “the doctor”, with her perpetual smile and eager cries of “Gobi? Gobi?” which she shouted as she ran off down random alleys and around the back of blocks of flats. When the strays got close, the doctor would reach into her pocket and pull out some treats.

  It was obvious that all of them loved dogs, and as we walked and talked with Lil, I learned why.

  “Stray dogs are a problem in China,” she said, translating for Lu Xin. “Some cities will round them up and kill them. That’s how they get into the meat trade. But that doesn’t happen here—at least, not in public. Most Uighur think dogs are unclean, and there’s no way they would have them as a pet in their house, let alone eat them.

  “So the dogs roam the streets. They can sometimes be dangerous, so people kill them. That’s what we’re trying to change. We want to look after the strays, but we also want to show people that they don’t need to be scared of dogs and they should look after them too.”

  I was sure that Nurali was a Uighur, and I didn’t quite know how to take Lu Xin’s news.

  “Do you think Nurali would have looked after Gobi well?”

  Lu Xin looked awkward.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “We’ve been talking to people, and we think Gobi might have gone missing before Nurali thinks she did. We think Gobi may have escaped earlier.”

  “How much earlier?”

  She shrugged. “Maybe one week. Maybe ten days.”

  I’d suspected as much all along, but it was still painful to hear. If Gobi really had been missing for so long, the distance she could have covered was vast. She could be far, far away from the city by now. And if she was, I’d never find her.

  All throughout the afternoon we saw strays, but they were always alone. They avoided the main roads and trotted down the side of the quieter ones. It was like they were trying to keep themselves out of sight.

  It was only after a few hours that we saw our first pack of strays. They were sniffing around a patch of bare earth a few hundred feet away, and because I was tired of walking and wanted to cut loose and run for a while, I told my fellow searchers that I was going to head off and quickly check them out.

  It felt good to run.

  When I reached the place where the pack of dogs had been, they’d already scattered. The patch of land wasn’t totally empty, and in one corner there was a half-finished cinder-block structure. Instead of turning around and going back to rejoin the others, I decided to poke around.

  The weather was so much hotter in August than it had been at the end of June, and the sun was fierce that afternoon. I guess that was why there weren’t any other people around and the noise of the traffic had subsided. I stood in the shade of the half-built building, enjoying the stillness.

  Something caught my attention. It was a familiar sound, one that took me back to the day when Lucja and I went to retrieve Curtly, our Saint Bernard.

  I went around the back of the building in search of the source.

  I found it soon enough.

  Puppies. A litter of two, maybe four or five weeks old. I watched for a while. There was no sign of their mum, but they looked well enough. Even though Urumqi was clearly not a haven for pets, the dense housing meant that there must have been plenty of opportunities for a dog to scavenge food.

  With their big eyes and clumsy paws, the puppies weren’t just cute; they were adorable. But as with all mammals, that helpless, cuddly phase would pass. I wondered how long they’d have before they would be forced to fend for themselves. I wondered whether they’d both make it.

  I heard the others calling my name as I approached them. They were clearly agitated, and the doctor ran out to grab my hand and hurry me back to Lil.

  “Someone has seen a dog they think is Gobi. We need to go.”

  I didn’t know what to think, but there was a buzz in the air. Even Lu Xin was looking hopeful, and as we drove the half mile to the location, the chatter in the car became increasingly animated.

  By the time we got there, I was starting to believe it too. Then again, I probably would have believed anything; I hadn’t slept properly in thirty-six hours, and I couldn’t remember the last time I had eaten.

  An old man holding one of our posters introduced himself to Lil as we parked. The two talked for a while, the old guy pointing to the picture of Gobi on the poster and indicating that he’d seen her some way down a track that ran around the back of a block of flats.

  We went where he suggested. I tried to tell people that their habit of calling out “Gobi! Gobi!” as we walked was pointless, given that Gobi had been known by that name for only a few days. She was smart but not that smart.

  Nobody took my advice, and the cries of “Go-bi! Gooooo-bi!” continued. After thirty minutes of wandering, I was beginning to tire. The surge of adrenaline I’d experienced when the news of the sighting first came in had long gone, and I was ready to call it a day and get to the hotel.

  The flash of brown fur a few hundred feet ahead stopped us all in our tracks. There was a moment of collective silence. Then chaos erupted.

  I ran hard towards the dog, leaving the sound of the others ca
lling out far behind me. Could it really be Gobi? The colour was right, and it looked like the same size as well. But it couldn’t be her, could it? Surely it couldn’t be this easy?

  The dog was nowhere to be seen when I got there. I carried on searching, running down the network of alleys and dirt paths that connected the blocks of flats.

  “Gobi? Gobi! Dion! Dion!”

  The shouting came from behind me, somewhere back near the main path.

  I raced back.

  The searchers were gathered in a knot, crowding around. They parted as I approached, revealing a tan-coloured terrier. Black eyes. Bushy tail. Everything was a match. But it wasn’t Gobi. I knew it from ten feet away. The legs were too long and the tail too short, and I knew from looking at the dog that it had none of Gobi’s spirit. It was sniffing around people’s feet as if their legs were tree trunks. Gobi would have been looking up, her eyes digging deep into whatever human happened to be close at hand.

  The others took some convincing, but eventually they accepted it.

  The search would have to continue.

  Back in the hotel, in the minutes before my body gave in to the deep tiredness that had been growing all day, I thought back on the afternoon.

  The members of the search team were wonderful people—dedicated and enthusiastic and giving up their time for no financial reward whatsoever—but they didn’t have a clue about Gobi. They were searching a whole city that was full of strays for a single dog, and all they had to go on was a home-printed poster with a couple of low-quality images.

  They’d never seen her in person, never even heard her bark or watched the way her tail bobbed about when she ran. What chance did they have of recognizing her in a city like this?

  Finding Gobi was going to be like finding a needle in a haystack—maybe an even greater challenge than that. I was an idiot for ever thinking that I’d be able to do it.

  15

  You could say I’m an addict. the feeling I get when I’m in a race, when I’m right at the very front, is a powerful drug. At some races, like the Marathon des Sables, if you’re the guy at the head of the pack, you’ll have a car ahead of you, helicopters tracking you from the air, and a whole load of drones and film crews capturing your moment in full high-definition glory. It’s fun, but the real buzz doesn’t come from all that horsepower and technology. What gets me fired up is the knowledge that behind me is a herd of one thousand runners—all running a little bit slower than me.