A St. Thomas, Ont., woman is thrilled to be reunited with her beloved dog after roughly two months apart, thanks to the kindness of a truck driver from Nova Scotia.
Victoria Craig dropped her three-year-old border collie, Kilt, off with a friend and breeder in New York while she prepared to travel Nepal for humanitarian work in early March, but the novel coronavirus pandemic and the dog’s pregnancy made for a complicated and delayed return home.
“My trip to Nepal has been postponed until it’s deemed safe to go, but Kilt was already in New York and had had her puppies and was there. She was being well taken care of and I didn’t have to worry that way,” Craig explained.
“But as time grew longer and the border has been closed for longer — and most recently just announced that it’s going to be closed for at least another month — thoughts became, ‘how am I going to get my dog home?’ I really didn’t have any viable solutions so I started looking outside the box.”
Craig posted on social media last week asking if any of her contacts knew any truckers running a route through Buffalo, New York and into Ontario who would be willing to help. She says many people tried to help but plans kept falling through and she was beginning to lose hope.
“I got up Sunday morning and there was a message from an old friend in Nova Scotia who I’ve probably known for 15 years. We used to compete in dog sports together and he asked me if I’d found a way to get Kilt home yet and I told him that I hadn’t,” she said.
“I’m not kidding, three minutes later he connected me to two new friends — Kristy and Jeff Dalby from Bridgewater, Nova Scotia. Jeff said, ‘just a minute, I’m going to check with some of my people.’
“Five minutes later he came back on the message and he said, ‘you know what, I’ve found someone and he’s four hours away from picking up your dog.'”
The truck driver who answered the call, Erik MacDonald, was going through Hamburg, N.Y., where Kilt was and was heading through Buffalo, N.Y., and into Ontario.
Craig said MacDonald was wonderful and would send her photos of her border collie every time he stopped.
“I was so excited and grateful,” said Craig.
“I couldn’t believe how giving and willing these people were to help me just bring Kilt home.”
Craig said she was originally planning to meet MacDonald at the border, but MacDonald told her he would be passing closer.
“Instead of having to drive all the way to Fort Erie to collect her, I only had to go as far as Cambridge,” she said.
She sat in a parking lot waiting to reunite with Kilt and thinking of how she could ever repay MacDonald.
“‘Thank you’ didn’t seem like enough so when he got out of the truck I said, ‘Erik, I’m so grateful to you, I’d like to offer you a little money, it’s not a lot, but here’s a little bit of money to help you for your trouble, for your gas, for just being so wonderful,'” she explained.
“He said, ‘absolutely not, I’m not interested in that. I didn’t do it for the money. I did it because I wanted to help.'”
Craig adds that the puppies are still in New York and most are due to go to their homes in the next week. Three puppies, however, still need to come back to Canada.
“If there’s anybody out there listening that knows some willing truckers that would be willing to take a crate of three eight-week-old puppies across the border, that would be most appreciated as well.”
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