Photo by Danny Fulgencio
When the Miller family lost their dachshund Millie, a friend advised them to ask St. Anthony of Padua, the patron saint of lost things, to intervene.
They did. But they also put up 250 flyers, blanketing a radius around their home on Kingsley Creek Circle. They visited every veterinarian’s office in their Zip code. They contacted Home Again, the company that micro-chipped the dog. And they spread the word on NextDoor.
Millie slipped out at 1 a.m. while Ryan Miller was loading some things into his SUV in the garage, and no one realized it until the next day.
That was a Wednesday.
On Saturday, a guy saw one of their flyers on Merriman Parkway and called.
“He said, ‘I know that dog, and I know where she is,’” recalls Nancy Miller, Ryan’s mom.
A night-shift worker had picked her up and taken her to his apartment. Since he worked nights and spoke only Spanish, the man who found her had kept Millie, but he hadn’t made an effort to find her owners.
The guy who saw the flyer led Nancy Miller and her husband, Don, to his neighbor’s apartment the next day, Sunday.
They pulled up to the apartment at Fair Oaks Crossing, more than a mile from home, and saw that the patio door was slightly ajar.
Photo by Danny Fulgencio
Nancy Miller called to Millie.
“There’s no doubt,” she says. “We know her bark.”
Millie came out on the second-story patio.
Don Miller went home to get a ladder, but Nancy Miller stayed.
“I wasn’t about to take my eyes off of her,” she says.
The resident had woken up by the time they had the ladder.
The guy who found the flyer, whose name happens to be Anthony, and the guy who found Millie were speaking in Spanish.
“I was crying. Anthony’s girlfriend was crying,” she says. “Anthony was crying.”
It turns out the guy who found Millie saw her on the side of the road, so he stopped and called to her, and she ran under his truck. He hadn’t had time to bring her to a vet to check for a microchip.
“He was so kind to her,” Nancy Miller says. “She was well fed. She’d had a bath.”
She gave each guy a reward, even though neither asked for one.
Millie really belongs to the Millers’ adult son, Ryan. He fell in love with her at a dachshund meet
up six years ago. They’re a dachshund family, having owned several of the little dogs over the years.
Nancy Miller thinks it’s no accident that an Anthony helped them find Millie after they’d asked St. Anthony to intervene.
“I felt there was definitely the hand of God in helping us find her,” she says.
By the way, they picked up all 250 flyers and called all of those vets’ offices to tell them they found Millie.
Photo by Danny Fulgencio
