Best In Dogdom

The boy had been missing for three days. State Police, neighbors, troops of Boy Scouts and small armies of volunteer searchers beat the countryside. Finally the State Police brought out their bloodhounds. In the ancient tradition, they gave the hounds pieces of the boy's clothing to sniff and sent them out to start a trail. Still no trace of the small boy could be found. He had vanished completely.

On the evening of the third day, a man appeared with a strange looking gray dog. The dog had houndlike ears, light eyes, a short tail, a silken bluish gray coat. He was quite large, weighing about eighty pounds.

"Let me try," the man said. "This dog of mine can find anything."

Police and spectators laughed. "Listen," said the sergeant in charge, "if our hounds, with the hottest noses in this state, can't find the kid, what do you expect to do with that thing?"

The man flushed and turned to the missing boy's uncle, who was standing beside the police sergeant.

"It's worth a try, isn't it? Lets's go back and start from the house and see if my dog can't pick up a trail."

The uncle gave the man with the gray dog a long look, then nodded. Together they walked back to the house. The boy's uncle went into the house and returned with a small, now pathetic object--a tiny sweater. The man took it from him, held it under his dog's nose.

Immediately the dog went into action. From the doorway of the house, nose to the ground, he started a long easy lope directly toward a small river about a quarter of a mile distant. The men followed. They came to a halt on the river's edge, where the dog stood immobile, his head high, looking out across the water.

Silently the men regarded each other.

"No," the uncle said a little brokenly, "it can't be. The bloodhounds have been out this way many times. It can't be! Let's try again."

So they did. They tried again, and again. The dog kept returning to the same spot on the river's edge. Finally the uncle summoned the State Police and the river was dredged.

Fifteen yards from where the gray dog had halted, they found the boy's body.

When the story hit the papers a line appeared stating that the amazing gray dog had found the boy in one hour after the trail had been cold three days, hundreds of people had walked over it, and the trail had been worked by some of the best bloodhounds in the state.

The boy's uncle took exception to this. He wrote one of the papers that had printed the story: "You are entirely wrong about the length of time. That gray dog, that Weimaraner found my nephew in exactly ten minutes. We didn't want to believe that the boy was drowned, so we made the dog retrace his steps three times before we were convinced..."

This was probably the first time public notice of the gray dog's amazing ability reached the press, the first time most people heard of the name Weimaraner.

The second time was when the same dog found an old woman who had been lost in a New England forest.