After being lost for nearly a month, Frankie the dog was finally found -- having somehow crossed nearly a mile and a half of strong tides and an international border to get from Eastport to Deer Island. If he swam, he probably didn't clear through customs, though. His owners, Blake and Ronda Shavers of Perry, are elated, but the tale is also poignant, as Frankie's sister Gracie died after the two nearly four-year-old dogs got loose from their home.
      Named like the TV comedy show "Grace and Frankie," the two lab mixes -- "Heinz 57" Ronda calls them after the company's slogan advertising its variety of products -- had taken off on September 9 while the Shavers had gone overnight to Bangor, where Ronda was taking a flight. A pet-sitter had come to their home to check on them, but the two dogs were able to escape out the door and took off. The pet-sitter called the Shavers, and Blake came home and hunted for them until about 10 that evening. "We felt horrible," Ronda remembers.
      "There was a rain storm that night," she recalls, and the next morning Gracie was found dead near the intersection of Route 1 and the Cannon Hill Road, having been hit by a vehicle during the night. They then searched for Frankie, placing posters "everywhere," contacting the animal control officer, Tony Bennett, and "we notified the garbage man, the UPS and Fedex drivers," and anyone who might be driving around and would see a loose dog, Ronda relates. The search for Frankie was also posted on Facebook sites and in an ad in the September 22 issue of The Quoddy Tides.
      On September 27, the Shavers' electrician, Paul Mitchell, and his son Cam, who both knew Frankie from having worked at the Shavers' home, spotted the dog along the side of the road on Carlow Island, near the causeway into Eastport. A woman, though, approached Frankie, and he took off onto the beach.
      A couple of days later, "he surfaced on Deer Island," says Ronda. Late one night, he scratched at the door of the home of Vaughn and Kathy Lambert of Lambertville, who let him in, with Frankie almost knocking Vaughn over as he ran past him. "He ran upstairs, they put a blanket on the floor, and he went to sleep," she says. The Lamberts "hunted around the neighborhood" to see if anyone was missing a dog, and a neighbor posted about the missing dog on Facebook. "No one on the island had a clue whose dog that was," Ronda says, and, with an international border between them, the Deer Island and Perry/Eastport area communities are not in much if any contact with each other through social media. Frankie stayed two days with the Lamberts, who then took him to the Charlotte County SPCA in St. Stephen, which posted Frankie's photo on their website.
      Then Michael Cline, an RCMP officer in Alberta, saw the ad about Frankie's being missing in The Quoddy Tides. Cline is originally from Deer Island and gets the newspaper, "although it comes about a week late because of the mail," Ronda says. He had also seen the posts on Facebook by the Deer Islanders and knew it was the same dog. He called the Shavers on October 4 and told them, "I think I know where your dog is. It looks just like the picture in The Quoddy Tides." Frankie has a microchip identification on him, and when that was checked at the SPCA, it confirmed that the dog was indeed Frankie.
      "It was awesome," says Ronda. "I cried. We were so elated to find him. We lost his sister and were just about at the point of giving up. It was about a month, and no one had seen him."
      Of the reunion, she says, "It was amazing. I was so glad and so excited to get him home."
      "We're just happy he's home, and he's happy to be home." Frankie, who had been chubby, lost 10 pounds during the ordeal and is now trim. However, when he got home he was treated to a steak dinner, after which he slept for a day and a half.
      "God knows how he got to Deer Island," Ronda notes. It's possible that Frankie caught a ride in a vehicle and was driven up through Calais, St. Stephen and St. George and then taken on the ferry to the island -- or over to Lubec and across the border to Campobello and taken a different ferry to Deer Island -- or he could have swum and been carried by the strong tides in Western Passage across the border and the nearly mile and a half to the Canadian island. Or he might even have been picked up by a fishing boat. The SPCA posted a video of Frankie getting into the Shavers' car, and someone who saw the video told Ronda that there had been "crazy tides with the full moon during that period."
      "It's possible he swam over," says Ronda. Noting that Gracie was the alpha dog of the two, she says, "His sister was an avid swimmer, but he's not. He would have had to have been scared to death to swim across."
      "It's a mystery," she adds. "We wish he could talk."
      The Shavers are very grateful to Cline -- "he saw it in The Quoddy Tides and put two and two together" -- the Lamberts and all who helped. Ronda observes, "You can post what you want on Facebook, but The Quoddy Tides came through."