DIXFIELD – Brad Bowie hardly ever goes to the town office.

When he did Wednesday, he got the shock of his life.

His black Labrador retriever, “Taja,” was there ahead of him.

The catch was, she’s been missing for more than a year.

“I was stunned” when he saw her, said Bowie. He had given the dog up for dead.

“I couldn’t believe it. I seen the dog’s tail as she went around the counter when I came in, then when I said something, she stood and stuck her face up over the counter. It’s a miracle!”

But he didn’t want to make a scene, he said, thinking that someone in the office had been taking care of the dog all that time. So he didn’t say anything then.

Instead, he went back to his Hall Hill Road home – nearly a mile from the town office – to get some papers that he had forgotten on his first trip to the office. He needed them to register his ATVs, the reason for the somewhat rare visit to the center of municipal government.

“I was going to register the ATVs four weeks ago, but I kept putting it off until today,” Bowie said Wednesday.

When he returned to the town office, though, Deputy Treasurer Charlotte Collins and Assistant Town Clerk Theresa Hemingway asked him if he was missing a dog.

He wasn’t about to say no.

“I said, That’s my dog!'” Bowie said, recognizing Taja as the dog he’d raised as a puppy.

He’d trained it to go duck hunting with him and retrieve ducks. The dog used to ride with him everywhere in his truck. It was the same animal he and his wife thought of as their second child.

“I had duck hunted with her right up until she left, and I haven’t bought my duck stamp since. I had assumed she had gone into the woods and passed away. I always wondered if she was chasing ducks in heaven,” said Bowie, a millwright at Irving Forest Products in Dixfield.

Taja, now 13, was 11-and-a-half-years old when she slipped out of her collar and disappeared.

Bowie said that before her vanishing act, she would get loose and walk a mile down to The Corner Store at the intersection of Main and Weld streets, and get fed a dog bone.

Sometimes she’d cross the street to the parking lot in front of the American Legion to the hot dog stand for a handout.

That’s where he’d always found her, at either of those two places.

Certainly not at the post office, where Jamie Dennett of Dixfield found Taja loitering outside Wednesday morning, before taking her into the town office.

“It’s too bad she can’t talk. I’d like to know where she’s been. I just can’t believe she’s back,” Bowie added.

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