Sheila Delamater was camping in Peru late last month when an injured dog limped behind her campsite. She and another camper propped him up with pillows and a blanket. For hours, the women pampered and fussed. They nicknamed him Buddy.

“He was spasming all the time, shaking constantly,” Delamater said. “A couple of times, he tried to get up but couldn’t.”

The dog with a pale brown coat and black circle around his eye had on a collar but no tags.

“He was just so happy to have help, he was the gentlest animal,” she said. When an animal control officer finally arrived and took Buddy away, “We were all worrying and kept asking, ‘What happened to him?’ “

The ladies didn’t think he’d make it.

Flash forward three weeks.

Delamater, a Realtor at ERA Worden in Auburn, was pounding a “For Sale” sign into the ground of a client’s lawn in Sumner when a woman delivering mail pulled up and asked for a business card.

Darlene Marrone had been driving her usual mail route and thinking out loud to her late husband, Wayne. She hadn’t been sure that selling their house – too big for her now – was a good idea.

“It sounds corny. I was just saying, ‘Give me a sign I (am) doing the right thing,’ ” Marrone said. That’s when she rounded the bend and saw Delamater. She thought, “OK, this is the sign. I’m taking this sign.”

Because Delamater drives a car marked up with company logos, people sometimes just walk up to her and ask about becoming a client. That in itself wasn’t unusual.

But when Delamater walked into Marrone’s house two days later on Labrador Pond Road in Sumner, the injured dog with the pale brown coat and black circle around his eye was in the living room.

His name? Spuddy.

“It was just like I entered the Twilight Zone,” Delamater said.

The evening before Delamater found the animal at the Snowshoe Club Campground, Marrone had let Spuddy, or Spuds, out to go to the bathroom with her two other dogs, like normal. She noticed a truck full of teenagers hooting and hollering at the end of her lawn, through bushes, and didn’t think anything of it. Then Spuddy went missing.

Marrone had owned the 15-year-old dog his whole life, even bottle-fed him as a pup. The next day, her son came up from Massachusetts to help mount a search.

“We put posters up, just talking to everyone,” she said. Along her mail route, she mentioned him to everyone she saw.

When the dog had been gone two days, her son called the local vet, then the Lewiston Animal Hospital. That’s where the animal control officer had brought Spuddy.

“He had a fractured pelvis and a few bruises here and there,” Marrone said. No one knows for certain how it happened. She suspects the boys took him for a joy ride. He might have been tossed from the truck.

“We got him back home and spoiled him rotten,” she said.

Over hugs and tears, Marrone and Delamater swapped Spuddy/Buddy stories.

“It was uncanny, just funny,” Marrone said. “I’m talking like a mom, but I was so worried about him being scared and alone. To know they did that, I felt so much better about the whole thing.”

Spuddy is now on the mend, starting to act like his old self. Marrone listed her house for sale with Delamater.

“It can’t be a coincidence,” Delamater said. “It was like it was fate, or something like the X-Files, only it was a good story.”