This is a sad dog story, in more ways than one. But it has a happy ending.

Annie is an English Pointer. She is an old dog who has seen her share of upland bird covers. Not a great pointer, but she has a good nose and likes to find birds. Most of her best days have been spent hunting northern Penobscot County with the late legendary guide Wiggie Robinson. Annie outlived Wiggie, and Wiggie’s son, Jay, found a home for Annie. Ron Hastie, a Massachusets bird hunter who spends a lot of time in Maine, adopted Annie. Ron and the old girl became fast friends, although Ron’s patience with his new pointer does wear thin at times . The dog is a bolter. You can be working a cover with Annie and, all of a sudden, for no good reason, she will be hell bent for the next county. Ron spends as much time trying to find this dog as he does trying to find birds. But he loves her, more so around camp than in the coverts.

This winter, during on overnight stay at a Bangor motel, Ron let Annie out in the morning to pee. She ran away. After a fruitless two-hour search, Ron notified local authorities about his missing dog and continued his journey to his woods camp north of Bangor. Unknown to Ron, Annie showed herself a few days later. She was dropped off at the Bangor Humane Society. What happened after that boggles the mind, and there has yet to be a truly plausible explanation.

A Humane Society employee removed Annie’s blaze orange hunt collar, along with tags that contained telephone numbers from Longmeadow, Mass. She gave Annie a spanking new fresh collar. Annie was checked by a vet, photographed, fed and then placed in a kennel. No attempt was made to call any of the phone numbers on the dog’s collar. Annie’s identification and collar were, according to a humane society spokesman, “filed away.” Annie’s photo was placed on the humane society adoption page. The ad even gave Annie a new name: “Please adopt Betty White, a senior citizen who is looking for a good home.” The price of adoption was $350.00.

While this was going on, Ron’s friend, Scott, made three calls to the humane society. Each time Scott described this black and white pointer and each time he was told there was no dog of this description in their kennels. Then, by chance, Scott looked at the humane society adoption page online and, behold, there was Annie! He called Ron who phoned the humane society and pressed them, hard. Finally, after his detailed description they conceded that, indeed, Betty White was really his Annie. Six highway hours later, Ron arrived in Bangor to get his gun dog.

Ron got Annie, but he was not a happy camper. At first, the humane society folks had excuses.

“Nothing made any sense,” Ron said. “Why didn’t they just call the telephone numbers on her collar? Why did they deny having the dog? How many other dogs have been put up for sale without any attempt to locate the dog’s owner?”

He recalls that, after an extended discussion, humane society officials, director Suzan Bell and operations manager Chris Young, “began looking at their toes.” Pressed, they conceded that there was no excuse for what transpired.

“Then they actually tried to get me to pay the $350 to get back my own dog, a dog that they, in effect, had dog-napped!, ” said Ron.  “I could not believe it. I told them that their behavior was borderline larcenous. It would have been one thing if Annie had had no ID on her, but there were two different phone numbers on her collar. Why didn’t they just make a call?”

Hastie says it doesn’t add up. If, as humane society director Bell contends, the society always goes to great efforts to locate owners of stray dogs, how did the system break down? Hastie is convinced that, for whatever reason, the employee who changed Annie’s identity did not want the pointer returned to her rightful owner. A Massachusetts bias? An anti-hunting agenda? (Annie was wearing a hunting collar).

Given the circumstances, humane society executive director Bell was forthright, and, indeed, refreshingly candid, when I talked with her.

“We really screwed up in a big way,” said Bell. “There is no other way to look at it. This never should have happened.”

She said that remedial action has been taken with the employee and there have been a number of staff meetings held to make sure that “this never happens again.”

People do make mistakes. Each year, 5,000 dogs, either strays or “surrenders,” get turned over to the Bangor Humane Society. This organization does have a big job. Maybe Annie simply fell through the bureaucratic cracks, though this theory strains credulity, especially if, as Bell contends, finding a missing dog’s owner is Job No 1. There must be a motive, a reason why the humane society employee in question simply shrugged off the protocol. She was not a new employee; she had to have known better. So why did she do it?

Bell won’t say.

“It’s a personnel matter, privacy issue,” Bell said.

Bell also insists that there is no anti-hunting agenda or any other agenda.

“Our job is to find homes for dogs, not keep them,” she added.

So we may never know how this near dog-napping caper really came about. Only Annie, the bolter, knows for sure, but at least she is back at Ron’s feet, and not far from the warming hearth in Longmeadow, Mass.

Postscript: Annie’s owner, though he refused to cough up $350, did make a $50 donation to the cause.

The author is editor of the Northwoods Sporting Journal. He is also a Maine Guide, co-host of a weekly radio program “Maine Outdoors” heard Sundays at 7 p.m. on The Voice of Maine News-Talk Network (WVOM-FM 103.9, WQVM-FM 101.3) and former information officer for the Maine Dept. of Fish and Wildlife. His e-mail address is [email protected] and his new book is “A Maine Deer Hunter’s Logbook.”