ohmidog!

Thanks to a newspaper and a good samaritan, a Chihuahua named Boo’kie was returned home last week after the pickup truck he was in was stolen from a Wal Mart parking lot in Winston-Salem, N.C.

John Jenkins, a 67-year-old cancer patient who’d gone to the store to fill a prescription, spent two sleepless night after Boo’kie, his 7-year-old Chihuahua, disappeared.

The dog had helped him through the death of his wife, in 2009, and his battle with throat and esophageal cancer.

He and friends had searched all last Monday and Tuesday for the dog.

On Tuesday night, Vanessa Calvery, a personal chef, was driving home from delivering meals when she saw a Chihuahua standing in the middle of a road in the rain near her home in Rural Hall.

Calvery, who has two Chihuahuas of her own, stopped her car, bundled the dog up, brought him home, cooked him chicken and made him a bed in her TV room.

The next day, Calvery, who was laid off from her full time job on Jan. 1, took the dog to the Animal Care Clinic in Rural Hall, where she takes her own dogs, because one of his  paws seemed swollen.

One of the veterinarians at the clinic, Preston Roberts, recognized Boo’kie from a story about his disappearance that ran on the front page of the Winston-Salem Journal on Wednesday.

That story, by reporter Laura Graff, noted Boo’kie had one paw larger than the other, a result of frostbite when he was a puppy. The vets office called Jenkins, whose number was published in the story.

By then, Jenkins had gotten his truck back, after it was found abandoned. He got the call just after returning home from getting new keys made.

When he picked the dogs up, he saw that the animal clinic had given Boo’kie a new collar, and implanted a microchip under his skin.

“They done everything, and they charged me nothing,” he said.

Jenkins, according to the Journal’s follow up story, also by Graff,  had offered a $500 reward for Boo’kie’s safe return.

He tried to give it to Calvery when he met her at the clinic.

She turned it down.

(Photo by David Rolfe / Winston-Salem Journal)