He thought his dog was gone forever. Seven years later, the phone rang.

Boston Globe

31-01-2025

After 2,813 days, Guilbeault, now 43, had resigned himself to what seemed like an inescapable conclusion: Damian was dead, killed by an opportunistic predator or a distracted driver.
Then came Day 2,814 — and a text from a mysterious number saying he had been found.
'I was like, 'Shut the front door!'' Guilbeault remembered saying.
After nearly eight years, someone had nearly run over — and then found — his miniature Doberman Pinscher.
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A new life starts with heartbreak
Guilbeault got Damian around 2012 when he was 6 months old. He had agreed to help a friend by fostering the dog for a few days, but when he went to pick him up, Guilbeault was immediately charmed by Damian's affection and over-the-top theatrics. He decided to keep him.
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In 2017, Guilbeault decided to move from Haverhill, Massachusetts, to Mesa, Arizona. He loaded his life into a U-Haul and, with the help of his father and a friend, started driving west as Damian cycled between laps in the front cab.
About two-thirds of the way through their 2,650-mile trip, the wayfarers made a pit stop in Oklahoma City and booked a room at a hotel for the night.
Guilbeault leashed up Damian, who was 5 at the time, and with his friend, he went on a walk along a frontage road near the hotel. For 10 minutes, Guilbeault and Damian battled. Damian, who preferred asphalt, insisted on walking in the road; Guilbeault, worried for their safety, kept pulling him back onto the grass. When Damian made his umpteenth bid to get back into the street, Guilbeault yelled at him for being so stubborn.
Affronted, Damian threw a tantrum, slipping out of his collar and bolting. Guilbeault and his friend gave chase, but Damian was too fast. He soon disappeared.
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Guilbeault, his father and his friend started searching the area where the dog had escaped, and when that yielded nothing, they spread out. Around sunset, Guilbeault ordered his dad to stop the U-Haul truck; he had seen a flash of what looked like Damian's fur. He got out of the truck, ran around the back and almost smacked into a mountain lion before making a quick retreat. Still, they kept searching until about 1 a.m., when his father told him to call it a night.
What was supposed to have been an overnight pit stop turned into a week-long quest.
After a 'cryfest,' the three travelers marshaled the support of hotel staff. They printed photos of Damian and helped Guilbeault make fliers about the lost dog.
The search-and-rescue party settled into a routine: Guilbeault's father and friend hung fliers and physically searched for Damian while Guilbeault worked the internet, posting pleas and Damian photos on lost-pets groups on Facebook. The memory of the mountain lion loomed in Guilbeault's mind when he occasionally searched outdoors.
The flier Guilbeault made in 2017. (Paul Guilbeault)
'Half the time, I was just looking for a bloody red sweater,' he said.
But they didn't even find that.
After a week, the group abandoned the search, caving to the mounting cost of the hotel room, moving truck and food. Guilbeault left Oklahoma City heartbroken.
'I was devastated,' he said.
'You also got to move on'
Once in Arizona, Guilbeault occasionally went online to see whether he could find any evidence of Damian, but those efforts faded over time. Guilbeault figured he had been run over, picked up by a passerby or eaten by the mountain lion they had run into. Either way, he figured he would never see Damian again.
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'That's my fail,' he said. 'I should have [searched] every day until I found the dog or found a body.
'But you also got to move on with your life,' he added.
Guilbeault did indeed start a new life in Arizona. Back surgery forced him to switch careers to photography, something he could do without moving as much or from a wheelchair if need be. He parlayed his new profession into planning art events. That led him to meet his husband-to-be, Julian, in 2022; the two got married last year on Valentine's Day. He also got new dogs: Percy, a Jack Russell terrier, who died, and an Arctic wolf-malamute-border collie hybrid named Petra, who gave birth to two daughters, Persephone and Mystique.
Weeks had turned into months, and months into years.
Little Man
Then, on Jan. 15, he and Julian were driving their car full of clothes and other supplies from Mesa to Southern California to help victims of the Los Angeles-area wildfires when he got a call. Driving, Guilbeault used his Apple Watch to send it to voicemail. He got several more from the same number in quick succession, all of which met the same fate as the first. About 10 minutes later, he received a text message from the mysterious number. It said his dog, Damian, had been found.
Still at the wheel, Guilbeault had Julian call the number, figuring it was a prank or a scam. A representative for American Kennel Club Reunite on the other end said someone had found Damian and used his microchip to find Guilbeault. The rep gave him the phone number of the man who was taking care of him.
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About an hour from the Arizona-California border, Guilbeault made sure the road was clear, then did a U-turn to head back east on Interstate 10. Fourteen hours later, they were at the door of Ricki Chambers, who filled in the backstory of how Damian came into his possession.
Chambers, 62, told Guilbeault that on New Year's Eve, his sister had nearly run over the dog while driving down a four-lane thoroughfare. She stopped, got out of her car and tried to pick him up, only to be met with bite attempts and barks she compared to screams.
She grabbed and held him nevertheless. She worried about how her 150-pound dog would interact with Damian, so she gave him to Chambers. Chambers said that he could see the dog's ribs a bit and that his claws were overgrown, having just started to curl under themselves.
'But he looked pretty good and looked pretty healthy,' Chambers said. 'He wasn't stinking stinking, so somebody had been taking care of him.'
Chambers had the dog's nails cut, fed him well and, above all, gave him love — 'treated him like he was one of my own.' He started calling him 'Little Man.' The dog had free range of the backyard and lay beside Chambers on the couch — a bit of a salve for Chambers who had been desperately searching for his own lost dog, Carolina, after she disappeared the week before.
Work and weather thwarted Chambers's plans to take his new charge to the vet, but after two weeks, he got him there. The vet found a microchip that led him back to Guilbeault.
'I knew that dog didn't belong to me,' Chambers said. 'I was just glad to reunite them two.'
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Guilbeault called Chambers minutes after learning Damian had been found. Chambers sent him proof-of-life photos and told Guilbeault he would be at his home in Oklahoma City to receive them no matter the time.
About 14 hours later, he made good on that promise, welcoming the Guilbeaults into his home about 5 a.m. Damian had developed cataracts since the two last met, so it took him a few moments to notice Guilbeault and realize who he was.
But Chambers said their connection and history was unmistakable, even to an outsider.
'When he came in and sat down with Damian,' he said. 'I knew that was the owner.'