In Search of the Missing Read online

  Hours passed without the slightest hint of progress. We were becoming increasingly concerned. The boy had been missing for nearly thirty-six hours. The treacherous cliffs nagged at our minds, reminding us of their thousand-foot drop into the Atlantic Ocean. But we remained optimistic. Searching with the conviction that the missing person will be found alive helps focus the mind, gives that extra drive, that zip and essential sense of urgency.

  At 4.30 a.m. Neil suggested we move over the ridge to the back of the mountain, which was the opposite side to that identified by the Scouts as the location in which they had last seen the youngster. Time was moving fast, and we were aware that the other volunteers would return at first light. If they came back while we were still searching, they would have to wait in the farmyard. Although our dogs are trained to work with multiple handlers at the same time, and will do so ahead of line searchers, there is always a chance that the dogs can be put off by searchers inexperienced in dealing with search dogs. Time-wise, we were under pressure, but we pushed on, determined to find the boy.

  Neil and Pepper searched upwards from the bottom. Dex and I worked downwards from the top. After just a further hundred yards, we would be finished with that particular area and switching to yet another part of the mountain. Suddenly, I heard Pepper indicating far below. Neil contacted me on the radio. At that stage, he was about a quarter of a mile below Pepper. Neil suggested I send Dex down to confirm Pepper’s indication. Dex made his way downhill, turned left, headed towards Pepper and indicated. Both dogs stood together facing a gully about fifteen feet deep and twenty feet wide, with a sheep fence on top. They cleared the fence, went further in and kept indicating.

  Daylight was breaking. Neil and I could see various items in front of us: a guitar, pots and a frying pan. We could see no trace of the boy. But the dogs continued to indicate vigorously.

  One Boy and His Dogs

  It’s strange that we can go through life without really knowing ourselves. Looking back, it’s only now I see I’ve always been a loner. Even from a very early age, I rarely wanted to be in the company of others. Instead, I preferred to roam through the woods and fields with only my dogs by my side. Dogs were always my best friends, and most of my life revolved around them.

  My childhood world in the 1950s was Knockraha – a quiet, east Cork village that only came alive on the annual sports day or when Dolly Daly played the accordion at her garden gate. Mam, Dad, Uncle Danny and the eight of us all lived with Nana Gleeson in her two-storey house, which had two rooms downstairs, with a small lean-to, and was situated in a laneway only a stone’s throw from the village church. More people must have set foot in Nana’s house than in any other house in the village because it had once been a shop and, before that, a British police barracks. One morning, when my mother got a notion to tear down and replace the front-room ceiling, a shower of guns, bayonets and bean tins full of bullets came crashing down. ‘A blast from the past,’ my grandmother said. ‘There’s no escaping it.’

  And she was right, because the past is always with us. It latches onto us. It moulds us for tomorrow into something we might or might not want to be. When I was young, I never knew what I wanted to be. The question never even crossed my mind. I was cocooned in my own little world of Knockraha, oblivious to any possibilities beyond it. But I sensed I was different. I never belonged to the pack. I was always moving away, out towards the edges and off in the opposite direction.

  I was still only a toddler when the Caseys – a warm-hearted couple who lived next door in the parish house – took a shine to me, plucked me from my family, fussed over me like a little prince, and treated me as one of their own. I kept calling in to them, drawn back time and time again by the red, rosy apples stored in a timber box in their hallway. Even before I started school, Mrs Casey would spend hours talking to me, feeding me stories about faraway places I’d never even heard of, and teaching me how to read, and how to make capital letters and small ones on the lines of a copybook. Even then, I was moving away from the pack. I was out of the traps before the rest, and gone.

  I hadn’t yet reached my fourth birthday when Mr Casey – who was the local schoolmaster – whisked me off to school one morning. Rubbing his hands together with glee, he marched me up to the top of the classroom and teased the other boys: ‘Watch Mikey making his letters correctly on the blackboard. And he’s only three!’ Sometimes in the schoolyard I got a thumping from the older boys for being the teacher’s pet. But it was never very serious. It didn’t bother me. I was becoming used to being different.

  One of my early-morning jobs in school was to bring a bundle of sticks and some coal into the classroom fireplace, which was the only form of heating in the school. After the fire had been lit, the teacher would tell us to stand by our desks and do ‘star jumps’ in an attempt to warm ourselves up.

  Up through primary school, Mick Mackey was my best friend, my idol. He was the boy with a special demeanour about him, who spoke in a very dignified way, the boy who used to make model aeroplanes with paper, paint them, and hang them from his bedroom ceiling with fishing gut. To me, they were masterpieces. And then, suddenly, he was gone, taken off in an ambulance, never again to return to school, and I was lost without him. Mick was one of the unlucky ones who contracted polio, a disease that plagued Irish children in the mid-1950s but about which I had no understanding at the time. And nobody explained it to me. I missed him a lot, and spent hours sitting alone and crying my eyes out in a shed at the back of Donoghues’ pub. I didn’t hear of Mick again until years later when someone mentioned that he was working in Dublin as an engineer.

  It was around the time of Mick’s disappearance that I started to wander off down through the fields and into the glen with my springer spaniel Jessie. I sat there for hours just talking to Jessie. Even when it was wet and windy, I went off with her. I’d sit with my back to a tree or to the wall of a house in the village, and feel the shivers run up my spine. Somehow, it gave me a buzz.

  Each morning, Jessie walked me to school, along with my brothers and sisters. She would be waiting at the school door when we came out at lunch time, and again in the evening, to shepherd us safely home.

  In the village, I sometimes played with Tommy Maher and Martin Lynch – boys of my own age. But being shy and a loner at heart, I spent most of the time on my own. At home, we didn’t have a television. Staying inside and getting under Nana’s feet while my parents were out working was never an option. But that was fine for Jessie and me because the days were never long enough for us.

  In all our wanderings, I dared not go too far outside the village. I was too scared. The adults had me frightened out of my wits, spinning high tales about wailing banshees and the bogey man, who was always in hiding, waiting for his chance to snatch children away from their families. They warned me about all the eerie sounds around, like echoes and bird chirping, saying they belonged to the ghosts, who always appeared when children ventured too far away from home. They told me to stay well clear of the Fairy Rock in the glen, and never to swim in the river because the big black hole would suck me down. While I believed all that the adults told me, I pushed their warnings to the back of my mind and scuttled off with Jessie to the countryside to play. But I always kept well within my boundaries.

  One of my favourite haunts became the riverbank, where I gathered reeds, pressed them between my fingers, and blew with all my might to make a magical, musical sound, just as I often did at home with a comb and paper. I paddled, caught tiny fish with my jam jar, and tightly twisted the lid to keep them in. I rummaged for the flattest stones to skim through the water, or I threw in the rounded ones as far as I could for Jessie to chase.

  Late afternoon on a sunny summer’s evening was the best time of all. The water was at its warmest then, and Jessie and I crossed from one side of the river to the other. I held onto the branches of heavy old tree trunks, which made a stable bridge across the water, and I hopped from one tree trunk to the next, with Jessie jumpin
g along behind me. Other days, we spent hours hunting rabbits, wading our way through high-grassed fields, bushes, briars and ditches. Sometimes, we sniffed for the scents of other animals or we searched for their tracks. The tracks of the fox, the weasel or the badger, I learned them all from my father. If a big, droopy tree took my fancy, I took out my penknife and carved my initials and the year on it. I promised Jessie that the engraving would still be there when I’d be an old, cranky, toothless man with white hair and a walking stick.

  One of my daily chores was to go with my older sister Mary to collect a bucket of milk from Pádraig Dennehy, a local farmer, who always had great time for me. He might let me milk a cow or even ride bareback on one of his horses. Racing through the fields with Jessie running alongside, I felt as free as the wind, like one of those Travellers who galloped through the village on a rare occasion, wild and reckless, and then disappeared from reality, or like one of my classmates, who attended the riding school in Glanmire and often rode his pony from the riding centre in Brooklodge to Knockraha, then all the way back again.

  As we had no running water in the house, I was always up and down to the pump, filling two buckets of water at a time and then drawing them back to Nana, who seemed to be forever washing and scrubbing all around her. Sometimes, I thinned beet with my mother and my brother Dan. My mother tied potato sacks around our knees, and told one of us to go to the start of the drill and the other halfway along. We had to keep nine inches between each little plant, and clear away all the excess plants and weeds. My mother thinned two drills at the same time – one with her left hand and one with her right – and could thin two drills in the time it took the two of us together to thin one. Woe betide us if we didn’t clean and thin our drill properly! Some farmers’ wives would bring us a large churn of tea and sandwiches, but Dan and I never got a penny for our work – my mother kept it all.

  Often, Mrs Peter – as she was known locally – let me serve in her shop. I raised myself up on my toes, with my eyes barely able to see over the countertop, and put my number skills to good use by totting up the customer’s bill on a piece of paper, while at the same time eyeing up all of the mouth-watering temptations around me, my favourites being sherbets with sticky lollipops, and paper-wrapped, square-shaped toffees.

  If I happened to wander into the village post office, Mrs Long, the postmistress, scurried off to her kitchen to fetch me a huge slice of fresh, thickly buttered white bread coated in big, glistening grains of crunchy sugar and cut up into little fingers, like soldiers.

  In the evenings, I often cycled miles to accompany my mother home from working on the farms, or I hung around the village with Jessie, dangling my legs from a high wall, waiting to catch the first glimpse of my father returning from the quarry. If the curtains of John Daly’s front room were slightly ajar, I stood with my nose pressed against the window and my hands at either side of my forehead, peeping in at the only television in the village, hoping to see one of my favourite programmes, like Mr Ed, an American comedy about a sharp, palomino talking horse, who spoke only to his owner, Wilbur Post, and who had a knack for stirring up trouble. Sometimes, the screen showed only jumping, fuzzy lines, and I waited impatiently as John twiddled with the buttons at the back of the television, trying in vain to restore the picture. John worked in the Electricity Supply Board, and had erected a giant of a pole in his garden to receive the BBC. Back then, RTÉ had not even started.

  On moonlit nights, I ran with Jessie to the nearest field and stretched out under the sky, scanning my eyes across the heavens for all the different groups of stars, and excitedly shouting their names aloud: the Seven Sisters, the Plough, the Milky Way – I knew them all from my father. On a night when I could see only one star in the sky, I made a silent wish. There was a time when I felt sad that it was all alone. I wondered where all the other stars had gone. But then I decided it was better off on its own. It had the whole, vast sky to itself. It could wander wherever it wanted to go. Nothing was in its way.

  It was only natural that I should be close to nature and animals. It was in my genes, planted in the past just like the ammunition in Nana’s house. It went way back to a time when my great-grandfather trained horses for the local point-to-point races, or when my father patiently carved an exact wooden replica of a Grand National winner and jockey, having carefully taken the measurements from a newspaper photograph, or when he hunted and ferreted as a boy in his native Ballymacandrick in east Cork.

  My father had a way with dogs. When he read the paper in the shed or back garden, they quickly gathered at his feet. And the minute he got up, they followed him without ever a word being spoken. ‘Don’t talk too much to the dogs, Mikey,’ he advised me. ‘And then they’ll trust you more.’

  My youngest brother Gerard was just like my father when it came to dogs. In Riverstown, where we moved later, Ger would only have to walk out the gate of the house with his terrier, give a whistle, and, as if by magic, several other dogs would appear and follow him as he went on his daily walk through the local woods and fields. My father got a great kick out of it. ‘Mikey! Watch what happens next,’ he’d call to me. ‘Gerard’s after whistling.’ On arriving back, Ger would saunter in through the gate, and, without a word from him, the dogs would scatter off home.

  My brother Dan was different. He hung around with dogs but had no understanding of them. When my father bought a Labrador he saw advertised in the paper, Dan started taking the dog for long walks. One scorching day, he took him into a field near a stream. He stayed there for hours basking in the sun and smoking his cigarettes, and because the dog was too hot, he began to growl over him. When they went home, Dan convinced my mother that the dog was dangerous. Dan was my mother’s pet, and she always gave him what he wanted. Nobody dared cross her, least of all my father, who was a silent man. In our house, my mother was a matriarchal figure, and she made all the decisions without ever consulting anyone else. Nobody ever questioned her or argued with what she had said. When she told my father that the Labrador had to go, he went off straight away, without the slightest hint of protest, and sold the dog for £10.

  As a child, everything I knew about nature and animals I learned from my father. At the annual sports day in a local field, I watched him set up a pulley system for the dog racing, using an old bicycle, a few hundred yards of twine and a stuffed rabbit skin. Many days, Jessie and I hunted with him, along with his ferret and dogs. When we found a rabbit warren, we made a big circle around it with a net. Then my father put the ferret inside to drive out the rabbits. Sometimes, the ferret stayed down the rabbit hole, and we’d have to go back days later to dig it out. My father had a line of rabbit snares running at intervals down through the fields towards the glen, and each evening he’d take me with him to collect the snared rabbits. We’d put the rabbits into potato sacks and bring them home, where my grandmother would gut and clean them. With their back legs interlaced, they were left hanging in rows from the back-kitchen ceiling until Ger Connell, a local collector, called to take them to the market ten miles away. My mother got a shilling and sixpence for each rabbit – a price that had doubled by the time they reached the market. In those days, it was all about survival.

  Although I didn’t know it then, hunting trips with my father would form the basis for my work in search and rescue, the main difference being that I would search for humans. The basics were the same. Once the hunting animals made the find, they were rewarded with food or play. Of course, for me back then it was only a game, a sport to enjoy, with Jessie tagging along beside me.

  Like most children of my era, I was often shielded from the truth. When there was no sign of Jessie one day after school, Nana never told me she had died but said she had simply gone away. I ran breathlessly to Donoghues’ backyard, in through the woods and down to the glen, yelling her name at the top of my voice. I combed the riverbank and fields, and watched for her return at every corner. Then we moved away, and I left my innocence behind. Our new home was a semi-de
tached council house in Riverstown, a village nearer Cork city. And, boy, did I get the biggest culture shock of my young life. There were gangs of youngsters everywhere. They pelted each other with stones at every chance. And although some were only my own age, they were all much more advanced.

  Riverstown was a much bigger area than Knockraha, and I now felt like the stranger up from the country. I was reluctant to step outside my own front door for fear of a thumping. And there wasn’t an ounce of sympathy coming from my mother, who was a hard, robust woman. Once, she had taken part in a scuffle on a hurling pitch at White’s Cross and nearly left an opposing player for dead after he hit a player from our local team, who happened to be the son of one of her friends. But without ever making a fuss, my father threw me a lifeline. He knew all the old men in Riverstown from talking to them as they passed up and down with their dogs, and some were members of the Riverstown Foot Beagles. Dexter, a beautiful, three-month-old liver-and-white beagle came into my life when two club members brought him to our door, asked me to rear him, and invited me along to the club. My heart jumped for joy, and straight away I forgot about everything else. Dexter was my survival kit, and we became great friends.

  Going off with the hunting pack to a meet on a Sunday morning was exhilarating. I hurried after the dogs, watching their every twist and turn, delighting in their chase and bursting with pride as Dexter scampered along with the rest. The day we travelled to Tallow for a joint meet was the best day of all as I had never before been so far from home. For ages after, I ranted and raved about the road trip, and repeated word for word the doggy conversations of the day. I entertained my father, imitating the strange accent of the Tallow people and rattling off the names of the Tallow dogs.

  In the early days, I never saw a kill with the pack as it wasn’t always possible to keep up with the hunt. Then, months after joining, I witnessed one for the first time. When I was younger, I never had any qualms about a kill carried out by hunting, dazzling or ferreting. As a teenager, it affected me differently: I shook with shock as I saw a hare being torn asunder by the pack of beagles. Even though the kill was very fast, I was upset for a long time afterwards. I never again attended a meet.