It will likely never be known how Buster Brown, a 7-year-old mutt that went missing in mid-November from his home near Boulder, ended up in Salinas, Calif., and exactly what he was up to along the way.
But any speculation as to the beagle/retriever/pit bull’s whereabouts over the last six months yielded to elation Friday when Buster’s owner, Samantha Squires, reunited with her “magical dog” at Denver International Airport amid a waterfall of tears and a vigorous, thigh-slapping tail.
“I never gave up on him and I thought about him every day,” she said hours before Buster Brown landed at DIA on a Frontier flight from San Francisco. “It wouldn’t be surprising to me that he was looking for us the whole time.”
On Nov. 19, Squires was headed out to Boulder Reservoir for a run. When she returned to her Olde Stage Road home that afternoon, Buster Brown had simply vanished from the backyard. She noticed that a gate was ajar.
The single mother of a 4-year-old son admitted that as the months dragged on, she had tugs of doubt about her close companion, fearing that a mountain lion might have claimed the pooch in the foothills west of Boulder.
But despite her misgivings, she kept all of Buster Brown’s toys, and as recently as last weekend, decided against taking his allergy report down from the kitchen wall.
