Chiweeny Reunited With Owner After 1,200-Mile Journey

Their eyes met across the crowded airport lobby. It had been 18 months since they last saw each other.    Mandi Smith stretched out her arms and said, “I missed you.”

Pooka did not say anything back.

But that’s understandable; Pooka is a dog, a brown, doeeyed dachshund Chihuahua mix, to be exact. And she went missing from Smith’s home at Fort Campbell military base in Kentucky a year-and-a-half ago.

“I never thought I’d hold her again,” said Smith, a 26-yearold military wife and mother of four.

Improbably, Pooka turned up in Española on Jan. 12. Someone found her on the street and brought her into the Española Valley Humane Society, where staff members scanned her microchip and tracked her back to the Smiths.    How, exactly, she made the 1,200 mile journey from Kentucky to New Mexico — and where she’s been for the last 18 months — remain a mystery.

“I don’t know,” said Nina Stively, community outreach director with the Española Humane Society. “She’s not talking.”   The Smiths got Pooka when she was just six weeks old. Mandi Smith picked out the puppy from a litter of the mixed breed, called chiweenies.

“When I saw her the first time, I said I have to have this one,” she said. “It was love at first sight.”    They had her for about five months before she disappeared from the backyard. Smith speculated that maybe she escaped through the fence.