MANILA: Two weeks after it was given up for dead as it was swept away during a deadly typhoon that unstitched whole neighbourhoods in Cebu province, a dog walked home.
On Nov 4, Typhoon Kalmaegi ripped through the Philippines with winds of over 180kmh. It flooded entire towns in Cebu, central Philippines’ most populous island.
Amid the chaos, Emmanuel Llenos and his wife, of Bacayan village, in Cebu, climbed to a neighbour’s third floor, ferrying only their smallest dogs in the crooks of their arms.
Haven – a mixed breed commonly referred to in the Philippines as an “aspin” that has a sturdier build and steadier temperament – was left to fend for himself.
When the flood receded, Llenos and his wife circled the neighbourhood, calling Haven’s name along streets littered with debris – shoes, roof shingles, the swollen carcass of a couch.
They posted pleas on social media. They returned to their ruined home even after moving elsewhere.
Then, two weeks after the typhoon, while Llenos was back at the wreckage being interviewed by a local news crew, a shape emerged at the doorway: Haven, filthy and thin-legged, as though conjured from the very mud that lacquered his paws.
He looked, Llenos later said, “ready to go home”, as if that had been his only task all along.
To explain this small miracle, Emmanuel reaches for the language of karma.
The night of the flood, he spotted a woman perilously clutching an electric post, the current snarling around her legs. He does not know how to swim, but he went to her anyway.
His 74-year-old mother and his child were calling for him at the time, their voices carrying over the water. He chose to save the stranger first.
In the days afterward, that choice festered.
He prayed the decision had been the right one. His mother and child survived; the woman lived. But Haven was gone, and Llenos suspected the universe might have taken its recompense.
And then the dog came back. - The Straits Times/ANN
