'Huck' Proves Inspiration Comes in All Sizes

Not only is Janet Elder a senior editor at The New York Times, she’s also a five-year breast cancer survivor, and the proud owner of a red-haired toy poodle named Huck, whose brief disappearance a few years ago is the basis for her new book Huck: The Remarkable True Story of How One Lost Puppy Taught a Family—and a Whole Town—About Hope and Happy Endings.

In the wake of Elder’s cancer diagnosis, her then 12-year old son was finally promised the dog he’d been nagging his parents about for years. Elder and her husband wanted their son to have something to look forward to, “instead of concentrating on my chemo, and my hair loss, and my radiation,” she explained.

And so Huck entered their lives, and shortly thereafter Elder and her family took a trip to Yankees spring training in Florida, leaving Huck with her sister in New Jersey.

“We were at Yankees spring training for 24 hours, the Yankees beat the Red Sox, it was all perfect,” Elder recalled. “And we got the call that Huck had run away.”

Unlike Imus, whose initial reaction was to assume Elder’s sister had been drunk when Huck disappeared, Elder’s family, and particularly her son, went to great lengths to ensure nobody felt guilty. 

“That was one of his great marks of character,” Elder said of her son. “His first reaction was, ‘I don’t want Auntie Babs and Uncle Dave to feel like it was their fault.”

Elder and her family flew right back to New York, and ran what she called “the equivalent of a political campaign” to bring Huck home. “My sister lives in the foothills of the Ramapo Mountains,” she told Imus. “So this little guy had run away into a very wooded area filled with wild animals and birds of prey, coyotes, bears.”

They papered the town with reward posters and talked to commuters each morning at the train station, asking everyone to keep an eye out for Huck. “Before we knew it, we had lots of strangers helping us look for Huck,” Elder said.

The little guy was gone for three days when a man called at 6:30 in the morning on a Sunday to say he had seen Huck running around somebody’s yard. “He emerged with only a scratch on one eye, and he had lost about a pound,” Elder said. “But otherwise, he was fine.”

While Elder’s story is charming, there is, of course, deeper meaning than just finding a lost dog. “We learned a lot about each other, and about our devotion to each other as a family,” she said, adding, “I think Huck had come to represent to all of us a real symbol of hope. He was a real talisman in our lives, because we were looking forward to getting him throughout the treatments.”

Though Imus hasn’t read Huck (“I have many balls in the air,” he told his guest), Deirdre read it and loved it. “She said, ‘Not only will you love the dog, but you’ll love this family,’’” Imus reported. Sounds good to us.

-Julie Kanfer