A dog's nose catches the salmon scent

What dog doesn’t love finding scraps of dead salmon. Usually it’s a smelly cleanup for the dog’s owner, but this time it was a real treasure.

In Haines, Lilly Ford’s Siberian Laika puppy Sacha sniffs everything, which is how Rebecca Brewer’s lost wallet was retrieved from a snow berm along Chilkat Inlet.

Brewer had noticed her salmon-skin wallet missing in early February. She posted notices around town at places where she may have left it behind. She notified the police. After a few days, she canceled the credit cards inside.

“I thought I’d never recover it. I’d given up hope,” she said.

On Feb. 12, while walking Sacha along the beach side of Mud Bay Road, Ford noticed her dog had stopped behind her. Sacha was walking in a circle around an object. “His nose pointed to it just as I turned around.”

It was Brewer's wallet, soggy but intact.

Ford immediately started to approach others walking along the beach, trying to match the wallet with its owner. Brewer happened to be along River Road at the same time, not far away, making her regular walk with friend Sam Jackson and her own dog.

“It was a guardian angel moment,” Brewer said. “I was extremely lucky.”

She said the wallet may have fallen out of her pocket during an especially blustery hike there when she was crouching by some trees.

Brewer makes wallets, bags and jewelry with salmon skin, using tannin from tree bark as a natural tanning agent instead of chemicals. She wasn't surprised to learn that Sasha honed in on the wallet.

“I’m sure to a dog’s nose if it didn't smell like food, it at least smelled interesting,” Brewer said.

Its salmon-skin hide may have saved the wallet, but also had the potential of dooming it, she said. “I was afraid a raven might find it and eat it.”