Hi Joe, Where Are You?

Small wonder then that there was national concern over Hi Joe, who was scarcely gone from his kennel before bookmakers in Ireland began taking bets on where he would be found. Many bettors favored Glasgow's bush-league "flapping" tracks, those small greyhound racing strips unaffiliated with the National Greyhound Racing Society. This theory soared momentarily when a truck driver reported that he had seen two men exercising a black dog beside a Jaguar on M6, the main high-speed road to Scotland, but it collapsed when police checked the license number of the car the trucker said he had seen. The number was out of service.

To wiser heads, the idea of Hi Joe running at a flapping track or anywhere else seemed pretty ridiculous, particularly in the light of the $1,400 reward (later doubled) offered by owner Chandler for the return of the dog with no questions asked. With the whole British population on the lookout, such an outstanding performer might be expected to arouse a certain amount of suspicion. Even if Hi Joe were dyed pea green, he had other characteristics much more difficult to disguise. There was a bone in his forehead that gave his head an odd, easily recognized shape. On his left ear he was tattooed with the letters VHX, a code marking similar to one given all greyhounds born and bred in Ireland. Even if this could be obliterated, Hi Joe's toes would remain as the final giveaway. The National Greyhound Racing Club in London has an exact record of the pigmentation of every single toe on Hi Joe's paws, and this is as effective a method of identification as a man's fingerprints.

But to match paw pigments, one needs paws. At the end of two weeks slender threads had taken the chase to Wales, up to Scotland and down to Kent, but nothing concrete materialized. A black great Dane, glimpsed briefly in a car and mistaken for a greyhound, set the police on one of many fruitless investigations. In Glamorganshire, a greyhound answering to Hi Joe's general description was found running loose on the mountainside but it was another dog altogether. There was a macabre report that the body of a racing greyhound with its feet cut off had been found at the bottom of the cliffs at Hove on the English south coast. It turned out to be a poodle. A wild, unconfirmed rumor suggested that the dog had been shipped to Spain or Portugal, where an animal as magnificent as Hi Joe would practically lap the field. And in Whitstable, Kent, a 79-year-old astrologer named Rupert Cobb studied the stars and gave it as his opinion that the dog was in the English Midlands.

The most recent and most favored theory is that the dog has gone—or will soon go—to America. An investigator said: "It seems the only logical conclusion." If any U.S. reader notices a dog fitting Hi Joe's description in Tampa, Colorado Springs or Taunton, Mass., try calling him over. If he is Hi Joe, he will answer to his nickname: Archie.