By Tina Comeau

THE VANGUARD

NovaNewsNow.com



Searchers had felt their best odds of finding a Yarmouth County man, reported missing on Sunday, was to keep en eye out for his dog that he had with him.

As it turned out it was the dog that led searchers to the man, although the outcome of the search ended on a grim note on April 7.

The body of 39-year-old Chad Dewayne McDow was discovered in a wooded area just a short distance off the Bloomfield Road in Gardners Mill around 11:45 a.m. on Monday. There, at his side, was his dog Bailey, barking.

The scene was not far from where the command post vehicles, belonging to the Yarmouth County Ground Search and Rescue Team and other rescue personnel, were situated, and it was also just 1.5 kilometres from his home.

While standing just a couple of feet from the command bus Monday morning speaking with a reporter from the Yarmouth Vanguard, Corporal Dana Parsons spotted what he thought to be a glimpse of the man’s dog in the woods.

“There’s a dog in the woods,” he said to the searchers. “I think it’s his dog.”

Cpl. Parsons started into the woods, whistling for the dog and calling its name, while two members of the search team approached the dog from another direction. After a couple of minutes the dog, a Nova Scotia duck troller/golden retriever mix, stopped running and stayed put, barking.

The search for the man, which had begun the day before, was over. An autopsy is pending to determine the official cause of death, although the police say foul play is not suspected in the man’s death.

It had been a complicated search for the police and searchers, who, by the time the man had been found, had covered about a 20- -square-kilometre area from the ground and the air. Searches didn’t know where to concentrate their efforts so the entire area became a search zone.

With spotters in the air, on the ground searchers walked through ditches and along dirt roads.

“We’ve been looking for tracks, to see if he went up any of the four-wheeler trails, logging roads and things like that and there is no indication of that at this point, or obviously we would have a direction to send our searchers,” Cpl. Parsons said at the search scene late Monday morning.

Cpl. Parsons said the man was going through “personal problems,” which added a different set of concerns to the search.

The civilian air search and rescue association (CASARA) plane had been in the air for a few hours on Sunday and was back again Monday, keeping an eye out for the man and also any camps in the area that might have smoke coming from their chimney.

But because of what McDow was wearing when he was last seen, a green fleece jacket with navy blue accents, it was felt spotting him in the woods or brush might prove difficult. So searchers also concentrated their efforts on finding the dog.

The police and searchers were awaiting the imminent arrival of a Department of Natural Resources helicopter when the man’s body was discovered.