Several years ago, someone lost a dog in Mobile. She must have been cared for at some point: She was spayed, her tail was docked and, at first, she had a collar with tags. But no one ever claimed her and, despite many efforts over the years, no one could catch her, either. Through social media, she was named Taylor and was known by some as Swift, an appropriate name for a dog who’s always on the move.

Five years ago, Toddie Grier, a local animal rescuer, first spotted the Australian Cattle dog (also known as a blue heeler) near the Greyhound Bus Station. She started feeding her behind the Taylor Motel nearby on Government Boulevard, but she never could get close enough to the dog even to determine her sex. She named the dog Taylor and kept up with her through the years, watching as Taylor raced around town, always looking determined to go somewhere.

Toddie started a Facebook page, “Taylor’s Trail,” that has 1,500 followers. People would see the street-smart dog all over town, almost always running like she was determined to get somewhere. One day during a storm she ran into a pet store, where someone bought her a leash and tried to take her home. Not having it, Taylor escaped and continued running with the leash dragging behind her.

“She became a community dog,” says Toddie.

After living in the woods near Bel Air Mall for a year or so, she ventured west and started staying beneath the I-65 overpass at Cottage Hill Road, according to Toddie. Here, she spent a lot of time just watching cars go by and eluded capture by animal control officers. At another point, she migrated all the way north to Saraland.

“My theory was that she escaped from a family passing through Mobile, because her favorite pastime was to perch on the side of I-65, both here and in Saraland,” Toddie speculated on the Facebook page.

Eventually, Taylor made her way to west Mobile, where she has become like a unicorn to some and like a familiar but stand-offish presence to others. She would gladly stop and eat a hamburger or a bowl of dog food, sip some water, maybe take an occasional nap in the sunshine, but she never let her guard down. She seemed to love running in the rain. To the amazement of many, she navigated busy intersections and would wait beside multi-lane Airport Boulevard until she could dash across it somehow unscathed.

In the past year or so, she has spent most of her time near the intersection of Airport Boulevard and Schillinger Road, where she frequented the front porch of U-J Chevrolet, allowing the kind staff there to feed her and even sleeping on a bed they bought for her. Other favorite spots were Verizon Wireless and Palmer’s Hyundai.

But soon after Kimberly Reed came to work as a mechanic at Pep Boys last September, Taylor started hanging out there more often. The two of them developed a sweet and careful friendship, sizing each other up from a distance at first and then slowly, tentatively, getting closer and closer as Kimberly talked to the dog, tossing handfuls of food toward her. She put a bed for her outside the shop.

“She wanted attention, but she was scared,” Kimberly says.

Finally, about three weeks ago, on a cold and rainy day, Kimberly propped the door open with a car battery. Eventually, “She eased on in the store and sniffed around. I shut the door to let her know it’s okay.”

With infinite patience, Kimberly started to earn Taylor’s trust. Soon she and one of her managers, Ron Broughton, were able to pet her.

At the end of the day on a Monday in January, Kimberly finally took Taylor home with her to meet her family, which includes her husband, Shawn, her 10-month-old daughter, Kinley, and their miniature Schnauzer and 5-pound Maltese. And of course, she gave her a bath – actually five baths, because Taylor was so dirty. After getting her fur blown dry, the dog fell right into a deep sleep.

Taylor was home at last – or so it seemed.

‘It gets in your blood’

Toddie, a retired art teacher and U.S. Air Force veteran, spends most of her time feeding homeless dogs and cats in woods and fields, behind buildings where few others would think to look. Along with a group of likeminded friends, she has caught several of the animals, helped find foster homes for them and gotten them into rescue.

“People always say animals are voiceless,” Toddie says. “That is what all my Facebook posts have been about, photographing them, documenting them, making their struggle to survive a newsworthy story. Bringing attention to the dogs and cats that are homeless in Mobile.”

Most of the dogs Toddie helps will never know the comforting touch of a human hand. There was Moses, who was hanging out near the I-165 ramp at Water Street. She fed him twice a day to try to keep him away from the interstate, and she tried her best to get him to trust her, but one day he disappeared, never to be seen again.

There’s also Peaches, a Chow mix who has taken up residence under a boarded-up house near downtown Mobile. Toddie has fed Peaches for the past 2½ years, successfully rescuing many of her litters of puppies who now live in good homes. And there’s Tip, who is kind of the Taylor of midtown Mobile – seen and fed, but nearly impossible to capture.

When she started feeding Moses, she became aware of a pack of nearby feral “swamp dogs” she feeds every day. As her red cargo van pulls up, she blows her horn to let them know she’s arrived. From the back of her van, she scoops kibbles and canned food into bright blue bowls that she sets inside aluminum trays filled with water to keep the ants away. She gives the dogs fresh water and tosses hot chicken nuggets toward the woods. The bravest, a female lab mix, shows up, tail tucked, to eat the chicken, but keeps her distance from Toddie.

At one point, Toddie kept track of all the dogs she’s rescued, but she lost count. She is constantly looking at Facebook to see if there’s an animal that needs her out there. “There are hundreds of dogs out on the street in this town,” she says. “They’re not just lost, but in the woods, starving, scrounging for food.”

Toddie was a “military brat,” she says. Because her family moved around so much and lived in apartments, they never had dogs – but she always wanted one. When she was in her 40s, she finally got a dog of her own – her first rescue, who showed up right in front of her house. After a couple more rescues, some of her teacher friends convinced her to start volunteering at the Animal Rescue Foundation (ARF) shelter.

Toddie began doing what she does now about 10 years ago, when she learned that dogs were killing cats in the woods behind a local hospital. “I decided I needed to feed the dogs so they wouldn’t kill the cats,” she says. “I ended up in the woods all over town finding dogs.”

Her work is “so depressing, so sad,” she admits, but she’s compelled to keep doing it. “It gets in your blood.”

She struggles with her health and with her finances – even with donations, she spends more than $1,000 a month on food and supplies – and her work takes an emotional toll as well. There are just so many dogs she can’t help. “There’s no rescue support for dogs on the street,” she says. “Nobody really knows what’s going on in the city.”

Toddie moved to Mobile from the Washington, D.C., area in 1994, originally just to visit her grandmother – her family is originally from Mobile – with the intention of continuing her graphic design career in Chicago. But when she got to Mobile, she says, “I thought this place was paradise.” She ended up working as a graphic artist in the advertising department at Gayfers until the Mobile-based department store closed.

That’s when she went back to school for a master’s in education and started her teaching career. Meanwhile, her mother and stepfather moved to Mobile, but they have since died. Her sister moved here, too, then married and moved away.

“I could leave,” she says, “but I can’t find anybody to feed the dogs. I can’t leave the dogs.”

One thing that keeps her going is that every now and then, there’s a success story – like Taylor’s. Toddie doesn’t have time to manage fan pages for all the stray dogs she encounters, but Taylor has a special place in her heart. “I loved being her PR rep,” she says with a laugh.

‘Already bonded’

After Taylor spent her first night with Kimberly, she went back to work with her at Pep Boys. The first time Kimberly was out of the dog’s sight, though – when she had to go outside to move a car – Taylor somehow managed to loosen her leash, which was being held down by a heavy toolbox. She escaped from the garage and ran away.

“I about started crying right there,” says Kimberly. “It was an awful day.”

As it turns out, Taylor had run straight to one of her old haunts, U-J Chevrolet, then went on a mile or so east on Airport Boulevard with Kimberly in pursuit in her car, calling her, as Taylor dragged her brand-new leash. Finally, something spooked her, Kimberly says, and she disappeared completely.

With a heavy heart, Kimberly went home, fed her baby and took a shower. That’s when she got a call from work. “Get up here now!” Ron, a co-worker, told her. With “wet hair and all,” Kimberly raced up to Pep Boys to find that Taylor had returned.

“She’s already bonded to me,” she says.

On Wednesday, she took Taylor to the vet. When she got there, she learned that Susan Franklin, a woman she doesn’t know personally who’d been following the Taylor’s Trail page, was going to pay the full amount of the bill, which came to $580.

Unfortunately, Taylor tested positive for heartworms. The treatment is expensive, but Kimberly has set up a GoFundMe page that raised $1,300 of its $2,500 goal in the first 24 hours. She plans to use some of the money to repair the fence in her back yard so Taylor can’t escape it.

In just a couple of days, the two of them already have a routine. “When I grab the diaper bag and my keys in the morning, she knows she’s going to work,” Kimberly says. “She lets me put her harness on and jumps in the car.” Taylor has a crate inside the shop and a bed in the garage so she can keep a watchful eye on Kimberly at all times.

Where she came from may forever be a mystery, but it now seems obvious where Taylor will be for the rest of her life. As many of her Facebook followers have pointed out, she has chosen her person.

“I just can't believe the change in her,” Toddie says of the dog she once fed, then followed for years but has never petted. She compares the night-and-day photos of a scared dog seen running in the rain to a recent one of Taylor lounging on a floral comforter, looking relaxed at last .

Finally, in Kimberly, this dog has found a human being she can trust. It’s the happy ending to which so many have hoped her trail would lead.