By Danielle Dreilinger, Globe Correspondent
It's challenging, if rewarding, owning a dog in Somerville: the small apartments and hesitant landlords or roommates versus coming home to those big doggy eyes and wet nose. It's challenging, if rewarding, owning a bike in Somerville: along with freedom and cheap mobility comes the ever-present risk of theft. 
It sounds like a bad party game: If you were forced to choose, would you pick your dog or your bike?
For James Anderson of Somerville, 26, it's no game. In the early hours of Aug. 20, his girlfriend Casey Sexton's dog, Link was found ... but he lost his bike.
The evening of Friday, Aug. 19 started out nicely, with Anderson in downtown Boston celebrating the recent Boston Urban Music Festival he'd helped organize. He returned home to Somerville, where he's lived for four years, to meet Sexton, who was tired after her grad school classes.
After relaxing for a bit, they went to her apartment about a mile away on Central Street to hang out with Sexton's dog, Link. There they found … one frantic roommate and one lost dog. Link, a fast-moving greyhound/shepherd/husky mix, had taken off during a walk in Somerville Junction Park.
The worried dogparents took right off after him. The search began, along with the exercise that may have jumbled everyone's minds just a bit.
"Casey and I are just walking, running all around the park," Anderson describes. They split up, Sexton taking her car, Anderson his beloved purple bike, his usual mode of transportation.
Up and down the steep hills he rode. "I'm seriously combing every single street between Magoun Square and Somerville Ave. looking for this dog," he says. After a couple of fruitless and sweaty hours, Sexton called: two neighborhood boys, she said, had seen the dog. In fact, she says now, they had been helping her search.
Anderson raced back to Central Street. At the same time, Sexton's two brothers and their girlfriend and her dad showed up from Haverhill. It was after midnight, everyone confused and panicked and exhausted.
That's when the teens spoke up.
"Just Somerville kids staying up late," Anderson describes them now — one wearing a blue shirt, the other a jersey. They told him they had just seen the dog. And then one of them said the fatal words:
"'If I had a bike or something — I could get the dog right now,'" Anderson recounts.
In a moment of desperate chivalry, his girlfriend freaking out, Anderson handed over the bike. They'd bring it back, the kids promised, in 15 minutes. One called out as he rode away, "Don't worry — we won't steal it."
"It was just a crazy, intense situation," Anderson says now. "We were seriously in the heat of it." There didn't seem to be any reason at that moment to question the kids' motives. But immediately after, when it was just a minute too late, "I was like, 'That may have been a bad decision.'"
Lest one slam Anderson as a bike-ownership slacker, usually he's the guy who, when he lets his friends borrow his bike, peppers them with reminders to lock up both the frame and the wheel.
It seemed a positive sign when Sexton saw the kids calling for the dog 15 minutes later. But — "I end up waiting there for an hour," Anderson says. No kids. No bike. No dog.
At 5:30 a.m., they finally turned in at Anderson's house. An hour later, Sexton went outside, and there, sitting by her car, was Link — skunk-sprayed and mangy. But still no bike.
It's a 21-gear purple mountain bike converted to road use with road tires and the brand name, Jamis, in yellow. It's equipped with a specialized rack and a collapsible rear basket for maximum city utility.
"Catching bike thieves is a high priority for us," says police spokesman Paul Upton. Alas, he doesn't think much of Anderson's chances. No matter how unique your bike sounds to you — "nobody rides a purple bike," Anderson says hopefully — it doesn't much matter if you don't have the serial number. That's how the police track stolen property, Upton says: serial numbers.
He laments people's frequent failure to log this key data: "It makes it so difficult for us when we do recover items." The department has "hundreds and hundreds of bikes."
For the record, none of them, officer Edward Barnard told Upton, are purple converted mountain bikes with a yellow Jamis logo and specialized rack. "He told him to start watching Craigslist."
Anderson posted a lost-and-found ad himself, and sent an alert out via social media, but hasn't heard much. He's trying to reconcile his love for the 'Ville with the situation.
"It was such a big piece of my life in the city — riding my bike," he says. "I had faith in those kids," and they took advantage of someone in trouble.
"I just wanted to find that dog so bad for my girlfriend."
Still, Anderson hasn't given up hope: He's had bikes stolen twice before, including that very Jamis, and recovered them both times.
Danielle Dreilinger writes the Somerville Scene column. E-mail her at somervillescene@gmail.com and follow her on Twitter.
