A lost dog treks 150 miles across Alaskan sea ice before he's reunited with his family
ANCHORAGE, Alaska — A 1-year-old
Australian shepherd took an epic trek across 150 miles (241 kilometers) of
frozen Bering Sea ice that included being bitten by a seal or polar bear before
he was safely returned to his home in Alaska.
Mandy Iworrigan,
Nanuq's owner who lives in Gambell, Alaska, and her family were visiting
Savoogna, another St. Lawrence Island community in the Bering Strait, last
month when Nanuq disappeared with their other family dog, Starlight, the Anchorage Daily News reported.
Starlight
turned up a few weeks later, but Nanuq, which means polar bear in Siberian
Yupik, was nowhere to be found.
About a month after Nanuq disappeared,
people in Wales, 150 miles (241 kilometers) northeast of Savoonga on Alaska's
western coast, began posting pictures online of what they described as a lost
dog.
"My
dad texted me and said, 'There's a dog that looks like Nanuq in Wales,'"
Iworrigan said.
She
reactivated her Facebook account to see if it might be her wandering hound.
"I
was like, 'No freakin' way! That's our dog! What is he doing in Wales?'"
she said.
The events of Nanuq's journey will
likely always be a mystery.
"I
have no idea why he ended up in Wales. Maybe the ice shifted while he was
hunting," Iworrigan said. "I'm pretty sure he ate leftovers of seal
or caught a seal. Probably birds, too. He eats our Native foods. He's
smart."
She used airline points to get her dog back to Gambell on a
regional air carrier last week, a charter that was transporting athletes for
the Bering Strait School District's Native Youth Olympics tournament.
Iworrigan filmed the happy reunion when
the plane landed at the air strip in Savoonga, with both she and her daughter
Brooklyn shrieking with joy.
Except
for a swollen leg, with large bite marks from an unidentified animal, Nanuq was
in pretty good health.
"Wolverine, seal, small nanuq, we
don't know, because it's like a really big bite," she said.
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