April 23, 2008

ELY, Nev. –- Missing for more than a week, a dog that broke free of his chain journeyed about 80 miles across Nevada’s high desert, braving two mountain ranges and surviving a lack of water before managing to return to his home town.

Moon, a nearly two-year-old Siberian husky, was reunited with owner Doug Dashiell April 14, after fleeing from his truck during a road trip rest stop April 6.

The dog wandered up to the home of Alvin Molea, who took her in. Thanks to Moon’s dog tag and a call to a local veterinarian, Molea contacted Dashiell with the good news.

“He called me and told me that he had my dog,” Dashiell told Pet Pulse. “I was stunned … stunned.”

When he briefly left Moon in his truck she was securely chained, or so Dashiell thought, until he returned to find her gone.

“I went and looked at the clasp, and sure enough it hadn’t closed,” he said.

“I had been camping over in the western part of the state, near a town called Tonopah, and was on my way back home and stopped off in this remote valley called Railroad Valley,” Dashiell said. “It’s about 80-plus miles from Ely.”

That hardly stopped Moon from trekking through the isolated desert, and across the White River and Ward mountain ranges. Dashiell says he has heard stories of people getting lost in the area and dying of thirst. He says he always brings water with him when driving, in case his vehicle breaks down.

When days passed without Moon’s return, “By that time I thought, well maybe she’s dead, or she’s gone off some place, or somebody picked her up,” Dashiell said.

Dashiell’s calls to animal control and the Sheriff’s Department turned up nothing, nor did him reaching out to an Indian reservation and the tribal police near where Moon disappeared. Dashiell says he’d hoped Moon’s coloring would help someone find her.

“She’s very striking, she’s black and white, she has a white face and blue eyes,” he said. “Beautiful Siberian.”

The reunion between Moon and Dashiell was memorable, especially since usually, “she doesn’t do a whole lot of demonstrative stuff,” he said.

“She came over and buried her head in my chest,” Dashiell said, laughing. “And she does that when she knows she’s done something wrong. And she stayed close, and she’s still close.

“I mean, right now I’m sitting in my chair, watching TV, and her head’s between my legs.”

Aside from losing about 10 pounds, some of which she’s regained, and smelling from skunk, Moon is doing well, Dashiell says.

A local newspaper account suggested Moon may have been brought back to town by someone with a bicycle, or a truck, or both, Dashiell says. Parts of that story don’t add up, though, he says, so he doesn’t believe it.

“The vet and the animal control officer believe that she walked all the way,” he said. “The pads on her front paws particularly, were heavily worn.”

Running away is nothing new for Moon, who previously fled through holes in Dashiell’s fence, which have since been plugged. Yet she always returned home on her own -- until now.

“She has been kind of a runner ever since she was a puppy,” Dashiell said. “I let her outside because I was housebreaking her, and she took off on me, and wouldn’t come back for a couple of hours.

“She stays in the area, she didn’t run very far.”

Since water is scarce where Moon ventured, Dashiell reasons that she may have drank from a trough.

“There’s a lot of five and 10-acre parcels, and everybody has livestock, horses, goats, sheep, even one of my neighbors has a bunch of pigs,” he said of the area.

Since this ordeal, Dashiell says he has taken extra steps to keep Moon from going on another adventure.

“I got all new clasps on the chains,” he said. “And I’m going to WD40 those chains fairly often. But I’m more obsessed about watching what she’s doing, where she is.

“I tell people, I don’t care if she caught a ride with the Tooth Fairy as long as she’s home. That’s the main thing with me. I don’t care who brought her here, or if she walked all the way. The fact is that she’s here, and she’s in really good shape.”

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