An Albuquerque man is relieved and happy after a five-day search for his missing dog ended with the owner reuniting with man’s best friend.
“If Ellie could tell the story, this would be a movie,” Austin Mason, the owner of Ellie, a five-year-old golden retriever.
Mason took Ellie on a routine fishing trip in a rugged canyon in Questa last week but lost sight of the dog.
"So we started down the trail heading down this trail and I stopped to show my buddy this little hole that we were going to fish, and Ellie was maybe about 100 yards ahead of us,” Mason told KOB. “I didn’t think anything of it. She goes on hundreds of trips with me a year.”
Suddenly, the dog vanished.
“I’m hiking up and down the trail in tears, beating myself up, what did I do… that turned into an all-day search which turned into an all-night search to an all-morning search,” Mason said.
The search was on its fifth day when Mason spotted something on the side of a cliff. “We started using my binoculars and there she is! There’s my dog. I just got chills and goosebumps and was crying and was so overwhelmed with emotions,” Mason said. “What we had realized is that Ellie had fallen down, what we think, is off of this big ledge, and so we then had to figure out how to get her out.”
Mason used rope to retrieve the dog. “She was sore. She was tired. She was scared,” he said. A week later Ellie is doing fine.
A week later, she’s doing just fine. “I was just at a loss for words,” Mason said. “I can’t know why God put me in that spot when I looked across and happened to see her. I don’t know why I scanned that area.”