Most of us realize that we love dogs but we never really know how much we love them until we are up against a very difficult situation. Sure, we bring them into our homes and they become a part of our family but in most cases, the kind of care that we provide for them is limited to feeding them, giving them some exercise and occasionally taking them to the veterinarian. What if it was a dog that you didn’t know? How far would you go out of your way to protect them or perhaps even save their life?
A woman found out just how much she loved dogs last summer when she was on a difficult hike. She was climbing when she came across a wounded dog and decided that she would do what she could in order to save his life. This didn’t involve running him down to the local veterinarian in her car, she had to pick him up and carry him down the mountain. In fact, it was a long and difficult trip that took over six hours with the 55-pound dog on her shoulders! I guess she found out what she was made of during those hours.
It was three hours of hiking that got Tia and her 76-year-old father to the point where they were on the top of the mountain. They were on their way down when they found the injured dog and the owners weren’t anywhere that they could see. She said, “he was pretty beat up, he couldn’t walk.” She knew that there was no way he would make it down the mountain so she picked him up, put him on her shoulders and started hiking. It ended up being 6 miles and 6.5 hours before they were at the bottom again.
“We had to hike through snow, we lost the trail at one point,” explains Tia. “It was one of the hardest things that I have done in my life.”
The father took a picture at one point when she was taking a break and the dog was sitting on her. She was almost in tears because of the difficult journey. She said:
“I got underneath him to pick him up to go again, and again felt the tears coming. I said a little prayer at that point, because the weight was hurting my neck, I had a really bad headache, my legs just felt like they were going to crumble at any moment,” Tia shares. “As I said that prayer, I literally felt the weight lift off of my shoulders and I thought ‘Ok, there must be a lost hiker that’s behind me helping me. So, I turned around, probably five or six times, looking for someone. There was nobody there. At that point I knew that divine intervention was happening. I was getting help.”
When she reached the bottom of the mountain she saw a note that the dog was lost and his name was Boomer. She contacted the owners and found that they had let him run while they were hiking and he slipped off of a crevice. It was a 100-foot fall but thankfully, he had only injured one of his front paws. He will be able to have surgery soon to fix the problem.
Boomer’s owners were heading out to Arizona to live so they were going to put him up for adoption. Tia was ready to step up to the plate.
“It pulled at my heartstrings all night long. When I woke up the next day, my first thought was ‘That dog’s supposed to me mine,’” explains Tia.
She sent the owners a message and said that she had bonded with the dog and would like to keep him. They agreed and now they are together. She had rescued him on the mountain but now, it looks like he is the one doing the rescuing.