‘Never give up on your family’

SFX residents rescue Winnipeg pooch after week-long forest ordeal

By the time five-year-old Rosie was found – bloody, bruised and clinging to life on a St. Francois Xavier river bed – she’d already undergone a seven-night ordeal, scared and alone.

Thanks to the efforts of some local residents who used their boat in dangerously low waters to help with search efforts, Rosie has been returned to her Winnipeg family. But no one is quite sure what happened during her week in the wilderness.

Rosie can’t tell the story herself – she’s a dog, a large husky-pointer-cross with some serious medical problems. She was being treated at the SFX veterinary clinic when she slipped her collar and spent a week on the run.

Sandy Sorensen, Rosie’s owner, who lives in the Crestview area, said the dog has been sick since April with an autoimmune disorder for which she’s been on a series of drugs to keep her alive.

Although Rosie is sleeping happily by her feet, Sorensen can’t help but break into tears when recounting the story.

“She could barely move from all of the drugs and we were thinking we might have to put her down,” she says. “We saw how bad she was without treatment and how bad she was on the drugs and we thought, ‘how many times can we keep doing this?’”

Sorensen, her husband, Kris, and their children had a vacation planned, so they decided to leave Rosie at the SFX veterinary clinic to be treated for a week while they were gone. If Rosie’s condition didn’t improve, says Sorensen, they intended to make the tough decision to put the dog out of her misery.

While they were gone, however, something happened. Rosie, who had been calm and docile for her entire treatment, slipped out of her collar and took off into the bush behind the vet clinic.

“Remember, this is St. Francois,” says Sorensen. “It’s not a bush – it’s a forest, and this dog is very sick.”

Sorensen’s mother, stepfather and neighbours went searching for Rosie but to no avail. After cutting their vacation short and driving 24 hours straight from British Columbia, Sorensen and her family joined the search, but things looked bleak.

“It was like looking for a needle in a haystack,” she says. “My husband said, ‘Sandy, you might have to accept that she may have fallen in the river or without her drugs, she may have died.’

“I could accept that, but what if she was still alive, lying there hurting, all alone? I couldn’t come home, because I couldn’t sit there in comfort on the couch in the living room if she’s out there suffering.”

After a poster campaign and some assistance from local residents who scoured their yards and fields, Rosie still hadn’t turned up.

After almost a week, Sorensen and her family were distraught, but she says she couldn’t give up. She continued to ask local boat owners to search the nearby riverbanks for the dog, and despite unsafe boating conditions, she finally found some help.

Margaret and Lee Smith, the SFX residents who took their boat onto the Assiniboine River to search for Rosie, said it was all a matter of timing.

“It was pure luck in several ways,” said Lee. “If she’d come to our door five minutes later, we’d have been gone, and we just happened to have a boat on the river that we were just about to move due to water levels.

“I think the biggest thing is that I had my wife with me in the boat, and she managed to spot a black-and-white dog that was blended into some black gumbo.”

Smith said the dog was found at the bottom of a steep embankment, covered in mud.

“She seemed quite scared, she was snarling and growling at me...getting a strange dog in a little boat with myself and my wife seemed quite dangerous.”

The Smiths tied Rosie to a nearby tree and called her owners.

“It was very, very interesting for them to be reunited,” he said. “It seemed the dog didn’t recognize its owner for the first 35-40 seconds, and then the dog realized – hey, my owner’s here!

“It was something out of Walt Disney...it was extremely touching, literally the kind of thing that would bring a tear to your eye.”

When Rosie was safe at home, the family brought her to a vet in the city, who put her back on medication. They had no idea if the dog would survive treatment, but they weren’t about to give up, especially after Rosie’s week-long ordeal.

Although she’s not at 100 per cent, Rosie’s recent blood work shows a positive improvement. Sorensen says it’s proof she did the right thing by continuing to search for the lost dog.

“The moral of this story,” she says, “ is never give up on your family.”