Huskies are amazing dogs: They’re loyal yet willful, known to trust their own instincts over their owner’s in certain situations—which serves them well when, say, they’re pulling a sled around a blind curve, and they know that following their master’s directions means plummetting to certain death. They make great YouTube stars and adorable memes. And they’re bred to run great distances, but they don’t have strong homing instincts.
That’s something the family of Phelia, a one-year-old husky from Austin, learned over the summer, after their dog went missing.
Phelia disappeared under circumstances that KVUE describes as “mysterious” sometime in July, though the details of what “mysterious” means are unknown. What is known is that more than a month later, a veterinarian’s office found the microchipped pup and identified the owners—in Chicago.
Without knowing the specific details of Phelia’s summer vacation, we’re going to assume, given the breed traits of huskies, that she escaped on her own, and then ran up to Chicago over the course of July and August. That sort of distance running isn’t uncommon for huskies—husky owners whose dogs have gone missing in Austin in the morning have been known to get calls from people who found them that evening in Waco—and it’s certainly more charming to imagine that poor Phelia ran 1,000 miles in the wrong direction as she sought out her people that summer than it is to worry that, say, someone stole her, drove her to Chicago, then lost track of her.
In any case, Phelia’s story has a happy ending, as the dog was no worse for the wear, and her homecoming to Austin was paid for by the microchip manufacturer that facilitated her return.
At the cargo pick-up Tuesday night, Phelia licked every face in the lobby, starting with her owner, Jodie, as soon as she was released from the kennel she flew in.
“I’m very emotional,” Jode said through an interpreter because she is hearing impaired.
The organization Lost Dogs of Texas was contacted by Lost Dogs of Illinois which made the reunion possible.
