A very pregnant Australian Shepherd wandering on a rural road outside of Noble, Oklahoma was spotted by people in the area for days. With temperatures due to drop below freezing, they grew concerned for the dog’s safety but she was “too skittish to let anyone close,” Alyssa Matlock wrote in the captions of her Instagram video.
Matlock and a group of animal lovers wanted to find the pup and fast. Matlock said they spotted the frightened dog in the evening but winning the miniature Aussie’s trust proved challenging.
“By some miracle she crossed the road in front of us that night and we spent the next 3 hours trying to gain her trust and get her close enough to leash,” Matlock wrote. “But we were unsuccessful.”
Instagram / pintsizedbuffalo
The next morning they set out to find her and try to rescue her again. That’s when Matlock noticed the dog’s overnight refuge place. “She’d spent the night curled up in a busted recliner on the side of the highway,” Matlock wrote. “But again, she wouldn’t allow us to catch her and took off.”
Instagram / pintsizedbuffalo
Matlock and the community members helping her “hoped and prayed” they would see her again, but the Aussie was constantly on the move and had covered a lot of distance, in the few days they had been searching, sometimes covering 10 miles from where she had been last seen in a day.
The following morning, snow began to fall and the temperatures dropped to dangerous lows.
Matlock wrote, “The next morning as the snow moved in and the temperature plummeted to 15 degrees [-9 C], we set out in one last attempt to find her, knowing if we were unsuccessful she would freeze to death.”
Finally, Matlock spotted the dog at the top of a hill. The dog was “walking aimlessly down the road.” Working together with two others, Matlock managed to catch her by coaxing the dog with food.
Instagram / pintsizedbuffalo
The dog who had been so elusive was finally safe. They decided to name her Journey and Matlock immediately brought Journey home and out of the cold. Just three days later, Journey gave birth to “six precious little babies.” The pups surely wouldn’t have survived if Journey hadn’t let them catch her.
Instagram / pintsizedbuffalo
“We don’t know what her story is,” Matlock later wrote about Journey. “We don’t know if she was dumped and left for dead or lost and trying to find her way home. For now we know she’s safe and that’s all that matters.”
Journey and her puppies will find homes. If Journey’s owner isn’t found, then she will be put up for adoption along with her puppies through Noble Now Inc. Friends of Noble Animal Shelter.
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