A year-old Australian Shepherd made an epic trek across 150 miles of frozen Bering Sea ice, during which he was bitten by a creature — likely a seal or polar bear — before returning safely to his home in Alaska.
Mandy Iworrigan, Nanuq’s owner, who lives in Gambell, Alaska, and her family were visiting Savoonga, another St. Lawrence Island community in the Bering Strait, last month when Nanuq disappeared with her other family dog, Starlight, the Anchorage Daily News reported .
Starlight showed up a few weeks later, but Nanuq, which means Yupik polar bear in Siberian, was nowhere to be found.
About a month after Nanuq went missing, people in Wales — 150 miles northeast of Savoonga on Alaska’s west coast — began posting pictures online of what they described as a lost dog.
“My dad texted me and said, ‘There’s a dog in Wales that looks like Nanuq,'” Iworrigan said.
She reactivated her Facebook account to see if it could be her stray dog.
“I said, ‘No way! That’s our dog! What is he doing in Wales?'” she said.
The events of Nanuq’s journey will likely always remain a mystery.
“I have no idea why he ended up in Wales. Maybe the ice shifted during the hunt,” Iworrigan said. “I’m pretty sure he ate leftover seals or caught a seal. Probably birds too. He eats our local food.
She used airline points to bring her dog back to Gambell last week on a regional airline, a charter that transported athletes for the Bering Strait School District’s Native Youth Olympics tournament.
Iworrigan filmed the happy reunion as the plane landed on the Savoonga runway, and both she and her daughter Brooklyn squealed with delight.
Aside from a swollen leg with large bite marks from an unidentified animal, Nanuq was in fairly good health.
“Wolverine seal little Nanuq we don’t know because it’s like a really big bite,” she said.
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