FORT KENT, Maine — It was a long week with a happy ending for a Cross Lake woman and a wandering Shetland sheepdog named Lacie.
According to Cricket Minet, her dog Lacie bolted from her lakeside yard on Sandy Point on March 11 while outside with Minet’s four other shelties.
The 8-month-old puppy was on the run for a week before a couple snowmobiling found her seven days later roughly 5 miles from home.
“It was a nightmare,” Minet said Friday. “I don’t think I got any sleep the whole time she was gone.”
Minet said something must have spooked the little dog, which ran up the driveway, across busy Route 161 and into the woods.
“I had just let the dogs outside and had to take a phone call,” she said. “They are good about staying in the yard, and I was watching them out the window.”
But when Minet went out to get the dogs, Lacie was gone and the search was on.
While Minet scoured the shores of frozen Cross Lake, her neighbor and fellow dog lover Paul “Frenchie” Madore took his snowmobile out to look on the groomed trails around the area.
“He went out twice a day looking for Lacie,” Minet said. “We put the word out, and everyone was just great helping us.”
For five long days, as temperatures in northern Maine fell to below freezing with the windchills several nights, there were no signs of Lacie until that Tuesday, when Minet said she got a call from a friend saying someone posted on Facebook they spotted a dog fitting Lacie’s description on a snowmobile trail in Sinclair.
“I got in touch with that person on Wednesday,” she said. “But he said Lacie was very skittish and he could not get near her.”
Minet and Madore rushed to Sinclair, where they walked along the snowmobile trail and drove up and down the road looking for the dog.
When they came up empty, Madore suggested heading back to get the snowmobiles to search the trails and into the woods, Minet said. On the way home, she stopped in at Martin’s Store in Sinclair to alert the owners there was a missing dog in the area.
“When I got home, there was a message on my phone,” she said. “It was the people at Martin’s telling me someone had found Lacie and brought her there.”
Minet, her four other shelties and Madore raced back to Sinclair for what she described as a very emotional reunion.
“Her tail did not stop wagging,” Minet said. “I teach my dogs not to lick me in the face, but she could not resist.”
Lacie had been found by a couple from Connecticut snowmobiling in the area, Minet said.
“The woman was a dog trainer,” Minet said. “So she knew exactly what to do and coaxed Lacie into her lap.”
The couple, who have since left northern Maine, declined her offer of a reward, Minet said.
For all her time on her own, Lacie was in very good condition, getting a clean bill of health from Dr. Christiana Yule at the Fort Kent Animal Hospital.
“She looked surprisingly good,” Yule said Friday. “No frostbite, no abrasions and no mats in her fur. She was a little slim but looked as healthy as could be.”
Minet said Lacie only lost a pound off her normal 14-pound frame while gone and hopefully learned her lesson.
“She still wants to go outside, but will not leave the yard without me,” she said. “She gloms right on to me.”
Because Lacie can’t speak human, Minet has no idea how she survived seven nights in the wild but did say she may have sought shelter by sleeping under a vacant shed or cabin and avoiding falling prey to predators like coyotes.
“I wish dogs could talk,” she said. “Because she’d have a pretty good story to tell.”
