Off the coast of the far-northern Alaskan town of Nome, and closer to Russia than the US, lies Saint Lawrence Island, where in a town called Gambell, a young girl was recently reunited with her dog who had a month-long meander around the frozen Bearing Strait.
Mandy Iworrigan, mother of three children and three dogs each, went missing on March trip in Savoonga, the town where their uncle lives. Starlight the Australian Shepherd, as well as Nanuq the Australian Shepard, were both lost.
Iworrigan thinks it was her uncle’s Ghost who led them in a dance through the frozen terrain. Ghost routinely strikes out for several days to a week before coming home, but maybe Starlight and Nanuq don’t have the familiarity with the area.
Starlight returned about two and a half weeks later. Nanuq on the other hand, was still at large, and Nanuq’s 8-year-old human sister, Brooklyn Iworrigan, was frightened.
A week later, Mandy’s father texted her to say that a dog which looked like Nanuq was seen in the tiny town of Wales on the Seward Peninsula, a staggering 166 miles from Svoonga. A Facebook page that is used for gossip, trading and goods by the residents of Nome, Alaska, was flooded with images of dogs they did not recognize.
Sure enough, after Mandy reactivated her Facebook account, she discovered it was in fact her daughter’s dog.
Nanuq means “polar bear” in the language of the Siberian Yupik, and despite coming from Down Under, he had negotiated 166 miles of frozen ice flows that stack up against each other in the small Bearing Strait separating Asia from North America, through which real Nanuqs prowl, all in the tail end of winter.
I don’t know how he got to Wales. Iworrigan told Anchorage Daily News that the ice may have shifted when he went hunting.
I’m pretty sure he ate leftovers of seal or caught a seal. Most likely birds as well. He eats our Native foods. He’s smart.
Aside from a bite mark on his leg, the dog was healthy, and Iworrigan organized his return via charter flights that were already arranged for the Bering Strait School District’s Native Youth Olympics.
“Wolverine, seal, small nanuq, we don’t know, because it’s like a really big bite,” she said, adding that “if dogs could talk, both of them would have one heck of a story.”
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