On Saturday afternoon, four 7-week-old puppies wrestled on the hardwood floor of Bud and Karen Smith's home in Huntsville.

They nipped, they barked, they growled, they did everything that normal puppies do with their siblings.

But how the four were able to do it on Saturday was anything but normal, after one of the pups -- the deaf, vision-impaired Australian Shepherd mix named Toffee -- spent 30 hours trapped in a backyard 50-feet-deep crevice; helped by a region that came together to pull her out of her trap and before a worldwide audience cheering and praying for her on the internet.

"I cried so much in the last two days that I think all the tears are gone," explained Karen, the foster mom to Toffee and her three siblings. "I think the biggest thing with this is finding out about the power of a community. I couldn't have dreamt that the number of people willing to help someone they never met."

Toffee's disappearance started innocently enough with a trip to the backyard with her brothers Brickle and Snickerdoodle, and sister Cotton Candy (all named after Bruster's Ice Cream flavors) to do their business after a hard rain on Thursday.

"We let them play and walk around like normal and I was standing on this ledge, when she came running toward me. All of a sudden, it was like 'where'd she go?'" said Karen. "I looked in this crack in the ground and could see her walking around at the bottom when I shined a flashlight on her."

The rain had washed away rock and debris covering the crack; Toffee found the weak spot and fell to the bottom. Karen started calling people at A New Leash On Life, the animal rescue group she works with, while Bud called 911.

"It took on a life of its own. People were calling different people to try and help," said Karen. "The fire department stayed till dark, Huntsville Cave Rescue came out and they tried to get two different people in there, but it was just too tight."

They knew Toffee would be OK for the short term with food dropped down and puddles for water, but it didn't make the night any easier. At 5 a.m., the Smiths and A New Leash volunteers were back at it again. A little later in the morning, a trickle of help became a torrent thanks to a livestream by a Huntsville TV station.

"Once WAFF did the live feed, it took off," said Karen. "People were tuning in, offering help, bringing food and equipment, offering suggestions on how to get Toffee out. The media played a big part in this. Without them, people wouldn't know I needed help and we wouldn't have known where to turn for help."

The effort to bring Toffee out of the crevice was a group effort -- starting with A New Leash, but it didn't end there. There were first responders from Huntsville, people who donated time, effort, water, ice, or ideas, and the unlikely but Herculean effort from a group of employees from Roto-Rooter, who snaked a high-powered camera down the crevice that made a difference in the rescue.

They tried just about every suggestion thrown out there to get Toffee out of the crack -- except for two.

"Using suction was suggested by the Roto-Rooter guys (and others on line) because they use it to get rats out of sewer lines. When I asked what it did to the rats, they said it kills them -- and were weren't going through all of this to do that," said Karen. "And we weren't going to send a child down there to grab her. I have a puppy stuck, I don't need a human and a puppy too."

But things started coming together when the Paint Rock Volunteer Fire Department showed up later Friday night and worked with Gary Cooper of USDA Wildlife Services in Auburn. They used a snare and snaked it through a length of PVC pipe to feed it down into the hole. To get the right size, they first tried it out on one of the other pups; once they got the snare to the bottom, sardines were used as bait.

A little after midnight on Saturday, a tired and exhausted Toffee went for the bait, into the snare and began the trip above ground -- capping 30 hours of stress, sweat, angst, excitement and now for the Smiths, sleep.

"I had planned on letting her sleep with us in bed to make her comfortable," said Karen. "But when I took her inside and she saw her siblings, she wanted to be with them. They ran around chasing her, licking all over her face. I can't take her away from that. She wanted to be with them and that was obvious."

Saturday was a day of recovery. Pipes, equipment and the odd water bottle were strewn around the yard. The crack had been temporarily covered up by rocks and chain-metal fencing. Inside, the four pups played among themselves and the Smith's four dogs.

New Leash also found new life on Saturday, with an influx of donations of food, money and more.

"We had donations of food for the volunteers and money for the puppy," said director Debbie Dodd. "We had flown out an expert from California, in case they weren't able to get her out. But we got quite a bit of donations for the rescue for a couple of days. We had more than we normally get in food. It was a great community effort."

The four pups will be up for adoption soon, once they get spayed and neutered. They're part of a litter of seven found living under a truck in Blount County by a New Leash volunteer; the other three -- including one similar to Toffee -- are with another volunteer. Keeping Toffee sounds like a wonderful ending, but isn't in the cards. Karen said that she can't keep her own four dogs, a special-needs dog like Toffee and foster other dogs.

But she will always remember Toffee and the outpouring of kindness and community that she brought to their house this week.

"There are people out there who wonder 'why would you do this for a dog," said Karen. "Don't go there with me because I will go off on you. But that's obviously not how the people in the community feel because they showed up in masses. It was a huge outpouring and I think that says a lot about our community."