"We pulled her up out of the water, she was very sad and dejected and she just looked at us and wandered in the opposite direction." Jessica said. They made their way through the lantana after the tired pooch until they came across where the animal had been living. "I gradually worked up the courage to reach out and pat her on the head and she gave me a lovely lick on the hand." After a struggle they harnessed the dog in a rope rig, but because of her heft, she was able to wiggle out and make a run for it. The hikers crashed through the lantana and headed her off. It was at that point Jessica said the dog had become resigned to the fact we weren't going to leave her alone.

It was obvious to the group the rope wasn't going to work, luckily Jessica's husband Luke had a lightbulb moment and remembered a large canvas tool bag he had put in the car. "She just climbed right in, she didn't have a problem with sitting in the bag and she just watched us to see what we were going to do next." Because of the dog's weight carrying the bag proved to be too much of a struggle, so they grabbed a large branch and put it through the handles for a makeshift stretcher. "We cut our way through the lantana and vines and made our way over loose rocks, it was quite an ordeal, the whole thing took us two and a half hours and from that point it took us 30 minutes to get her up on the shoulder of the road." As soon as she got reception on her phone Jessica started searching lost pet pages on Facebook and posted pictures of the dog on one of the pages..

"Within 30 minutes of posting it I had a message from a man called Jeremy saying it was his dog and he told us that she had been missing for nearly a month. Jeremy Sharp had been quite distressed about the loss of his dog, which had been missing since June 30, and had put a great deal of effort to find her. He started campaigns on Facebook, put posters up, he would go out in the evenings and spend a few hours searching for her in the surrounding suburbs. Elly-Bobby, named after Ricky-Bobby the protagonist from Talledega Nights, was noticeably lighter upon her return. Jeremy said it was not the first time she has gone on a walkabout, months earlier an intruder had left a gate open and she went missing for 18 days.

"It's been a struggle, I can't believe what those wonderful people did, they're just fantastic. "She came to the door at their house and a couple seconds after she realised it was me and she just went nuts, I think we both went nuts actually. "It tears me up every time I think about it." Jeremy has since added locks to his fences and has ordered a tracker to attach to her collar, so if Elly-Bobby gets away, he can track her down. Loading

"I can't take any chances, I won't go through that again, it's horrible." Stay in touch with Queensland's best news via Facebook.