A missing dog is home today after being gone for since last Thanksgiving.

INDIANAPOLIS (WTHR) - A dog who ran away last November is back home after nearly five months of a statewide search by his owner.

"Puppy Dog, what do you think of all of this?" Wes Capito asks his beagle KJ as they sit in the front yard of the retired truck driver's home on the west side of Indianapolis.

"Yes, I know," Wes says to KJ, as he scratches the dog's belly.

Right at this moment, it's just a man, his dog and good belly rub on a bright spring day.

"I think you got a little more more white on you than when you left here," Wes tells KJ, as the dog looks up at his owner, KJ's paws in the air.

For Wes and KJ, life couldn't get any better than this moment.

"This is his office. This is KJ's office and I'll sit here with him," Wes explains.

After nearly six months of being separated, Wes and KJ are back in the office and back in business.

"Strange as this may sound, we're on the same wavelength. Only difference is his wavelength got stretched out a little bit farther when he decided to take off," says Wes.

That was last November, just a few days before Thanksgiving, when KJ ran away during a walk at a nearby cemetery.

"I should have known and I blame myself for this whole ordeal, because I should have had a chip in him and I should have known it's a beagle's nature to run. I just didn't think he would," Wes explains.

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For Wes, an only child, who's never been married and whose parents passed on long ago, KJ has been the only family he's had for a long time.

"He sleeps with me every night. We do everything together," Wes says. "He and I have been together all his life, through the good, through the bad.

"He was there when I felt bad, he was there when I felt good," he explains.

That's why Wes spent nearly six months after KJ disappeared searching for his best friend, trying not to lose hope.

"I missed him, period. There's no explaining it. He's my buddy. He's the one I choose to run around with," says Wes.

Wes hung up flyers, hired a bloodhound tracker and visited and called area shelters every day.

"I've been all over pretty much three-quarters of the state of Indiana checking," he explains. "Frankly, I did everything I possibly knew to do."

Still, there was no sign of KJ.

Wes was about to rent a billboard with the dog's picture on it when he got a call Tuesday morning about a woman who'd found a dog at West Lake Apartments, six miles from where KJ disappeared.

The woman took the dog to a vet to see if he a microchip. When she found out he didn't, she took him home and put his picture online.

Someone else, who had seen all the posts online about KJ, saw the picture and called Wes, telling him the dog might be KJ.

And just like he's done so many times over the past several months, Wes went to see, hoping this time, would be the time, KJ was coming home.

It was.

"He was just hoopin' and hollerin'," Wes says of their reunion in the woman's apartment. "He was excited to see me and I was more excited to see him. She said when she found him yesterday, he was laying under the bush cooling down.

"As my boss told me one day, that's the most sought after animal in the state of Indiana and as it turns out, evidently he was," says Wes, smiling and petting KJ.

Now, after all that time apart, the pair is just happy to be back in KJ's office in the front yard.

They might celebrate later.

"We're not going to get crazy, but I think he deserves a steak," says Wes.

They're just making up for lost time.

"We're just going to make up for it and hey, today's a holiday. Today's KJ day. Isn't that right hound dog? Isn't that right?" Wes says to KJ, explaining that he's taking the dog to get a microchip to prevent this from happening again.