Dog survives 5 nights in bitter Minnesota cold huddled in window well

Emily Haavik | KARE-TV, Minneapolis-St. Paul

EDEN PRAIRIE, Minn. - A blind 13-year-old dog was found huddling in window well in Minnesota Monday.

Emily Raguse was in her basement when she saw something in the window well.

"He must have moved his head or something," she said. "I couldn't even believe my eyes."

A dog was trapped on the other side of the glass, curled up and covered in snow. Raguse ran upstairs and called her neighbor, who called Eden Prairie police. Then she went outside to check on the dog.

"He was really, really lethargic, so he pretty much was only moving his head a little bit," she said. "I grabbed a towel from the house to put on top of him because he was obviously cold. He was shivering."

She had been out of town all weekend, so she had no idea how long the pup had been there.

Police arrived and climbed down to get the dog, a Goldendoodle. His tag revealed his name, "Buddy," and his owner, Patsy Sumpter,

Sumpter said she put the dog outside on Wednesday night around 8:30 p.m.

“Normally he goes down in the woods and he comes back," she said. "And he didn’t come back. And I kept calling and calling."

Sumpter called for Buddy all evening, and looked for him all day on Thursday.

“The weather changed and it snowed that next morning and it just got worse and worse, and I just felt so helpless," she said.

Little did she know, Buddy was not far away.

"He probably heard me yelling and he couldn’t get out," she said. "He was that close to home."

Sumpter said her 13-year-old Buddy is blind and battling cancer. Still, he somehow made it through five nights of bitter cold.

“I prayed and prayed and it’s just so miraculous that they found him," she said. "I don’t think he would have made it one more night."

Raguse agreed that it seemed "divine intervention" played a role in her stopping by the spare bedroom when she did.

And as her 4-year-old daughter pointed out, even before she read the tag, she seemed to know the dog's name.

"You were calling him 'Buddy,'" her daughter told her.

Sumpter plans to bring Buddy to the vet for a check-up on Wednesday. In the meantime, he's resting by the fire under a blanket.

“He didn’t want to die there I guess," she said. "He wanted to come home and be with us.”