By Terry Karkos , Staff Writer
Monday, June 15, 2009
DIXFIELD - A young Dixfield boy's birthday wish and a truck reunited a Shetland sheepdog named Max with its Sumner owner 51 days after the lovable sheltie was lost in the Maine woods.
Shetland sheepdog is reunited with its 11-year-old owner after being lost 51 days in the woods of Maine, then hit by a truck.
Six days after the reunion, late Friday afternoon at Towle's Corner Store in Dixfield, Tina Hicks of Sumner and Zachary Brown, 11, of Dixfield, hugged each other.
Hicks thanked Brown for finding Max; Zach thanked Hicks and her daughter, Riley Hicks, 11, for the thank-you card, cash reward, and other gifts they gave him.
"You're a hero, man. You rule," Tina Hicks told the boy, who sat back down beside Max and petted him.
"Thank you for finding him," Riley Hicks told Brown, whose birthday wishes on June 5 were simply to find Max and get a spaghetti and meatballs dinner.
"He didn't ask for anything material," Maria Brown said of her son. "All he wanted to do was find this dog."
"That's so sweet," Tina Hicks said. "If he hadn't have done that, we wouldn't have found him."
On April 16, the day the Hicks family left on a Florida vacation, Max chewed through a rope and escaped from the Dixfield home of Ben and Rebecca Skibitsky. Rebecca, who is Tina's daughter, was dog-sitting.
Last month, Max was spotted near Welch's field off Route 142 in Dixfield.
"There were no sightings of him for three weeks and then there were sightings every day," Tina Hicks said. Several Dixfield residents, including the Skibitskys, searched daily for Max, left food for him and tried to trap him.
But Max evaded capture, twice escaping from Havaheart traps.
On June 5, Maria Brown took Zach looking for the 2½-year-old dog and returned the following day to refill a feed bowl they'd left for Max.
As they approached the bowl on June 6, Brown said her son heard Max there.
Max heard them, too, however, and bolted, darting onto Route 142, where he was immediately struck by a braking truck.
"We heard the crack, crack of Max running and then the (screech) of tires," Maria Brown said. "Three vehicles stopped and pulled over. The dog rolled off the road, got up and took off."
The Browns gave chase.
Despite suffering a fractured pelvis in two places, collapsed lung, pierced liver and ruptured spleen, Max ran 1,000 feet before collapsing in a yard. He had porcupine quills entangled in fur around his face and was covered in ticks.
Maria gently picked Max up and carried him to her Jeep.
"It was a bittersweet moment," she said. "I was so happy we'd found him and yet so sad that he got hit."
She drove to a utility pole on which the Hicks had posted a flier about their missing pooch, tore it down and called the number on it.
When she took the call, Riley Hicks burst into tears, her mother said.
"Riley was crying, 'They have Max! They have Max!' and I thought, 'Nobody has Max. He's like lightning,'" Tina Hicks said.
"Shelties freak out when they get lost," she said. "They don't even come to their owners."
Max, who suffers from night blindness, had been given up for dead.
"It's bad enough that he got to live in the woods for 51 days and then he gets hit by a truck," Tina Hicks said.
Shortly after the call, Hicks' son-in-law, Ben Skibitsky, arrived to get Max.
When they finally got him back, Tina Hicks said she didn't think Max would live through the night. But he did. A veterinarian revived and mended the family pet, but his collapsed lung has yet to refill.
Still, despite many injuries, Max is expected to make a full recovery.
The vet said we have to punch two holes in Max's nine-lives' card," Tina Hicks said.
As for Zach, whose sheltie "Tickles" died of old age a few years ago, he was just happy to help reunite Max with the Hicks family.
"It's pretty cool," he simply said.
Source: http://www.sunjournal.com/story/322049-3/RiverValley/Girl_dog_reunite
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