The rescue made him a hero — and earned Buford, a 6-year-old Anatolian Pyrenees, a hero’s dinner.
“He got a 2-pound rib-eye last night,” Buford’s owner, Scotty Dunton, said Wednesday. “He’s just a cool, cool dog.”
The meal came after Buford wandered home Tuesday morning with a 2-year-old boy who disappeared the day before from his home in Seligman, Arizona, the Yavapai County Sheriff’s Office said.
Dunton’s ranch, in a remote part of the state roughly 100 miles south of Grand Canyon National Park, is 7 miles from the boy’s home, according to the sheriff’s office, which noted that dozens of search-and-rescue personnel and deputies had spent the night searching for the boy.
The sheriff’s office posted details of the disappearance at 11:08 p.m. Monday. As of 8:20 a.m. Tuesday, the sheriff’s office said, the toddler had been found and was safe.
Dunton said he’d learned of the missing boy that morning. The combination of his age, the temperature outside — it was in the high 40s — and the rough terrain made Dunton concerned the toddler wouldn’t be found alive. The area surrounding his ranch is “all big thick trees and mountains and canyons and boulder piles,” he said. “Not real friendly for a 2-year old.”
In the post announcing that the boy had been found, the sheriff’s office said a helicopter involved in the search spotted two mountain lions in the area.
Still, when Dunton said he got in his pickup to drive to town that morning, he saw Buford walking down the driveway. A little boy with blonde hair, pajama pants and a tank top was with the dog, he recalled.
It was around 7:30 a.m.
“I knew it was him,” Dunton said. “He was all disoriented and crying. And so I jumped out and ran and grabbed him, and told him, ‘you’re OK, you’re OK,’ and took him inside and got him some water and food.”
“He calmed down pretty quick and turned back into a 2-year-old,” Dunton said.
When he asked the boy if he walked all night, Dunton said, the boy responded, “no.”
“He kept saying, ‘tree, tree,'” Dunton recalled. “So I said, ‘you laid down under a tree? And he said, ‘yeah.’ And I said, did my dog find you? And he said, ‘yeah.'”
The boy wasn’t hurt, Dunton said, and even though he got him a blanket, the boy didn’t want it.
“I said, ‘you’re the toughest 2-year-old I’ve ever seen,” he said. “There’s people saying, ‘There’s no way he made it that far. And something’s fishy about this story. And like, I physically went and found his little foot tracks.”
“He walked that entire way,” Dunton added.
Anatolian Pyrenees are guard dogs by nature, he said, and Buford typically sleeps all day and patrols his ranch at night to keep coyotes away.
Dunton wasn’t sure if the dog heard the boy crying and found him, but he tracked the child’s footprints for a mile. Buford, he said, was with him the whole time.