Last week a Tennessee hunting dog got himself stuck in a cave, but it was three days before rescuers could fish him out—not because he was too stuck, but because he picked a bunkhouse with a 200-pound black bear.
The dog, Charlie, was stuck in a 40-foot "extremely narrow cave shaft" (and not the cool kind of caves you'd want to explore). But when the Waldens Creek Volunteer Fire Department rescue team sent "rope rescue technicians" down the hole on English Mountain, they discovered a rather large and furry obstacle between them and the pup, according to a post on the rescue team's Facebook page.
"As I rounded the corner, I could see two little bear feet and a quite large claw grasping onto the wall beside him," firefighter Tori Downing told WVLT. The bear was about 5 feet below Downing. Captain. Jon Lanier, who was with Downing in the cave, told the outlet, "She stops, looks down, turns around and looks calmly back and says, 'Bear is still in the cave.'"
They left the cave and set up trail cameras to watch its exit. The bear took three days to leave the cave. Once they were sure the bear was clear of the cave, the team went to work to rescue the pup. But they encountered yet another issue.
"At first, we actually thought the dog had slipped further into the cave where we couldn't access," Lanier said. "It was kinda sad because we felt like we were gonna have to leave the dog there."
Senior WCVFD firefighter Christian Ellard was leading the team into the cave and was sure they had lost the dog. Ellard said, "As we're about to head back out, I looked back one more time, and I saw his antenna from his tracker collar."
The team grabbed Charlie and brought him back to the surface, where his owners and the rest of the rescue crew were waiting.
"It was definitely a sigh of relief for everybody on scene," said Andrew Wojturski, a Sevier County Fire & Rescue firefighter, according to WVLT. "And then once we finally got him out and the owner came up afterwards and shook our hands and thanked us, it was really rewarding."
Despite his three-day ordeal, Charlie was in "good condition." He was, understandably, "dehydrated and hungry."
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