MOORHEAD, Minn. (Valley News Live) – A pair of chocolate labs are recovering after being pulled from the ice on Upper Cormorant Lake on Thanksgiving Day.
“My two dogs fought for over an hour to save their own lives,” Molly Norman, of Moorhead, said, still in shock about what happened.
She knew something was wrong when the dogs didn’t come home right away. She explained, “I let them out and realized they haven’t been back in a while, so I started calling them, and they just didn’t come.”
That’s when the panic set in.
After searching nearby areas, Molly and her family noticed paw prints in the snow leading into Upper Cormorant Lake.
“I looked past the bushes, and I just saw two heads bobbing in the water,” she recalled.
Seeing bobbing heads, watching terror unfold.
9-year-old, Dakota, and 5-year-old, Nelli, had fallen through the ice on a day with near-negative wind chills.
With tears in her eyes, she said, “I just remember being like, ‘now there’s only one head.’ I was so helpless watching that.”
Watching and waiting, as 911 dispatchers told Molly an airboat can get there in over half an hour. With no time to spare, her neighbors grabbed a canoe, and headed onto the ice.
“They pulled Dakota out first and they were just stiff. Frozen. I could just see their legs were frozen as they were pulling them out.”
They pulled both dogs out safely and immediately drove to the emergency vet. With hours of life-saving measures done, Dakota was able to go home that same night, but, without her sister.
“Nelli had to stay. She has water in her left lung, so she has pneumonia and hypothermia, they both had hypothermia,” the dog mom explained. They came into the vet with extremely low body temperatures, low oxygen, and abnormal heart rates.
Nelli is still at the vet recieving oxygen, but is expected to come home very soon.
With all of this unfolding on Thanksgiving Day, the word, ‘grateful,’ is an understatement.
Molly said, “They fought so hard to prove they could do it.”
Grateful – for this Thanksgiving miracle.
With a long road of recovery ahead, Molly and her family created a GoFundMe to help offset the costs of treatments.
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