Awww...
Girl, 4, found asleep with her dog after two days in forest
Evelyn Sides got lost running in woodland
Evelyn Sides got lost running in woodland
Two days and two nights after she strayed alone into the woods of Alabama a four-year-old girl has been found alive and well, sleeping in a pine-wooded valley with her dog at her side.
Evelyn Sides, who goes by the name Vadie, was at the home of a family friend she calls “Nanny” deep in the countryside about 50 miles northeast of Montgomery.
They were out for a short walk at 2.40pm in the afternoon when Vadie and the dog strayed out of sight into the woodland.
Nanny, who is said to be in her seventies and who also looks after Vadie’s infant sister, looked for the girl in the woods and then raised the alarm. Sheriff’s deputies arrived to search for her on foot, on horseback and on four-wheeled motorbikes. As darkness fell a police helicopter flew overhead, scanning the woods for signs of life with an infrared camera.
The following day dog teams came from all over Alabama to comb through the trees, while police divers arrived to search the streams and waterways. Firefighters joined the hunt too, told to look for a girl who might be in the company of a hound dog.
A second night passed with no sign of Vadie, who has red hair and was wearing a blue print dress with green flower patterns, and hopes began to fade with every passing hour.
On the third day of the search 400 volunteers assembled by a church to lend a hand.
Jay Jones, sheriff of Lee county, said that they were deployed at 2.35pm that afternoon in a grid formation to scour woodland where some signs of life had been found the previous day. Less than an hour later, the searchers heard a dog bark and saw a little girl sit up from a spot where she had been resting.
Colonel Edward Casey, of the Alabama national guard, said that he had imagined that she would be distraught. Instead she exclaimed, “Oh! I can’t wait to tell my mommy about my two nights out here,” he told The New York Times.
Vadie recounted some of her adventures to her mother from a hospital bed. “Nanny decided let’s go take a walk,” she said in a video her mother, Amanda, posted on Facebook. Vadie said she had started to run “too fast” and “got lost and then I started calling for Nanny”.
She had passed a house, she said. Also, “I slided down a waterfall that was so slippery. It went just, ‘schooo!’”
“Did you have Lu with you?” her mother inquired, referring to the dog.
“Lu just ran off,” she said. “She was fast but I found her again.” She was able to find the dog “because I could smell”, she said.
“I slept by a road the first night and the second night I slept where they found me.”
She was found less than a mile from where she had gone missing. Sheriff Jones told the Alabama news site AL.com that her movements may have caused her to be missed by searchers hunting a relatively small patch of woodland. He said that he had fretted about snakes and thought the dog might have kept her safe.
“You don’t have anything else that happened in these very long two nights and three days?” her mother asked, in the video.
“Um, no,” her daughter replied, and then pointed at the camera, asking to take a look at the footage that they had recorded.
