During the two weeks her dog was missing, Katie Gideon experienced many emotions.
Hope. Anguish. Grief.
“I had a feeling I would see him again, but I just didn’t know,” she said. “I was really sad, and I cried a lot.”
One night, the Cordell native had let Kuma outside, and he disappeared.
“I posted him on Facebook and everything, and had people looking for him,” she said.
Then after two weeks and out of the blue, someone commented on her Facebook page.
They had found her Kuma, who had wandered into their yard.
After two weeks, the roller coaster ride of emotions was over.
“As soon as he saw me, he jumped up on me and started licking my face,” she said. “He licked my face all the way home”
Gideon considers herself lucky.
She hadn’t had Kuma too long at the time he disappeared.
She got the German shepherd-mastiff mix when he was six weeks old. He was only about three months old when he disappeared.
“I was sad. That was my baby, my child,” she said.
Gideon considers the circumstances around his disappearance mysterious, she said.
Her family did everything they could. Besides the Facebook post, they went driving around looking for him and contacted other towns about missing dogs.
He wasn’t in any of them, she said.
“No luck,” she said.
In the meantime, she got another dog, Cooper, thinking maybe she wouldn’t see Kuma again.
“Now I have two dogs,” she said. “I got my new dog about a week before Kuma came home. They love each other.”
Gideon’s advice for others in the same situation: “Love your dog, and don’t give up the hope.”