By early Wednesday morning, Kendra Green and her family had spent more than four days driving the backroads and open country of Natrona County looking for a 120-pound dog named Tango.
People had offered drones and even airplanes. Strangers called to say they were praying for them.
“There is a part of us that definitely thought maybe, you know, because he's a 120-pound dog. How does nobody see him?” Green said.
Then, Tuesday night, after another full day of searching and another drive home to Gillette without him, Green's phone lit up.
“Hey, not sure if this is your dog,” the message said, along with a photograph.
Green knew immediately.
“Oh yeah, that's him, definitely!" she responded.
The woman who spotted Tango dropped the family a pin.
A few hours later, around 4 a.m. on Wednesday, Green, her husband Anthony and their children headed back to Natrona County.
Dad's Truck
The family searched through the morning around the area where Tango had been spotted.
“Well, there's a lot of draws in that country that you can't see down in from the roads, and my guess is the last few days we were probably driving right by him and didn't know it" said Anthony.
Finally, around 8 a.m., there he was, three miles from the pin Jill Sisson sent in the BB Ranch area.
Tango was running and exploring, Green said, noticeably thinner than the dog that vanished Sunday night.
“He's skinny,” Green said. “You can feel his bones.”
After several days alone, Tango appeared frightened and confused. Anthony got out of his truck and stood there, calling to him.
Then Tango heard Anthony's turbo diesel, and he came running, Green said.
The reunion brought tears for a family that had spent days imagining the worst. Green's children had even taken the morning off school to join the search that morning.
Once they got the Great Pyrenees mix loaded up, they stopped at a gas station.
“We stopped at Micky's, and he got two of the sausage, egg, and cheese burritos and a sausage, egg, and cheese croissant.”
'Just Don't Give Up'
Tango is a livestock guardian dog in ranch country. Green worried he could have encountered livestock and was shot by a rancher protecting animals, or that he could simply be traveling through remote country where nobody was around to see him.
Still, she said, there was never really a conversation about giving up.
Then came the photograph around 7:30 or 8 p.m. Tuesday.
“The effort was incredible,” Green said.
Her phone filled with calls and messages from people asking what they could do or telling the family they were praying Tango would turn up.
“Just don't give up,” she said. “You just never know. The amount of effort you put in really pays off, and the community helping really helps too. Just keep sharing it, get the word out, and more eyes on it, the better.”
Still, Tango didn't come through his adventure unscathed.
Green said he appears to have fought with something while he was loose. His face is torn up, and his legs and stomach have bite and claw marks.
She called her veterinarian almost immediately after finding him.
Antibiotics and pain medication were already waiting for Tango when the family returned to Gillette.
Built To Roam
Tango's disappearance began only shortly after the Green family had made the difficult decision to rehome him.
Green raised Tango from the time he was about 8 weeks old. He is now 2 and roughly 120 pounds, a mix of Great Pyrenees, Maremma and Anatolian — breeds developed to independently guard livestock across large expanses of country.
Green had rehomed Tango after he and his brother began fighting.
The new home was in Natrona County, an unfamiliar territory for a dog whose old home and family were back in Campbell County.
When Cowboy State Daily first reported on the search, Kathy Liles, who has experience with livestock guardian dogs, warned that dogs like Tango are capable of covering tremendous distances once they start traveling.
They can go a “long, long ways,” she said.
Liles also recalled a previous search for a dog that remained missing for 11 days before it was recovered, an example that offered the Greens some reason to keep looking even when Tango appeared to have vanished.
For Tango, it took five.
Now Tango is headed home to Gillette.
The family plans to have Tango and his brother neutered, separate them into different goat areas and see whether time, distance and a little more work can make living together possible.
Kolby Fedore can be reached at kolby@cowboystatedaily.com.
