Off the coast of the far-northern Alaskan town of Nome, and closer to Russia than the US, lies Saint Lawrence Island, where in a town called Gambell, a young girl was recently reunited with her dog who had a month-long meander around the frozen Bearing Strait.

Mandy Iworrigan is the mother to three beautiful children, each of whom is the brother or sister to three beautiful dogs, but on a trip to their Uncle's town of Savoonga in March, two of the three dogs, Starlight, and an Australian shepherd called Nanuq, disappeared.

Iworrigan believes it could have been that her uncle's dog, Ghost, led them on a merry dance around the frozen landscape. Ghost routinely strikes out for several days to a week before coming home, but maybe Starlight and Nanuq don't have the familiarity with the area.

In any event, Starlight reappeared about two-and-a-half weeks later. Nanuq on the other hand, was still at large, and Nanuq's 8-year-old human sister, Brooklyn Iworrigan, was frightened.

A week later, Mandy's father texted her to say that a dog which looked like Nanuq was seen in the tiny town of Wales on the Seward Peninsula, a staggering 166 miles from Svoonga. People were posting images of a dog they didn't recognize to a Facebook page used by residents of Nome and the surrounding communities for trading, goods, and gossip.

Sure enough, after Mandy reactivated her Facebook account, she discovered it was in fact her daughter's dog.

Nanuq means "polar bear" in the language of the Siberian Yupik, and despite coming from Down Under, he had negotiated 166 miles of frozen ice flows that stack up against each other in the small Bearing Strait separating Asia from North America, through which real Nanuqs prowl, all in the tail end of winter.

"I have no idea why he ended up in Wales. Maybe the ice shifted while he was hunting," Iworrigan told Anchorage Daily News. "I'm pretty sure he ate leftovers of seal or caught a seal. Probably birds, too. He eats our Native foods. He's smart."

Aside from a bite mark on his leg, the dog was healthy, and Iworrigan organized his return via charter flights that were already arranged for the Bering Strait School District's Native Youth Olympics.

"Wolverine, seal, small nanuq, we don't know, because it's like a really big bite," she said, adding that "if dogs could talk, both of them would have one heck of a story."

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