Bonnie Brown was too old and too afraid of “bad” weather to be out alone on a cold December night. But, there she was with thunder clashing and lightning popping all around her. She could think of nothing to do but dig out and run as fast as her four legs would carry her.

That’s way Eloise Brown figures it happened.

Bonnie is Brown’s 18-year-old terrier and what happened that night still makes Brown’s heart sink.

“Bonnie stays in a pen on the back porch and that night, about 11 o’clock on Dec. 14, I heard her whining,” Brown said. “I thought she need to go outside so I went out on the porch to see about her.”

Brown was hesitate to let Bonnie out because she is afraid of thunder and lightning but reluctantly she did.

That turned out to be a mistake. Bonnie didn’t come back to her pen.

“The next morning I saw where she had dug out from under the chain link fence,” Brown said. “I guess she was just so scared that she ran off into the woods.”

The image of Bonnie darting farther into the woods with each clap of thunder and each flash of lightning was haunting to Brown.

“We looked all up and down the road for Bonnie but we thought we would never see her again,” she said.

The loss of her long and faithful Bonnie surrounded the Christmas season in a cloak of sadness for Eloise Brown.

Then, suddenly, Bonnie was back home and just in time for Christmas.

“About two days before Christmas, my grandson and Eloise’s great-grandson, found Bonnie on the side of the road about a mile and a half from home,” said Diane Brown. “She was so hungry that she was eating a dead deer. You can’t image how proud we were to find her and we still can’t understand how she was able to survive that long. It has rained for several days during that time and the temperature had dropped down to the 24 degrees. Bonnie wasn’t used to being out like that and with nothing to eat. We just don’t know how she lived.”

When Bonnie got home, she was as sad a looking dog as anyone ever saw.

“She was so skinny that you could see every bone in her body and she was hobbling,” Diane Brown said. “She had cuts on her body and her ears were nicked. But she was so excited to be home.”

Hopefully, Bonnie didn’t notice that, thinking she was dead, her long and trusted friend had removed her pen from the porch.

“We put rags in a her box and covered her with a blanket and she actually passed out from exhaustion,” Brown said. “We’re all so glad to have Bonnie back home. We don’t know where she was or how she survived. But we know that it was wonder that she did.”