REGINA -- A dog is back home with her family in Qu'Appelle, after she was rehomed to a new family but went missing for seven days, likely trying to find her way back to her original home.

“What she went through, I can’t even imagine,” said Darren Klassen, Patty’s original owner.

Patty is a white husky-lab-pit bull cross. The family has several other dogs, so when they sent a puppy to a new home, they thought Patty should go too.

“I didn’t want to send her. But, it was just getting a little hard to have attention for all of them,” Klassen said.

Patty ran away from her new home in Regina Beach that same night, on Jan. 31. Klassen immediately started searching for Patty, with a group of others assisting in the search by posting sightings of her on the Regina Beach Area Lost and Found Pet Alerts Facebook page. In the days that followed, Patty was spotted numerous times in the Lumsden area and throughout the Qu’Appelle Valley.

“The first three days, I had lots of people spotting her. But by the time I got to the area, she was gone,” Klassen said.

Five days after Patty went missing, the family contacted Perry Reavley with Critter Gitter Wildlife Control Services, to help track the dog. Reavley said between the cold, the coyotes and the terrain, it was a race to find Patty.

“It was really tough slugging down there, with the snow and the brush,” he said. “We tried three times to push her up the valley, which we were successful doing. But when she got up top, she would panic and just go back down into the valley.”

On Saturday, the group searching for Patty set up live traps. That evening, Klassen told the group to go home and he would stay to check the traps throughout the night.

“I’m hoping and praying, ‘Please be in the trap,’ because it’s already minus 35 on the temperature in the car,” Klassen said.

Then, at 12:30 a.m. on Sunday, Klassen spotted something white in one of the traps.

“So, I zipped down the hill and I rolled up to the trap, and she turned and looked at me,” he said. “My heart just jumped like, ‘Ahh it’s Patty, I got her.”

Patty was hungry, but seems to be doing well overall. Klassen and his wife, Laurie Baht, said they will be keeping Patty for good, adding the potential second owners were very understanding.

“She ain’t going anywhere. She wanted to come home. There is where she’s gonna stay,” Klassen said. “That was the roughest and longest six days I’ve had.”

Klassen said there is no way Patty would have made it home without the overwhelming support of the community, and for that, he is forever grateful.