Dog Hero Likely To Be Honored For Saving Boy

When Cataldo artist Carrie Stuart-Parks launched the Great Pyrenees Hero Dog of the Year award 10 years ago, she never thought about bestowing it locally.

But this year, the award from the Great Pyrenees Club of America most likely will go to a Twin Lakes dog whose ancestors Stuart-Parks probably raised.

“I was so excited, but I’m not surprised,” she says. “It’s kind of neat that it happened here.”

Prince, a white Great Pyrenees pup, wandered off with his youngest master, 2-year-old Joshua Workman, last September. Rescuers found the pair unhurt six hours after they disappeared.

Temperatures had dipped below 40 degrees, but Prince apparently had kept Joshua warm.

“I don’t know how anyone could top him at this point,” says Claire Leishman, the New Jersey woman heading the Great Pyrenees club’s Dog Service Award Committee.

“I’m hoping he’ll get the top award.”

Prince is only 7 months old, but stands eye to eye with Joshua. At 100 pounds, he’s triple the boy’s weight and a shade blonder. His white hair ripples like duck down from his ears to his prodigious paws.

“Whether he wins or not, he’s a hero to me,” says Workman, Joshua’s mother. She won’t use her first name because she says a man has threatened to harm her family.

The Workmans left their five boys in their Twin Lakes home under their grandfather’s care to attend a meeting in Coeur d’Alene Sept. 18. Joshua played outside as they drove away at 6 p.m.

Workman found out later that Joshua never showed up for dinner at 6:30 p.m. Her older children thought he might have gone with his parents. They tried but couldn’t reach Workman on her cellular phone.

She finally called them about 9 p.m. on her way home from the meeting. She found out her baby was missing.

“I panicked, ran to the house, looked under all the beds,” she says. “We called the sheriff.”

Just the day before, she’d found Joshua pushing his dump truck down their quarter-mile-long driveway, Prince at his heels. Workman sent her boys to comb the woods.

She called neighbors. The kids checked the doghouse. Workman cried. Search and Rescue arrived with two dog teams.

While the experts hunted, Workman paced in her kitchen and drank coffee. Thirty neighbors and friends waited with her. At 12:30 a.m., her husband ran in to tell her that rescuers had found Joshua.

Her oldest son took a leash to property a quarter mile away where Prince stood between Joshua and rescuers. The dog wasn’t threatening, but protective.

Rescuers wrapped the toddler in a coat and handed him to his father.

“He just held him and wouldn’t let him go,” Workman says. “Joshua was wet from the waist down, but he didn’t even feel that cold. All I can think is that he was buried in the dog.”

A few days later, Joshua laid next to Prince while Workman groomed the dog. Prince hugged the boy with his furry legs.

“I asked Joshua if that’s what happened the other day,” Workman says. “He got a thoughtful look on his face and said something, but I couldn’t understand him.”

Marcy Desmond has raised dogs for 25 years and was impressed when she read about Prince’s actions. She sent his story to the Great Pyrenees Club of America.

“I thought, ‘Five months old and that instinct to guard is already there,”’ she says.

Leishman read the story and nominated Prince for the hero dog award Stuart-Parks began 10 years ago. Stuart-Parks grew up in Coeur d’Alene with Great Pyrenees champions her family raised and bred. She owns two regal dogs now of French heritage and says Prince looks like one of hers.

“Pyrenees are more than just pretty dogs,” she says. “We needed to acknowledge the dogs that save people’s lives.”

Nominated dogs all earn commendations from the Great Pyrenees Club. But the Hero Dog of the Year wins a Stuart-Parks watercolor print of a proud Great Pyrenees head.

The club honors dogs that act on their own, with no human prompting, to save a life.

Dogs just like Prince. , DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo