Corky went missing in August of 2009, when he somehow slipped away from the Montez family’s fenced-in yard in Texas.
The family spent months looking for the little terrier, whom they had adopted that year. He was wearing his collar when he went missing.
“We searched for him for six months,” one of his owners, Jimmy Montez, told ABC News. “We put up fliers, asked local businesses if they’d seen him and even went door-to-door to our neighbors. But we never found him, and so we assumed the worst.”
The family moved from their home near Boyd, Texas, to Fort Worth, and added two dogs (and more kids), but they never forgot about Corky, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported.
Then, this month, the Montez family got a phone call.
Corky was microchipped, which was lucky for all parties involved here. Because that’s how he was reunited with the family, after he and another dog were brought into the Humane Society of North Texas.
Staffers discovered the microchip after Corky and another dog, named Captain, were brought in, according to a Humane Society post on Facebook. Kim and Jimmy Montez were contacted and when the family arrived, they took home not only Corky, but his pup pal, the one-eyed Captain.
“What a blessed day it was,” Kim Montez told the Star-Telegram. “We have so much love to share.”
The newspaper described the reunion:
“What a wonderful way to wake up on Saturday morning,” Kim Montez said Tuesday. “We never knew what had happened to him. We still had pictures of him in the house, but we never expected that call.”
Captain, the other stray adopted by the family, and Corky are kind of a package deal these days, Jimmy Montez told ABC, saying it is “so obvious they’re best friends.”
“It’s actually pretty adorable,” he told the network. “It looks like Corky really took care of Captain when they were out in the streets. He always lets Captain eat first, and he’ll even stand guard to make sure none of our other dogs bother him.”
This month, microchips also helped reunite Misty, an Oregon cat that had been missing for 11 years, and Raven, a Nebraska dog that ran away, with their families.
In an interview with the Star-Telegram, Humane Society spokesman Philip Gonzalez called the reunion between Corky and the Montez family “quite rare,” and “incredible.”
“If the dog could talk, we could only imagine the stories he’d tell,” he told ABC.