Two boys cuddle dogs to survive harsh winter in forest

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Two boys cuddle dogs to survive harsh winter in forest

Russia - The boys slept on a bed of twigs and cuddled their two dogs to stay warm during the night.

By Web Report

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Published: Mon 8 Jan 2018, 10:14 AM

Last updated: Mon 8 Jan 2018, 7:30 PM

Two 11-year-old boys, Ivan and Evgeniy, set out to take a stroll with their two dogs in the cold forest of Urals, Russia. The playtime soon turned into a nightmare for the boys who got lost in the woods while chasing one of their dogs.
However, instead of panicking, the boys put up a strong front to beat the freezing temperatures in the forest as they realised they had ventured too far, unable to find their way back home. They were found in the forest by the rescue teams some 30km away from their home.
On Thursday afternoon, the boys from Kushva town, about 200 km north of Ekaterinburg, planned to set up a 'command unit' in the forest. According to reports in RT, the boys said as they were walking in the woods when one of the two dogs ran off to chase a squirrel. The boys ran after the dog and got lost in the thick forest. They tried to get out of the forest but in vain.
As it started to become dark, the boys prepared themselves to spend the night in the woods and piled twigs on snow to make a makeshift bed. They had nothing to light a fire to keep themselves warm and so cuddled their pets to get through the cold of the Urals where temperatures dipped to -10 Celsius (14 Fahrenheit) in the night. The boys cleverly took turns to wake each other up so as not to freeze.
Their parents alerted emergency services past midnight when the boys failed to return home and over 200 emergency services workers and volunteers searched through the forest to look for the lost children.
It was only in the afternoon the next day that service workers discovered footprints of the children and their dogs, with traces going straight and then straying. When the rescuers finally found them, the boys said they were feeling fine but complained that their feet hurt as they suffered frostbite and were taken to hospital.
"They were going in circles. They also found one of the boys' sweatshirts and their improvised bed of twigs and sticks before the rescuers finally found the two boys. The dogs helped [the] children to keep warm," the head of one of the rescue teams, Leonid Demchenko, said.
 


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