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Four-year-old survives 11-day ordeal in bear-infested Siberian forest
The girl was lost in the Russian far north for almost a fortnight with only her puppy to defend her
A four-year-old girl was recovering in hospital after being lost for nearly two weeks in a bear-infested forest in Russia with only her puppy to defend her.
Karina Chikitova was found emaciated but alive at the weekend, having survived 11 days in the Siberian wilderness in what rescuers said was nothing short of a miracle.
The girl had left her village in Russia's northeastern Sakha region with her dog on July 29 to stay with her father, who lived in a neighbouring hamlet. But he had gone to fight a wildfire and the girl apparently walked into the forest alone to find him.
With no mobile phone signal in the sparsely populated region, where native Yakut people live from hunting and reindeer herding, her mother only realised four days later that her daughter had gone missing.
Despite a massive search, the breakthrough only came when Karina's puppy traipsed back to the hamlet - in which eight people live - allowing rescuers to send search dogs on the puppy's trail.
"We were sure that the puppy was next to the little girl all this time, warming her at night and scaring away wild animals," rescuer Afanasiy Nikolayev told the Zvezda TV channel.
A report on the channel said the search party kept to creeks and meadows, going into the forest only in the presence of special forces because there are so many bears in the area.
The search team came across Karina's footprints two days later and found her lying in tall grass about four miles north of her village.
She had lost her shoes and was walking barefoot and had lost a considerable amount of weight.
"She didn't say a thing... she just cried quietly and reached out her arms," Artyom Borisov, a volunteer told Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper. "She asked for water and food right away."
"It's simply incredible that she was found safe with so much wildlife in the forest," a spokesman of the regional rescue service told the paper.
Television pictures showed the wide-eyed girl in a T-shirt and leggings just after she had been found gulping water before being carried onto a helicopter.
She said she ate berries and drank water from the river to survive.
Sakha governor's office said Karina was in the main regional hospital in the city of Yakutsk and was recovering well.
The Sakha region in northeastern Russia is one of the country's most remote, known for its icy rivers, permafrost, and rich wildlife that includes reindeer and brown bears.
Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/...ian-forest.html
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Four-year-old survives 11-day ordeal in bear-infested Siberian forest14 Agosto 2014 |
