The hard truth is that sometimes animals don’t know how dangerous roadways are and drivers sometimes don’t have time to react if they hit one. Sometimes it can be more dangerous to get out of the car at that point, so many people keep going with a lump in their throats.

While we don’t know the circumstances surrounding Nutmeg’s accident, we can only hope the driver involved had no idea that they hit a 7-month-old puppy.

Stranded and injured

It looked like 7 months was all Nutmeg would get after that. She lay broken on the side of the snowy road in Alberta, Canada with her pelvis smashed, unable to move.

As her warm body and breath melted the snow around her, she sank deeper in, making her harder to spot. Rescuers estimate she laid in the ditch for roughly 12 hours.

But it wasn’t her time to go.

Fortunately, a few teenagers on their way to a skate park came down the country road and realized that the lump of fur was, in fact, an injured puppy. They immediately called authorities who reached out to a local rescue organization – the Alberta Spay Neuter Task Force.

According to Alberta Animal Rescue Crew Society:

A second chance

It turns out locating her in the snow a second time would be quite a task.

“Her body heat had actually created a hole in the snow,” Amber Perry of the Alberta Animal Rescue Crew Society (AARCS), which cared for her after her rescue, told The Dodo months later. “She was deep down in the snow. So she was hard to see when they were coming back to look for her.”

The organization reported on their Facebook page that the tall grasses along the road acted as further camouflage.

But they found her – and it turns out she was definitely open to being helped!

“She was very approachable, but she was unable to move her back end,” Perry says. “She was wagging her tail a little bit.”

It must have been a relieving, if heartbreaking, scene.

On the mend

The rescuers rushed the puppy to the emergency vet at Southern Alberta Veterinary Emergency (SAVE) where they took good care of her and set her on the road to recovery.

She was on crate rest for 6 weeks while she healed.

After that, she was handed over to AARCS and, as you might imagine, they had no trouble finding the adorable German Shepherd that they dubbed Nutmeg, a foster family.

(We assume efforts were made to locate her original family, but they failed.)

Before her final adoption, Nutmeg became the face of the AARCS’s campaign to build a new veterinary hospital – after all, she was the very model of how important facilities like this are in helping animals in need.

And good news! They reached their goal with Nutmeg’s help and now the stray and wounded animals of Alberta have one more facility to help them.

Be sure to scroll down below to take a look at this slideshow posted by the rescue on Facebook to see all of the photos of Nutmeg’s recovery.

Please SHARE this with your friends and family.

Source: AARCS, The Dodo, Facebook – AARCS