Dog Daily News

This is the face of one of the most loyal, dear dogs in the world (Photo: CBS News)

Here’s one for the books. To your left is a dog who went through a terrible trauma, but never gave up hope of seeing her people. Her name is Ella. Ella, meet a lucky reader. Lucky reader, meet Ella.

Ella is a Rottweiler who surely has a touch of Good Dog, Carl in her. According to a CBS News story, she and her family were in a serious car accident in Tennessee. She was thrown from the car next to a busy highway. Rescue crews never saw her. For two weeks she survived next to the highway, which is a story in and of itself.

But where this gets really incredible is what Ella did while she scavenged for scraps of food and drank from a roadside drainage ditch. She gathered things. Not just any things, but things that had been thrown from her family’s car. A toothbrush. A candle. A razor. A comb. And a host of other reminiscences and scraps of a life and the people she missed so much.

“It was like she was sleeping with them (the objects) – or waiting with them,” Kathy Wilkes-Myers, the Love Me Tender animal rescuer who found Ella, told CBS. “That’s the last spot she saw her family, and she was going to stay there.”

When Kathy found Ella, it was 13 days into her ordeal.  Ella was emaciated. But she didn’t act like countless dogs who are abandoned in the middle of nowhere. “I could just tell right away she was somebody’s baby. She just didn’t act like a stray dog to me,” said Kathy. It took a lot of detective work by Kathy to realize what had happened. We’ll cut to the chase. Thanks in part to the clues gathered by Ella, Kathy ended up finding Ella’s family, the Kellys.

Reunited! (Babies taste so good, don't they?) (Photo: CBS News)

The Kellys were thrilled, needless to say. They had given her up for dead. In an O. Henry-esque twist of fate, the family had moved, thinking Ella was no longer of this world. Sadly, they moved to a place that doesn’t allow dogs. The move is temporary, brought on by the accident and the expenses that came along with it, according to CBS.

But Ella will not be left out in the cold again. Kathy has agreed to take care of Ella for as long as it takes the Kellys to get on their feet and find a place that permits pooches.

Sigh…. This is the kind of story that makes us staffers proud to be dogs, and proud to be humans’ best friends.

Good dog, Ella. Good person, Kathy.

(Click here to see a video of the CBS News story. It’s a must-watch.)