AP – Spotting a dog struggling to stay afloat in a icy Vermont river, Chris MacRitchie never hesitated.
He jumped into the frigid waters and waded over to the dog, gently pulling it ashore, where his wife draped it with a sweatshirt. The dramatic rescue on January 10 in Berlin was caught on video by his son and was shared widely on social media.
MacRitchie’s son first spotted the dog as they were going through the drive-thru. When they reached the embankment of the Stevens Branch, a tributary of the Winooski River, the father of two felt he had no choice but to save the pooch.
The video shows MacRitchie – dressed in a T-shirt, sweats and boots – approaching the embankment as the dog struggles to get out. He calls out to the dog, and his wife can be heard encouraging him to rescue it. MacRitchie gingerly steps through the ice and into the river, audibly gasping as he wades toward the dog, which was on the other side of the frozen tributary. MacRitchie lifts the dog out of the water and onto the icy embankment. He carries it over to his wife.
“The only real stress I had about it wasn’t getting in the cold water. It was the depth. I did not know if it was 20 feet deep or it was two feet deep,” MacRitchie said. “When I broke through and I got on my feet and it was like waist-high, I was actually relieved by that. In my mind, during the moment, I thought, ‘Okay this isn’t that bad. Yeah, it’s cold, but I feel this is a very doable situation’.”
MacRitchie called the dog’s owner, Morgan Cerasoli, whose number was listed on the dog tag.
Cerasoli said she had been looking since January 9 for her dog named Arizona. She was heading to pick up her daughter from school, when she got the call from MacRitchie who said he had “pulled a drowning dog” out of the river.
“I started crying, and I told him, ‘Oh, my God, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you. Let me pull a U-turn and I’m coming right back,'” she said as she sat beside Arizona during an interview. She said the dog has mostly recovered.
After reuniting with her dog, Cerasoli said she saw the video and was brought to tears again over MacRitchie’s rescue and the sight of the dog struggling in the water.
“It’s brave, it’s selfless, it’s commendable. It’s everything that I think that we were on this Earth to be,” she said of the rescue. “Sometimes it feels like that’s very rare these days.”
