A Victorian family is celebrating an early Christmas miracle after their beloved and deaf pet dog was found alive and well down a metres-deep mineshaft.
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Marlo, the three-year-old border collie, left home in December while his family were shopping, and they saw no trace of him for the next 11 days.
His owner, Aliex Kay, said she was almost certain Marlo had disappeared forever, when she received the news he had been found down an abandoned mineshaft in thickly wooded bushland.
"There was no sign of him; we weren't quite sure if someone had come and picked him up and taken him, or if he had just taken himself off for a walk," she said.
"We heard absolutely nothing from him for those 11 days, so we had almost given up hope.
"We were about to sit the kids down and have a conversation with them, that he might not be coming back."
That was when Ms Kay received the call from her neighbour, Jodi Toering, informing her they had located Marlo alive and well.
However, the discovery, which Ms Toering described as "like finding a needle in a haystack", would never have happened if it were not for the intervention of another four-legged friend.
Ms Toering's daughter, Mia, had taken the family's labrador, Bella, out for a run in the bushland in Victoria's Central Highlands, when she began pulling on the lead, barking and insisting Mia divert off the track.
Bella led Mia through the dense scrub, where she found Marlo at the bottom of a more than four-metre-deep mineshaft.
"(Mia) decided to go for a run in the bush with our dog, Bella, and she came running home and said 'hey Mum, I just found Aliex's dog in a mineshaft," Ms Toering said.
"She had no idea that he had been missing for two weeks, and I said 'oh my goodness, is he dead?' and she said 'no he's alive'.
"I rang Aliex up straight away. She was absolutely gobsmacked, she had no words."
Ms Toering, with Mia and her husband Derek, drove back to the mineshaft with a ladder and rescued Marlo.
"Derek dropped (our extension ladder) into the hole; he's six-foot-six, so he had a bit of extra reach," she said when describing the rescue.
"He basically kicked off his thongs, climbed down and saved the dog."
During the rescue, which the family captured on video and posted on social media, Marlo almost fell back into the hole, something Ms Toering attributes to his weakened state.
"Marlo is quite deaf and he was extremely weak in the hind legs. He'd lost a lot of condition," she said.
"I think his back legs may have faltered, and he turned and fell, but Derek caught him and shoved him out again, and he got out a second time."
'Since coming back home though, he has not left our side'
Since returning home, Ms Kay said Marlo had recovered well, even if he was a bit skinnier than before.
"He's perfectly fine physically, he was very, very dirty, but he's not injured at all," she said.
"He's maybe a little bit thin, but there was a (dead) kangaroo down there with him, so as horrible as that is, he at least had a food source down there with him.
"Since coming back home though, he has not left our side. He's not normally a dog that enjoyed being inside unless we forced him to be.
"But he is following me from room to room, he's with the kids constantly, he tried to sleep on their bed last night, he's just thrilled."
Ms Kay described Marlo's return as the "best present" the family could have received for Christmas 2025, saying her young children had shed happy tears on the night of his rescue.
She also said she was lucky to live among a "perfect community" of neighbours, and praised the heroics of Bella the Labrador, without whom it's likely Marlo would never have been saved.
"Without Bella we would not have known Marlo was down there," she said. "Because with him being deaf, as much as we walked through the bush we were calling him, but he couldn't hear us at all.
"So without Bella, I don't think we would have found him down there."
