‘I took her when she was still a puppy’: in Bashkiria, a dog spent three days near a river where its owner drowned after falling through ice

A dog breed Hachiko named Belka waited for three days for his owner, who fell through the ice on the Ufa River. Rescuers found the body only on the fourth day of searching.

The relatives of the deceased decided to take Belka in, but they are not sure that they will be able to replace her beloved owner.

The dog and its owner could often be seen together: Nikolai Khalanchuk on a bicycle and left behind him his faithful Belka. The 59-year-old man lived on a farm separated from the district center by the Ufa River. According to locals, Nikolai and Belka were inseparable.

‘Nikolai’s house was on a farm, practically in the forest. A loner, his only company was his dogs. Initially, there were three of them. But one day, when Nikolai went to the district center, one of his dogs fell into the hands of specialists from the catching service. And a week ago, the second dog disappeared. Only Nikolai and Belka remained,’ his neighbors recall.

On the afternoon of November 24, Nikolai and Belka went to the store in the district center for groceries. Nikolai rode his bike to the village from the farm once or twice a week. The bridge across the river is about 2 km from the farm.

Bashkortostan has been experiencing stable sub-zero temperatures for some time now, and the rivers are frozen. On the way back, the man decided to take a shortcut and cycle across the frozen river. But when there were about 100 m left to the shore, the ice cracked and Nikolai fell into the water.

‘There were fishermen there. They immediately started calling everyone and sent guys with ropes. By this time, his nephew arrived with his father. The nephew fell in too.

He heroically saved his uncle and almost drowned himself. He gave Nikolai a stick. He was already so frozen that he physically could not grab it,’ the head of the rural settlement, Ruslan Ilyasov, told RT.

According to Ilyasov, it was simply impossible to get close to Khalanchuk at the time of the incident. He was in the riverbed itself, where the ice had not yet formed.

The fishermen were in the flooded part of the river, where the ice is stronger and where you can walk. This is the Pavlovsk Reservoir, there used to be a river here. The riverbed where he drowned is an old river.

When the reservoir was built, part of the village of Karaidel was flooded, and people were resettled because of this. There is a good current in this place, the water does not freeze quickly there. That is why Nikolai, when he reached the most dangerous part, went under the ice. 

It was not safe for the dog to stay on the ice during the search, so we chased her away. She watched us from the shore until the end of the day.

After about four hours of searching, we pulled the man’s bicycle from the bottom with a hook. But we never found his body that day,’ Alexey Chipchev, acting head of the Central Search and Rescue Squad of the State Emergency Committee of the Republic of Bashkortostan explained.

As the rescuer clarified, the width of the river in the place where Nikolai drowned reaches 800 m, and the depth reaches 9 m. ‘The ice thickness is from 2 to 7 cm, with these indicators, it is strictly forbidden to step on the ice.

The safe thickness of the ice is at least 10 cm. The next day we continued the search, the dog was already there. The brother of the deceased told us that yesterday he took the dog, but in the morning, it ran away again,’ the RT interlocutor noted. The hound sat on the river bank for the entire second day of the search.

‘She’s smart. They said once: ‘No!’ – and she didn’t go, she watched from the shore,’ continues Alexey Chipchev. ‘In the evening, after we left, the dog went home, and on the third day, she never showed up. It turned out that the brother of her deceased owner left her on a leash.’

Rescuers managed to find Nikolai’s body only on the fourth day. It was lying in the deepest part of the river, six meters from the place where the man fell through the ice. 

The deceased’s brother, Sergei, told the media that the dog is now at home, lying down all the time and refusing to eat:

‘She senses that something bad has happened. Nikolai took her in when she was still a puppy, I don’t even remember where he got her from. But they have such love! The dog literally followed Nikolai around and never left. She was with him her whole life. I’ll take her in, but I’m not sure that I can replace Kolya with her.’

Sergey also said that his brother only miraculously escaped drowning several years ago. ‘The tragedy happened in the same place as now. It was in the spring. Kolya, his partner and a friend were crossing to the other bank when the boat capsized. His fellow passengers drowned, and his brother was rescued after he had been floundering in the icy water for about four hours,’ recalls the brother of the deceased. PLEASE SHARE OUR STORIES.

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