Bikers Found 2 Dogs. They Were Barking a Frantic Message

An elderly man in Maryland may want to give his pups an extra treat or two after their barks for help rescued him from mud-mired danger along the Potomac. Per the Washington Post and NBC Washington, the 87-year-old was near Little Falls Dam in Montgomery County with his two dogs earlier this week when he started looking for a couple of sticks they could fetch, says Pete Piringer, a rep for Montgomery County Fire & Rescue. Before he knew it, the man was stuck in mud that reached above his knees, and his attempts to escape the quicksand-like muck seemed to only exacerbate the situation, per Piringer. But while the man didn't know what to do, his dogs did.

The concerned canines ran to a nearby towpath and started barking, until two people on bicycles stopped to see what all the commotion was about. "The dogs saved his life," a fire official tells WTOP. "Absent the dogs, there would have not been a trigger to get a cyclist or a hiker to slow down. [The trapped man] was 40 to 50 yards away from the [trail] at the water's edge." One of the bikers stayed with the man while the other alerted authorities. The man was rescued unscathed, and even his shoes were salvaged. "It's always a great day when you can help somebody," one of the Good Samaritan bikers says. "He was an older gentleman, so he wasn't going to get out of the mud by himself." (More dogs stories.)