It started as a faint howling early Wednesday morning that made Terence Moniz’s stomach drop.
The noise was from Kula, his 3-year-old Brittany spaniel who’d escaped his fenced, Volcano property the night before and gone missing. Moniz had combed the neighborhood for hours trying to find her.
“I (had) called and called and called,” he said. “There was no sign or sound. It was strange because she normally sticks around. But there was nothing.”
So, when Moniz finally heard Kula in the distance around 1 a.m. that morning, he jumped out of bed, threw on rain gear and trudged outside. Eventually, he found her — and was horrified. The 35-pound canine had fallen into what looked like a collapsed lava tube at least 20 feet deep with 90-degree vertical walls.
There wasn’t much he could do until the sun broke, so he went home.
“I didn’t sleep the rest of the night,” he said. “It was impossible. I was worried and there were those crazy thoughts that went through my head — we were getting a lot of rain that evening and I was worried she could drown.
“At 1 a.m., you’re thinking about all kinds of things and just wide awake. A lot of panic had set in.”
Moniz’s story has a happy ending, thanks to what he says was above and beyond rescue work from two employees of the Hawaii Island Humane Society’s Keaau shelter. The employees, animal control officers Marie Kuahiwinui-Eggers and Starr Yamada, responded to the scene bright and early that morning and spent hours — enduring some scratches and cuts along the way — to get Moniz’s beloved best friend to safety.
Moniz was so touched, he sent an email to shelter management later that day expressing his gratitude.
“It was not required of them to do what they did,” he said. “They could have been like, ‘Go get some ropes, we did our best see you later.’ But they didn’t. These ladies are a rare breed and I wanted them to be recognized.”
The rescue wasn’t an easy one. Eggers and Yamada arrived with a 6-foot loop stick, but it proved far too short to pull Kula out. So they had to get creative. They left to borrow rappel rope from the National Park Service nearby. Then, they scoured YouTube for proper ways to create a rope harness, which they attached to a tree nearby.
Finally, a harnessed Eggers scaled into the lava tube to tie a horse harness around the frightened, muddy Kula. After 15 hours, and a long, rainy night, Kula was finally pulled to safety.
“As soon as I got to the bottom of the hole, she was instantly by my feet like, ‘Yay someone’s here to rescue me,’” Eggers recalled. “She was just so happy someone was in there and I think she knew I had come down to pull her out.”
The officers joked that their regular CrossFit workouts gave them the strength and technique to execute the complex mission. They said the experience was a rarity — usually, their workdays are spent catching dogs or chickens and responding to complaint calls.
“We don’t get a lot of calls for rescues,” Yamada said. “Over the years, we’ve had a few — there are a lot of lava tubes around here — but when we get a call, we will always try to help, for sure. I mean, that’s the least we can do is try.”
Moniz said Kula did not sustain any serious injuries from the experience.
He gave his four-legged friend a bath and now she’s back to normal, minus a few raw patches where her skin was scraped up. Mostly, he’s grateful to have his pooch home safe and thankful for the help from Eggers and Yamada.
“My whole thing is, people don’t step out on a limb anymore,” Moniz said.
“That’s the bottom line. They (did) without hesitation. You don’t see those kinds of heroics anymore.”
Email Kirsten Johnson at kjohnson@hawaiitribune-herald.com
