By Jacques Von Lunen, OregonLive.com
June 04, 2010, 12:31PM

A dog that was adopted from Thailand proved his street smarts – and the effectiveness of Internet communication – when it survived 11 days in an Oregon wilderness recently.

On March 29, Alexandra Zell picked up a scrappy medium-sized dog at the SeaTac airport. The dog came from the Soi Dog Foundation in Phuket, Thailand. Martin had lived among a pack of dogs around a temple at the popular vacation spot, fed by the monks and volunteers from the foundation.

Martin warmed up to Zell and quickly proved to be an intelligent and friendly companion, if a bit shy around men. Zell kept the dog on a leash at all times; she had been warned by the Thai group that Martin appeared to be an escape artist.

On May 23, Zell and her partner, Brian Wartell, went to visit friends on a ranch property just outside of Prineville. Although dogs and people at the gathering freely roamed the premises, Martin seemed to not object to being leashed by Zell the entire time. After the dog had been very well-behaved for hours, Zell had to use the restroom and left Martin alone in the hallway. When she reemerged "not a minute later," she says, Martin was gone. She sprinted outside, only to see the dog tear down the driveway and into the surrounding wilderness. The gathered friends searched the area, which teems with coyotes and cougars, for four hours that afternoon, to no avail. Zell and Wartell stayed at the property for the entire following week, until May 28, hiking and camping in the woods around Prineville, looking for Martin. They also put up fliers and posted notices on Craigslist and Facebook. On May 30, a full week after the disappearance, they received an email from a woman who'd come across the Craigslist notice: she'd seen Martin three days prior – 15 miles east of Prineville in the Ochoco National Forest. The couple spent 10 hours searching the area near that last sighting on May 31. Still nothing.

Through all this, they'd been in touch with Soi Dog. One of their volunteers suggested using FindToto, an online service that blankets entire areas with automated calls after a pet is lost. On her lunch break at work back in Portland on Wednesday, Zell signed up for the service.

The call came in that afternoon: a woman who'd stopped in at her house on a brief break from camping in the Ochocos had gotten the robocall. She told her husband about it when she returned to the campground later that day. The husband, while out looking for elk, saw Martin in a field near their camp site. The dog shied away from him, but when his wife returned with some food, she was able to grab Martin's leash.

The woman took Martin to the Redmond Humane Society until Zell could come pick him up. He arrived looking thin and dirty, said Chris Bauersfeld, manager of the humane society. He seemed to be happy to be out of the wilderness: "He wagged his tail and ate a bowl of food," Bauersfeld said. The shelter's vet found him to have survived the 11 days in the woods without lasting damage.