When Midnight went missing, she eluded all the search parties and technologies her owner could muster – but the “smoochy” black dog couldn’t escape the skills of an off-duty land SAR tracker.

The Horrell family’s beloved 8-year-old black lab-mastiff cross didn’t normally go anywhere on her own, but when family dog, Luna the fox terrier, “lured” Midnight away one morning, Luna returned a few hours later alone.

Owner Joelene Horrell said that night she put Midnight’s bed and food outside in the hope she would return overnight but she didn’t.

“It was horrible.”

The next morning Horrell sprung into action, posting photos and a description of the “calmest, gentlest, smoochiest” dog on four Facebook community pages. Offers from neighbours, strangers and dog lovers poured in to help scour her 270-hectare property bordering forest in Tasman’s Ngatimoti.

She said for seven days searchers covered “all the ground we could access multiple times” but she feared the worst that Midnight had fallen down a hole, or off a bluff.

She tried flying a volunteer’s drone over the area, tied a tracker to Luna to see where she went, and attached a GoPro camera to her collar.

“It didn’t come up with anything.”

On the eighth day, Horrell reached out to Don Schwass, a land SAR tracker recommended to her by a woman on Facebook who had been reunited with her dog after Schwass found it in his spare time.

Schwass said when Joelene contacted him he didn’t hesitate in travelling the 90 minutes to her property.

“For me, it’s all about bringing families back together.”

Working with his own dog Piper, an unqualified but trained search dog, Schwass left Horrell’s home for the search at the same time Midnight left more than a week earlier.

He said the key to tracking a dog, was thinking like a dog.

Dogs mainly used their noses to guide them, so he said, “if the breeze is coming from the south, dogs will head to the south”.

Every move Piper and her master took was calculated.

“In the world of search and rescue, when I go looking, I walk in the same direction [the missing person or dog went] to make the same choices.”

Those choices paid off.

Schwass and Horrell set off to find Midnight at 8am; by 10.30am, Midnight was found in the bush and back in her arms.

Horrell said when her dog first laid eyes on Schwass and Piper running at her, Midnight was “petrified” but when she called out “she came on over and lay down on me”.

“I was bawling, I was howling. It was very emotional, like all my Christmases had come at once,” she said.

Schwass said it was a “happy ending”.

“Joelene got her dog back, and I was happy to use my skills to help her find it. I don’t know whether I get lucky or what but it seems to work.”

He said many dogs can revert to an ancestral wolf state when they go missing, which is what Midnight did, and why she didn’t return home despite knowing the way.

The ordeal saw Midnight lose four kilograms and she barely left the house a few days afterwards.

“She’s been laying on her mat in front of the fire for two days straight now.”

To avoid going through the heartache again, she said “from now on if she steps outside, she’ll have a tracking collar on”.