A 2-year-old boy was back with his family on Wednesday after a rancher’s dog found him in the desert 7 miles from his home in Arizona, authorities said.

The family of 2-year-old Boden Allen reported him missing on Monday after he wandered away in Seligman, the Yavapai County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement.

Deputies and more than 40 search-and-rescue personnel from the Arizona Department of Public Safety, the neighboring Coconino County Sheriff’s Office and other agencies sprang into action.

They searched through the night for the toddler clad in a tank top and pajama pants, scouring rough high-desert terrain from the air and on the ground. A rescue helicopter’s pilot spotted two mountain lions along the way.

“After 16 hours of searching, a rancher approximately 7 miles away reported that a young child had walked onto his property,” the sheriff’s office said. “Upon arrival at the ranch, deputies confirmed this was indeed the missing boy.”

Buford, an Anatolian Pyrenees, had come to the rescue, finding the child on his nightly patrol for coyotes and other wildlife, rancher Scotty Dunton told the sheriff’s office. He was heading out to town the next morning when he saw Buford sitting at the end of his driveway with the boy.

“I look up and the little kid’s standing there with my dog,” Dunton said. “It was a relief knowing that he was alive, so I was ecstatic that he was OK and that my dog found him.”

Dunton said he figured Boden most likely followed the road along the power line running between his house and the boy’s, traversing “three big mountain ranges between here and his house, and big valleys.”

Buford, who “loves kids,” must have encountered the tot in a nearby horse pasture and guided him home, because “that’s what he does,” Dunton added, telling KTVK that the canine hero had earned himself a steak dinner.

“There was a thousand ways for that to go really, really bad and one good way, and luckily it turned out to be the good way,” he told KPNX.

The Yavapai Sheriff’s Office thanked everyone who had helped search, “and of course, Buford the dog, who stayed with the boy and brought him to safety.”

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