photo by: Chris Conde

Lawrence resident Greg Martin and his sister's German shepherd, Blue, stand next to a frozen pond on the property of his sister and her wife northeast of Lawrence. Martin was dog-sitting for Blue when another dog — and the dog's owner — fell through the ice. Martin helped to rescue them.

Greg Martin is not a pet owner and was a tad apprehensive about dog sitting for 10 days, but he wanted to help out his little sister, who otherwise might have had to cancel an eagerly anticipated trip to Iceland.

Cindy Martin and her wife, Wendi Norton, hadn’t had any luck getting reliable sitters, so when Greg agreed to come keep an eye on their 3-year-old German shepherd, Blue, it was something of a godsend.

But before the women gratefully jetted off to Reykjavik, Greg, who is 59 and retired, paid a preliminary visit to make sure the big dog, whom he describes as a prolific and loud barker, “wouldn’t eat me.” Once satisfied that Blue had no such designs, Greg settled in for a cozy stay on the women’s 21-acre rural property northeast of Lawrence.

Eight days later, the dreaded dog drama struck.

Only it didn’t involve Blue. It involved a stranger’s dog — and then the stranger too.

As Greg tells it, he was relaxing in the late morning of Jan. 2, after a winter storm had plunged temperatures into single digits, when a woman knocked on the door and asked if she could search for her runaway dog on the property. Greg, with Blue barking at the stranger in the background, said of course.

Moments later, the woman returned in a panic and said she had located her dog; it had fallen through the ice on the nearby small pond and was struggling to escape the freezing water.

Greg threw on his shoes, his mind racing for ways to help as he left the house.

“I looked around to see what I could find,” he said. “I was thinking rope or lumber or something.”

Then, in the big barn nearby, his eye landed on an extension ladder.

“I remembered from the news how firemen use ladders to stabilize when they’re getting on the ice so they don’t fall in,” he said.

At the pond, the dog was frantically paddling in the icy water about 10 feet out or so. Greg positioned the ladder over the ice, anchoring it to the shore. The woman then crawled out on the ladder and grabbed hold of her dog, which, based on the woman calling it a “Newfie,” Greg thinks was a Newfoundland mix that weighed around 60 pounds. As the woman pulled the dog up toward her, she placed a hand on the ice, which Greg estimates was about half an inch thick, but instead of providing leverage, her direct weight on the ice caused her to break through and fall into the pond.

“She was very startled and scared,” Greg said, but she was able to get near enough to the shore so that he could grab her hand and help pull her out. The dog, though, remained in the water, struggling. Greg was worried that he didn’t have the strength to get to it.

But about that time, as luck would have it, the woman’s husband, whom she had called when she had first located the dog, arrived in a small utility vehicle and succeeded in rescuing the dog by using the ladder.

Greg said the dog was shaking and scared.

“It could have been in the pond for 20 or 30 minutes or more,” all told, he said.

The couple, whom Greg described as appreciative, quickly loaded the dog into the woman’s white SUV to warm it up and drove off.

Amid the rush and drama, no names were exchanged, and Greg, nearly a week later, has no idea how the story ended. He and his sister and sister-in-law — safely returned from Iceland two days later — would all like to know how the dog fared.

“I’m really hoping to find out how the poor dog is,” said Norton, the sister-in-law.

They believe the couple, who Greg guessed to be in their late 30s or 40s, live in the Lawrence area, but they have had no luck with inquiries they’ve made on Nextdoor.com, a social networking service for neighborhoods. They’re still hopeful, though, that they will get in touch somehow.

In the meantime, Norton is hailing her brother-in-law, the unlikely dog sitter, as “a hero.”

“He is a man of few words and mostly keeps to himself,” she said. “However, he came through big time for them. It could have all ended so much worse. I hate to think what could have happened to the dog, the woman and Greg.”