The men stood at the lookout point calling into the dark for ten minutes. Then they heard it: a scrabble of claws somewhere below the edge, and a bark coming up from the wrong direction entirely.

Carl, a 5-year-old, 30-pound Lagotto Romagnolo, had gone off a bluff on a friend's farm in Dickson County, Tennessee, on Thursday, Aug. 13. He had spent the evening exactly the way a farm dog should — swimming in the creek, running with the other dogs — before the group drove up to a viewpoint above a cliff that drops roughly 200 feet to Jones Creek. When it was time to leave, Carl was gone.

“We stood there for 10 minutes calling and calling, calling for him,” his owner, Scott Grissom, told Nashville's WKRN. “We heard him chatter down the side of the thing and we realized he had fallen off the cliff.”

Five hours of drone searching

You cannot simply walk down a sheer wall in the dark. So a neighbor, Bert Echols, was called in with his drone, and he flew the cliff face from about 9 p.m. until 2 a.m., WKRN reported. Somewhere in those five hours, the camera found him: a small brown dog on a ledge roughly 120 feet down, tucked beside the mouth of a small cave in the rock. The ledge was barely bigger than he was.

Grissom, who is 65, had five years of reasons to be terrified. Carl had been at his side since his wife died — road trips, fishing, hiking, essentially everywhere. “I was heartbroken. I was scared to death,” he told WKRN. “He's been my partner. He's my best friend.”

Nothing could be done safely until daylight, so Carl spent the night on his ledge and the humans spent it above him, watching a screen. The next morning, Friday, Aug. 14, firefighters arrived from four departments — the City of Dickson, Ashland City, Charlotte and Harpeth Ridge. Members of Dickson Fire's Special Operations Response Team rigged a high-angle rope rescue system and went over the edge.

‘He was able to jump right into the arms of our guys’

The drone footage from the night before turned out to be the plan itself. City of Dickson Fire Marshal Mike Osman said crews used the images to pinpoint Carl's location and map their route down before anyone left the top. And Carl, roughly 17 hours into the worst night of his life, did not need convincing.

“He was able to jump right into the arms of our guys,” Osman told WKRN. “It took very little coaxing to get in there.”

Rescuers zipped him into a duffel bag and hauled him back up the bluff. Nine first responders worked the operation, Osman said, with help from Grissom and the property owner. Grissom told WKRN he could barely watch: he was on his knees in the back of a side-by-side, crying. When the bag reached the top, Carl's head popped out.

“The owner, and rightfully so, he was in tears — just tears of joy and extremely grateful,” Osman said. “It was a happy reunion.”

Carl escaped with no serious injuries, Grissom said; he went home with medication for pain and orders to rest. The Dickson department, sharing photos on Facebook, noted that the mechanical advantage systems its members drill on are the safest way to lower and raise rescuers and victims — “even our four-legged ones” — and added, with visible pride, that they don't just get cats out of trees.

Lagotto Romagnolos are an old Italian breed, developed to sniff out truffles, which may explain how a dog ends up nose-down at the edge of a 200-foot drop in the first place. It also explains the ending: a whole county's worth of neighbors, a borrowed drone and nine sets of hands, all spent on 30 pounds of curiosity who is now, by all accounts, resting comfortably.