After missing for eight months and traveling 175 kilometers, a dog was reunited this weekend with his family in Massachusetts.

Tom Woollacott told the Bangor Daily News in Maine that Kaiser, a 5-year-old shepherd king, had disappeared in June 2018 after jumping over a wall while a woman was keeping him with a dog.

For the first three or four weeks, Woollacott told the newspaper that he was traveling 1,500 km "every day" in search of his dog. The 130-pound dog had already been sighted in Massachusetts and New Hampshire.

"I talked to a lady who had entered her barn," Woollacott told the newspaper. "She said," I thought it was a wolf. "But by the time I arrived, he was gone."

Not even a drone could find Kaiser, but Woollacott told the Daily News that he had never lost hope.

In January, a woman in Maine discovered that a dog had eaten half of the meat stored under its porch, according to an article by Missing Dogs in Massachusetts. She fed him for three weeks before the animal control brought him to Responsible Pet Care of Oxford Hills, in the south of Paris, in a no-kill shelter on February 6th.

The dog, later identified as Kaiser, was timid and shy, the shelter posted on Facebook and the staff searched for a microchip. When they did not find any labels, the shelter shared his pictures.

"We had a ton of comments, sharing, tastes and people ready to give this magnificent giant animal a new chance," wrote the shelter. "But, we had to wait to see if it would be claimed or not."

Woollacott phoned Thursday afternoon, the Bangor Daily News reported, and identified the dog's features and provided pictures of his teeth. Morgan Miles, board member and volunteer, told the newspaper that the dog was looking straight at her when she called him Kaiser.

Holding back tears, Woollacott crossed the snow the next day to pick him up, the newspaper reported. The video shows that Kaiser jumps on Woollacott and wags his tail.

"He's clearly the only one who really knows what happened," Miles told the Daily News. "Someone might have taken it or he could easily have walked that distance himself in eight months. Honestly, I think he's walked all the way by himself.

Kaiser spent Sunday morning playing with Woollacott and his children, Connor, 4, and Leah, 16, the newspaper reported.

Related: Death of the missing dog who escaped from New York through the Lincoln Tunnel

Related: The owner returns a month after the camp fire and finds her dog waiting for her at her home.

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