A six-year-old walked out of his house in Dak Lak with the family dog behind him, and Den stayed beside him on the mountain until searchers found them at nine the next morning.

A six-year-old boy in Dak Lak Province, in the central highlands of Vietnam, survived a night alone on a mountain more than 10 km from his home because the family dog followed him out of the house and stayed beside him until searchers arrived the next morning, VnExpress reported on Saturday.

The boy, whose family lives in Song Cau Ward, left home at about 3:30 in the afternoon on Friday 12 September. His family assumed he was playing nearby, and it was only when an hour had passed without him coming back that they began to look for him. When they went through the footage from their neighbours' security cameras, they saw the boy walking away from the house with the dog close behind him.

The night

Police and local residents searched through the evening and into the early hours of Saturday, widening the area as the night went on. The route from the boy's house to where he was eventually found passes through mountainous forest with dense undergrowth. Truong Van Dan, a 34-year-old local man who joined the search, told VnExpress it is hard going even for adults, and that he does not know how the boy managed to get through it.

Nine in the morning

At about nine o'clock on Saturday morning, Dan spotted a child in an acacia plantation in the Ong Dinh mountain area. He compared the boy with the description in the alerts that had been posted online overnight, then approached and found him completely exhausted. Dan called for others to bring water and bread and told the police, who came to carry the boy down.

When the rescuers reached him, the dog was right beside the boy and would not leave. He backed away cautiously when strangers came close, but never took his eyes off the child. The search team believes the dog, a black mixed breed the family calls Den, which means Blackie, had watched over the boy for the whole night on the mountain.

The way down

Den ran alongside the rescuers as they carried the boy down the mountain, and kept checking on him the whole way. When the police put the child into a vehicle at the bottom, the dog seemed to think he had lost the boy again, and ran back towards the forest to look for him.

The boy's mother, Nguyen Thi Mai, told VnExpress that Den is a local mixed-breed dog the family has kept for about two years, and that because her son has developmental delays, the dog tends to stay close to him through his days.

If the dog had not stayed beside him throughout last night, I don't know what would have happened to my son.Nguyen Thi Mai, the boy's mother, to VnExpress

Sunday

The boy was checked over and found to be in stable condition with no injuries. On Sunday his mother told local reporters that her husband had gone back into the forest to look for the dog, and that Den had recognised his voice and come to him, and was home with the family again.