ANDERSON COUNTY — Lost dog stories touch people’s hearts, even if we don’t admit it. We hear those sad stories, then we look down at the worshipful eyes and fluffy tail sweeping the floor beside us.

It’s painful to think about. What if we lost our precious Sadie? What if Rocky escaped the yard and never came home?

Not all lost dog tales are tearjerkers, though. Sometimes there’s a happy ending.

For Nutmeg, there was.

The story begins on a dark and stormy afternoon — Sunday, to be exact, when an intense thunderstorm swept through the Upstate. Good news for the drought. Bad news for pets, such as Nutmeg, who are scared of thunder and lightning.

“She was right there at our feet,” Melanie McCrary said. “And then she was gone.”

A garage door at the McCrarys’ Clemson home was open for a few minutes while McCrary and her husband, Mac, watched the storm. Nutmeg, a 10-pound, light gray Shih Tzu, vanished.

McCrary immediately went looking for her dog, in the pouring rain.

No Nutmeg.

The family searched until dark, and their neighbors helped, kids riding bikes and calling Nutmeg’s name, adults walking their own dogs to see if they could sniff her out.

Nutmeg is pretty tough. She lost an eye several years ago, during a disagreement with a bull terrier. But storms are her nemesis. She cowers in a bathtub until the thunder stops. So McCrary was sure her baby would seek shelter. They looked under houses, in storage sheds, beneath fallen tree limbs.

No Nutmeg.

Monday morning the McCrarys called every animal shelter in Pickens County. They pasted flyers all over Clemson (“We’ve lost our little dog”) and posted Nutmeg’s picture on petfinder.com.

It rained again, ruining the flyers. McCrary made more. Hundreds of them. She put each one in a plastic bag and hung them on mailboxes.

By Tuesday, “we were 48 hours into this,” McCrary said. “It was so upsetting, because I knew she’d been out in the elements and had no food.”

Tuesday evening, McCrary posted one last flyer, at an apartment complex off busy Issaqueena Trail.

“I was feeling sick by then,” she said. “I couldn’t stand thinking that she was hurt and laying in a ditch somewhere, wondering where Mommy was.”

Then McCrary’s phone rang. It was a woman named Ursula (“I wish I could remember her last name,” McCrary said). She lived in the apartment complex on Issaqueena. Ursula had gone to visit her mother in Pendleton and there, at her mother’s house, was the dog on the flyer. It had turned up the day before.

A tearful McCrary tried to pay them a reward, but Ursula said “the joy of seeing her home was enough.”

Nutmeg had some bug bites and a cut behind her ear. She had walked almost 5 miles.

“That’s like me walking to Virginia,” a stunned McCrary said.

Now Nutmeg is home, sleeping off her adventure. And McCrary is fielding phone calls from people asking if she found her dog.

“It’s a miracle,” she said.

And a happy ending.