"She said she wasn't scared because Fat Heath was there. If he wasn't I think she would've been terrified."

By Meghan Overdeep
June 18, 2018
Twitter/MSHP Troop E

It goes without saying that what happened Thursday night in Qulin, Missouri, is every mother's nightmare.

Three-year-old Remy Elliott wandered away from her family's rural home just north of the Arkansas border around 8pm. It would be 12 long hours before she was found, safe and sound, in a nearby cornfield. Luckily for everyone, the girl's pet dog, a small Yorkshire terrier named Fat Heath, never once left her side.

"I looked for her by myself thinking maybe she was just in the woods or somewhere where I just couldn't see her," Timber Merritt, Remy's mom, told KFVS. "And I was calling for her and calling for her, and when she wasn't calling back I realized, ‘I don't think I'm going to find her on my own.'"

That's when Merritt reached out to friends, family, and local law enforcement. The search party grew quickly, and beyond the family's expectations.

"It went from five people to about 75 to 100 people out here by the time we were done," Timber told KFVS.

Makayla Hardcastle, a neighbor, joined the group to walk the rows of corn around 6am Friday morning.

"The corn feels like razor blades cutting you, especially for a child," Hardcastle told the station. "And you don't hear well in the corn either, so when somebody is yelling your name you can hear them but you don't know where it is coming from."

WATCH: The Mayor of This Tiny Kentucky Town is a Dog!

In the end it was Timber's brother, Quinlin, who drove all the way from western Kentucky to help, that found Remy and her dog. They were about half a mile away from the house lying down on some broken corn stalks.

"They said that she was asleep when he picked her up," Timber said. "She was definitely exhausted, hot, really sweaty and it took a while to drink anything. She said she wasn't scared because Fat Heath was there. If he wasn't I think she would've been terrified."

After getting a clean bill of health, little Remy is back to her normal self—save for a whole heap of itchy bug bites.

"I've never seen that many mosquito bites," Timber told KFVS. "We are going to give her a bath and keep putting medicine on it."

Talk about a happy ending!