Our first pair of Springers ran off one very cold winter day. Many searches turned up nothing. A week later, a friend and his son were coming out of the coal mine they worked 12 miles away and found them locked up and full of porky quills. It was very rural, with only one dirt road and no homes between our home and the mine. They were smart enough to recognize the dogs and kind enough to pull the quills before they brought them to us, and they were locked up again in his front seat. Poor Rambo's nuts were scraped raw where Lucy'd dragged him around. We learned to keep her contained when she was in heat, or she'd run off again. That was back in the day when there was a Springer at the White House, so we were able to get rid of the 10 pups pretty easily.
