Boy, 3, walks two miles in snow after father dies in accident

The miraculous Christmas walk led to the child being saved from certain death. Yevgeny Vlasov, 53, had picked the boy up from kindergarten and went with him to inspect an ice hole for fishing. He left the boy on the bank of the River Gur, some 4,490 miles east of Moscow, as he turned the snowmobile but it fell into the fast flowing river because the ice was not as thick as he had expected.

The boy – not yet named – said his father shouted to him: “Son, run to the shop!” before he went under.

The family own a shop in Kenay village in Khabarovsk region – and the boy obediently followed his father’s final instruction.

Head of the village administration Yury Anekhov said: “The child saw his father sinking.

“The boy later told me that his father shouted to him: ‘Son, run to the shop!’.

“They have their own shop in the village, and Yevgeny told him to go there.

“The boy climbed a hillock, and then came down from it – its height is about 300 metres (985 ft).

“Then he walked through the taiga.”

The boy followed the tracks of his father’s snowmobile but then lost the path, reported The Siberian Times.

He was walking in a temperature of minus 30C – colder than ever recorded in Britain.

He mistakenly took a wrong track but by chance was spotted by a local man who used it as a short cut.

The man said: “He doesn’t speak too well yet – he’s too young – so he couldn’t tell me what happened.

“I just understood that it was something really bad, and rushed to the village to find his family.”

The man said: “The little one was so smart.

“He had figured that the way back home was to follow the traces of his dad’s snowmobile.”

He reunited the boy with his mother Maria.

A day later the child succumbed to a “very strong fever”, he said.

Vlasov was a successful local businessman owning a chain of shops.

Local police chief Alexander Kolomytsev said that the chances of finding the body were slight.

It was a “fast mountain river” and was impossible to use divers in the search.