“Buddy!” called Mr. Elliot.
“Buddy!” called Henry.
And from far away—on the other side of that boulder? Through those birch trees?—came a whine.
“Dad! Did you hear that?”
Mr. Elliot came to a stop and Henry stood beside him. They listened to the wind and listened and listened and Henry heard the whine again.
“Buddy!” he shouted. “Buddy!”
The whine grew louder and Mr. Elliot took off through the trees.
“Buddy! Buddy!”
The whine became a yip. A soft, sad yip.
“There he is!” cried Henry.
And there was Buddy. He had been lying in the snow and now he tried sit up—tried to sit just the way he had been taught—but he collapsed to the ground again.
“What’s wrong with him?” asked Henry. He had thought that if they found Buddy he would run to him and throw his arms around him and feel his warm, strong body, but now he stood back. “Something’s wrong with him, Dad.”
“He’s caught,” said Mr. Elliot.
“What do you mean?” Henry took a step closer. “On what?”
“He’s caught in a trap. A hunter’s leg-hold trap.”
Henry was afraid to look but still he crept forward until he was standing in front of his father.
“Don’t touch him,” said Mr. Elliot. “Not just yet. He’s frightened. Let him smell you so he remembers you.”
Henry bent over to peer at Buddy, who was trembling. The trembling turned to shaking, and he shook so violently that every part of his body seemed to vibrate.
“It’s okay, Buddy,” said Henry. “We’re going to help you.” He could hardly bear to look at the steel jaws that were clamped around Buddy’s front paw, the metal biting through fur, through skin, making blood drip onto the snow where it froze into ruddy slush. Henry saw that all around Buddy the snow was stained with his blood. He had struggled mightily with his enemy, but now he lay still.
“Buddy,” said Henry softly, “we’re here. Remember me?” He held out his hand, and Buddy sniffed it. He stopped shaking.
Henry turned around and looked up at his father. “How long do you think he’s been here? If he’s been in this trap since Wednesday—”
“I don’t think he’s been caught for that long,” said Mr. Elliot, but he sounded angry and something dark slid across his face, which made Henry sit back on his heels, surprised. Mr. Elliot softened then. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s okay, Henry. Buddy’s going to be okay.”
Henry nodded. He slipped his arms out of his backpack, reached inside it, and withdrew the blanket.
And his father knelt in the snow, removed one glove, and extended his hand to Buddy. Buddy looked into Charlie Elliot’s eyes. Then he licked the tips of his fingers.
18. CHARLIE
Charlie gets lost in the eyes, the brown eyes as deep dark as chestnuts. The snow melts and the woods drift away and now he’s running through a stubbly autumn field holding fast to a spool of string as his kite jerks back and forth in the wind.
Charlie is proud, very proud, of this kite. He worked hard on it and he wanted RJ to be proud of it too—RJ who only smiled when Charlie told him he was going to make a kite all by himself. But Charlie made it anyway and he did a good job and here it is, sailing high on this blustery day. Charlie runs, lets the string out, changes direction in the field, runs some more, reels the kite back in. It is a kite masterpiece, but Charlie is the only one who knows this.
He lets the string unwind again and now the kite looks impossibly tiny. Charlie sees that he has let out too much string, the whole spool, and far ahead of him the kite begins a plunge toward the earth. Charlie stops. He can’t reverse the kite’s path this time, so he watches until his masterpiece is out of his sight and he’s sure it has landed somewhere. Then he bends over, hands on knees, and breathes in and out, in and out, until he stops panting.
When he has caught his breath, he follows the string in its looping path through the field, winding it around and around the spool, the spool growing fatter as Charlie nears the kite. He’s approaching the barn when he hears branches breaking—a crash almost as loud as if an entire tree were toppling to the ground—and a cry and then that thump that he’ll never forget. He pauses for just a moment, listening, and Sunny begins to bark and Charlie realizes that this is her bark that means something is wrong.
Charlie speeds up until he’s running again, racing to the fir trees. He tosses the spool aside and forgets about following the string, instead sprinting in a straight line toward the trees, which is how he almost steps on the kite. It has landed near the barn door and has a large hole in it. Charlie lets out a cry at the sight of his ruined work of art. He snatches it up and that’s when he sees the pile of clothes several yards ahead under the tallest of the trees, and then recognizes the clothes as RJ. RJ in a heap on the ground with Sunny standing over him.
“RJ!” Charlie cries.
Charlie has been moving so fast that he has a cramp in his side, and he’s doubled over, running bent in two like a broken branch. He reaches his brother and drops the kite.
Charlie kneels down and suddenly everything is still. Before, there were birdcalls and the relentless wind in his ears and the crash and the thump. Now he hears not a sound. He stares at RJ, who’s as still as the rest of the stillness. Charlie sees a drop of bright red blood appear in the corner of RJ’s mouth and then it’s a trickle, running down his cheek. Another drop appears in his nose and begins a second trickle that joins the first, finally spilling onto the ground.
Charlie can’t think. He sits back on his heels. Nothing at all is moving. Not the trees, not Charlie, not Sunny, and certainly not RJ. Charlie looks deep into Sunny’s brown eyes. She holds his gaze and then at last she moves forward and licks Charlie’s hand.
Charlie is galvanized into action. He leaps to his feet. “Stay!” he commands Sunny unnecessarily, since he can see that she’s already guarding RJ. Charlie’s side doesn’t hurt quite so much now, and as he runs to the house he knows he’s running faster than he has ever run in his life. He crashes through the front door, shouting, “Mom! Mom! Help!”
Mrs. Elliot is in the kitchen. She’s just starting to prepare dinner. Her hands are poised above a bowl in which Charlie knows is ground beef mixed with an egg for a meat loaf. In a second bowl are beans, neatly sliced and ready to go into a pot as soon as Mr. Elliot returns from work that night. Mrs. Elliot is wearing an apron she made herself, an apron with a little pocket in the shape of a cat. The adult Charlie sees all this—sees the entire kitchen with the blue-and-white-checked curtains and the scarred wooden table and the red linoleum floor and his mother looking up in alarm—as clearly now, thirty-two years later, as he saw it when he was nine.
“What? What is it?” asks Mrs. Elliot. She’s already wiping her hands on her apron and reaching for the phone.
“RJ fell out of a tree! He’s not moving. You have to call the ambulance!”
Mrs. Elliot dials 0 and asks the operator for an ambulance and says it’s an emergency and to hurry, hurry, please. She’s remarkably calm, but the moment she hangs up the phone she runs out of the house, and Charlie is the one who notices that a burner is on and turns it off before he flies out the door after his mother. He follows Mrs. Elliot back to the fir trees, hoping that things might be different now. Maybe RJ will be sitting up, dabbing at the blood under his nose and laughing a little at the scare he gave everyone. Maybe Sunny will be bouncing from side to side in relief, her tail held high.
But the scene is barely different. RJ is lying in exactly the same position under the tree, the kite nearby. Sunny has lain down next to RJ and rested her head on his chest as she sometimes does on winter nights when she crawls into bed with him. She’s begun to whimper.
Mrs. Elliot screams.
She falls to her knees and pats RJ’s cheeks. She takes his wrist in her hands and tries to find his pulse.
“What happened?” she asks
Charlie.
Charlie can already hear a siren in the distance. The ambulance is probably just leaving town. “I don’t know,” he says. “I heard a crash and I heard RJ shout and when I got here he was lying on the ground.”
“Was he climbing after the kite?”
Charlie can’t think. His brother is laid out before him, and Sunny won’t get up and his mother is sobbing and the siren sounds closer.
“Go call your father,” says Mrs. Elliot sharply. “He’s working at the Landaus’ today. Tell him to meet us at the hospital.”
Charlie does this, but he’s back outside by the time the ambulance arrives, so he hears the attendant say that RJ is already gone.
Lost. They’ve lost him.
The adult Charlie returns to the woods and the snow and his son and Buddy’s soft tongue on his fingers. But RJ and Sunny and his mother and the fir trees are before him too, and so is the kite. Why had he not remembered that he carried the kite to RJ’s side? But he remembers now and knows that RJ didn’t climb the tree to rescue Charlie’s kite. He climbed it because it was a nice autumn day and he didn’t have a lot of homework and maybe he wanted to prove something to his friends or maybe he just wanted to see if he could do it.
The accident was not Charlie’s fault.
“Dad?” says Henry now. “What do we do? How do we get the trap off of Buddy’s leg?”
Mr. Elliot, heart beating noisily in his chest, sends the past soaring away like his kite. He sits for a moment, catching his breath, and he strokes Buddy’s sleek head. “We should let a vet do that. We’ll have to bring Buddy and the trap together to Dr. Burton’s.”
“Leave the trap on his leg?” cries Henry in dismay. “But he’s bleeding!”
“It’s the safest thing. Trust me. Now let’s see where this chain goes.” Henry’s father indicates a chain trailing away from the trap. It leads to a stake in the ground. He pulls and tugs at the stake and finally manages to wrench it from the frozen earth. “You’ll have to help me lift Buddy,” he says to Henry. “I’ll pick him up and you hold on to the trap.”
They make their way slowly back to Tinker Lane. Mr. Elliot cradles Buddy, wrapped in the blanket, and Henry holds tightly to the trap, not caring that blood from Buddy’s foot seeps through his mittens and onto his hands.
Once they reach their house, things happen more quickly. Mrs. Elliot sees them coming and greets them at the front door. “Oh, no. Oh, poor pup,” she says.
“We need to call Dr. Burton,” Charlie tells her. “I hope he can go into his office on a Sunday.”
Charlie bustles Buddy into the kitchen, Henry still gripping the trap. Henry’s mother grabs two cushions from the couch and covers them with an old cloth, the one they use for painting projects, and Charlie and Henry lay Buddy there, trap and all. Then Charlie phones the vet.
“He’ll meet us at the office,” he reports when he hangs up. “We should leave right now.”
So Buddy is bustled right out the door again and into the back of the Elliots’ car where he rides between Henry and Mrs. Elliot, who pat him and talk to him. Henry never lets go of the trap. Charlie drives the car, and in no time they have pulled into Dr. Burton’s parking lot.
“There’s his car,” says Charlie. “He’s here already.”
Inside, Buddy is lowered onto an examining table and finally Henry can remove his hands from the trap.
“Now,” says Dr. Burton. “Let’s see what we have here.”
That night, after the trap has been removed from Buddy’s leg and his wounds have been tended to and he’s been settled into a crate at Dr. Burton’s office, Charlie sits by the fire with his wife and his son. He and Henry have changed out of their bloody clothes, and they’ve all eaten a rather large dinner and are feeling sleepy.
“Dr. Burton said Buddy is a nice dog,” remarks Henry. “He said he’s well-behaved.”
“Good-natured,” adds Mrs. Elliot.
“He didn’t make a sound when Dr. Burton removed the trap,” says Charlie thoughtfully. “I think he must have lived with a family at some point. Otherwise he would never have let us pick him up. He was awfully good in the car too.”
“I suppose we should try to find his owners,” says Mrs. Elliot. “They must be missing him.”
Charlie looks at his son. “Henry, how long did you say you’ve been feeding Buddy?”
“Feeding him and training him,” Henry replies. “A long time. Since October, maybe. And Dad, I don’t think anyone is missing Buddy. I haven’t seen any lost-dog posters around.”
“All the same, we should look for his owners,” says Mrs. Elliot.
Charlie is watching his son. Henry has opened his mouth and wants to say something. Charlie knows he wants to ask if they can keep Buddy.
But Henry doesn’t ask and Charlie doesn’t offer.
19. BONE
I have been in pain many times during my life. I have stepped on sharp stones and I’ve stayed out in the snow too long. I hurt my nose when the man called George threw my sister and me out the window of the car. Once I was sitting on the floor next to Julie, the baby, and she grabbed my ear and pulled it so hard that I felt a sharp stab that seemed to shoot all the way through my head.
But the pain I felt when the trap closed around my foot, and even after Dr. Burton had removed the trap, was like no pain I had felt before. Dr. Burton gave me medicine to make the pain go away. I know this because he stuck me with a needle and said, “This is to help you feel better.” And soon the pain disappeared. But then it came back. My foot throbbed and my body ached, and then I grew warm all over and Dr. Burton said to another doctor, “He seems to have developed an infection.” So they gave me even more medicine.
When I was at Dr. Burton’s I had to live in a cage in a room with lots of other cages in it. Each cage held a dog. Some of the dogs were quiet and still. Some barked. The poodle in the cage next to me was very young and very bouncy and wanted to play, but I didn’t feel like playing. And I didn’t like my cage, although the people who came into the room with food and medicine were nice. They patted me and talked softly to me and the food they gave me was good. It smelled meaty and was spooned out of a can—a little can, not a garbage can.
The day after the boy and the man found me in the woods and brought me to Dr. Burton’s, they came to visit me. It was the end of the afternoon and through a window above a table I could see that the sky was growing dark. A young woman with hair as long as Isabel’s had just put food in all the cages so my belly was nicely full. I was feeling better. My body wasn’t so warm and my paw wasn’t throbbing as badly as it had been in the morning. I was resting on my side, my bandaged foot stretched out in front of me, when the woman with the long hair returned and as she walked toward my cage, she said, “Buddy, you have visitors.”
Then I saw the boy called Henry. He was following the woman closely and as soon as he caught sight of me, he cried, “There he is, Dad!” He turned to the woman. “Can we touch him?” he asked.
The woman opened my cage and slowly Henry reached out his hand. “Hi, Buddy,” he said softly. “How are you?” He patted my side carefully.
I stiffened at first and Henry drew his hand back quickly, but then I inched toward the front of the cage and Henry smiled and stroked me again. He let his hand run up and down my side and I thought maybe this is the way Estelle the cat would feel when she began to purr.
The man was standing behind Henry, looking in at me. “You gave us a scare,” he said.
“How long until he’s all well?” asked Henry.
“Hard to say exactly,” replied the woman. “He developed a fever overnight, but he seems to be doing better now.”
“Will he be able to walk again?”
“You’ll have to ask Dr. Burton, but I don’t see why not. After his wounds heal I think he’ll be almost as good as new.”
Henry patted me for a while and talked to me. “Did you know we sent out search parties?” he asked. “Owen and Mackey and Antony and
Antony’s brothers and sisters and I went looking for you. So did Letty Lewis, sort of.”
Henry and the man who was his father left after a while, and then Dr. Burton came in. He looked into each cage. When he reached mine he said, “Well, well. You’ve had some excitement, haven’t you, boy? You were lucky to be rescued.”
The woman with the long hair appeared beside him and she said, “What’s going to happen to him now?”
“I’m not sure yet,” said Dr. Burton.
“Are the Elliots going to adopt him?”
“They haven’t said so.”
“If they don’t adopt him, I’d like to take him home. He’s an awfully sweet dog. Especially after all he’s been through.”
Dr. Burton smiled. “I wouldn’t mind adopting him myself.”
I looked out the window and all I could see now was nighttime. Dr. Burton and the woman left. The room with the cages grew dark and quiet.
I fell asleep.
When I awoke it was the next morning. I was hungry and not at all hot and my foot wasn’t throbbing.
I had more visitors that afternoon. This time Henry came with his mother and with Antony and Owen.
“Buddy!” exclaimed Antony. “What happened to you? Your fur is all different.”
“He had a bath,” said Henry importantly. “Look how shiny he is.”
The next few days were very much like this one. Henry visited every afternoon. I ate as much food as I wanted, and my foot stopped hurting unless I stood on it, and Dr. Burton said the infection was completely gone. One day when Henry was visiting he exclaimed, “Hey, I can’t see your ribs anymore, Buddy. That’s a good sign.” Another day he said, “Tomorrow they’re going to take off your bandage.”
And that’s exactly what happened. Dr. Burton had been changing my bandage all along, but each time he took it off and cleaned my wounds, he put a fresh one back on. Not this time, though. This time he removed the bandage and threw it away and then he held my paw in his hands and said, “You have a strong constitution, Buddy. You healed quickly. Now we just need to get you walking again.”
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