by Tom Ryan
He’d taken us on many shorter hikes to lower elevations. The Boulder Loop Trail wasn’t around when he was last in the mountains, but he would have loved to take all of us kids. When we reached the ledges with the views to the south and west, he would simply have stood there and absorbed the wonder, and it would have shown on his face. That’s one of the reasons I so loved the White Mountains—the magic reflected in my father’s face when he was up there. He was different when he sat and gazed out at the views. He was humbled and inspired. He was peaceful.
To know that I got to bring him back there through my words and my photos made me smile. And I knew that I wouldn’t have done any of it without Atticus. In having Atticus along, I was able to bring my father back to a place he loved.
On our Easter Sunday hike, Atticus led Ann, Ken, and me up the trail, and when he sat down on the ledges at the highest point and cast his eyes toward Passaconaway and the Tripyramids to the south, I saw that look come over his face, that peaceful, blissful look that said everything was right with the world—that look he’d almost lost the year before. After all those mountains, after all those years with Atticus, I finally realized where I’d seen that look before and why I was so transfixed by it. It was when I was a boy, standing next to my father, and I saw him gaze happily out at the mountains.
I didn’t want to go to the funeral. It meant nothing to me. I’d said my good-byes to my father, and I knew that a bit of him would be with me whenever I hiked. Like Max, he would live in the mountains forever, at least for me. But I ended up going, because it would mean something to my brothers and sisters.
Atticus was not allowed in the church. I’m sure he didn’t mind, other than for the fact that he wouldn’t be able to keep his eye on me. But the weather was cool enough that I cracked the windows of the car and left him there. Through the years, he’d spent more time in the car than I had. I was hardly ever in it when he wasn’t, but he was in it plenty when I wasn’t. So he was comfortable.
At the cemetery, however, I let him out of the car, but first I took him to the woods in the back corner so he could stretch his legs and go to the bathroom. When we came over to the grave, I looked at Jack Ryan’s four surviving brothers and sisters clustered together, along with their families. Then I saw something I’d rarely seen: all my brothers and sisters standing together. Some were even holding each other. Behind them stood their families. I hadn’t planned it, but I realized while watching both groups that Atticus and I were off on our own toward the foot of the grave. I’m not sure how my brothers and sisters felt about that, or if they even noticed, but that’s the way it seemed things were supposed to be.
31
Heartache
If you live to be a hundred, I want to live to be a hundred minus one day, so I never have to live without you.
—POOH’S LITTLE INSTRUCTION BOOK
After our winter came to an end and my father passed, Atticus and I settled into a quiet existence, and not much happened as spring became summer and summer grew old. By September we had moved to the other side of the mountains and were living in Tamworth, just a few miles from Whiteface and Passaconaway.
We were still climbing mountains, just not as many of them and without the same intensity. Oftentimes we’d simply go for long walks around the bucolic countryside. It was upon returning from one of those walks that I received news from the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (MSPCA-Angell) that Atticus and I were being honored at their annual Hall of Fame dinner. The two of us were receiving the Human Hero Award for our fund-raising efforts the previous winter.
The award was given every year “for exceptional devotion, compassion, and bravery on behalf of people and animals.” It was one of four awards MSPCA-Angell gave out. The others were the Young Hero Award, the Animal Hero Award, and the Humanitarian Award. The ceremony was to take place at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in October.
Six days before the event, when foliage was at its peak, Atticus and I went for a walk. I’d never seen a more picturesque day: stunning blue skies, trees like flames in the late-afternoon sun, comfortable temperatures, a gentle breeze. We walked, as we often did, toward the trails that led to Whiteface and Passaconaway, but we weren’t planning on a hike, just a relaxing stroll. We approached an old yellow farmhouse that sits quaintly in the valley at the foot of the mountains, and Atticus looked for his friend. She was a tall, leggy Newfoundland with a threatening bark that disappeared as soon we got close. She’d bark loudly, then invite him to play. However, she wasn’t there that day. But two other dogs were.
They had the bodies of Australian cattle dogs but were blond. They barked but kept their distance—at first. When I turned to look at a footbridge to the left, I heard a horrifying yelp. One of the dogs had come out of nowhere and struck in an instant, latching onto Atticus’s throat.
Atticus had never been a fighter. He’d never even been a barker, and when other dogs barked at him, he didn’t know what to make of it. I considered one of his greatest gifts his gentle innocence and his belief that all living creatures were just as temperate as he was. I often had to remind him, “Not all dogs are friendly, Atticus.”
The attacking dog wasted no time in going for the kill. Its grotesque snarls rang in my ears, as did Atticus’s stunned and helpless yelps. She lifted him off the ground, whipping him around by his throat. His legs flew helplessly about like a rag doll’s. By the time I reacted, Atticus was limp in her mouth. Her growls were savage when her eyes met mine.
I charged her, and she dropped him in a heap. She then bared her teeth at me and approached. I yelled loudly and readied for her attack. At the last second, she thought better of it and backed up a few feet, continuing to eye me and show her teeth.
It had happened so fast that I was stunned and couldn’t believe it. Not this way, I pleaded. Please, not like this.
I turned back to Atticus, and he was stirring, but barely. He struggled to get up. I went to him but kept an eye on the attacking dog, and she was approaching again. I stayed between the two of them as I moved toward Atticus. He stumbled, started to fall, caught himself, and then slowly started to walk back the way we’d come. A few more steps and he was walking somewhat more normally. I caught up to him, and he looked a bit confused as he limped along.
“Atticus, stop, please. Let me see.”
When I looked into his eyes they were distant and dazed. He let me run my hands over his body, checking for wounds. The muscles of his back and shoulders were tight and tender to the touch. When I ran my hand under his head, I felt blood pooling in my palm. There was a large hole in his throat, and I could see inside.
I pulled myself together and picked him up and carried him back toward the car. I could hear him breathing heavily. I walked faster. His eyes appeared tired. I held him tight and ran. He put his head against my chest, and I could feel blood seeping through my shirt.
In emergencies I can rise to the occasion, and I handled it well. However, as strong as I was, Atticus was even more so. Just before we got back to the car, he wanted to get down. At first he took a crooked step, and then he trundled down the dirt road, from time to time shaking his head back and forth, but looking mostly calm. However, when we got into the car I feared he was going into shock. I took off my shirt and wrapped it around his neck.
I called the nearest vet. She was working at the Sandwich Fair and couldn’t see us. I called a friend, and she suggested the North Country Animal Hospital, but that was more than twenty miles away, and it was after hours. Luckily, they had twenty-four-hour emergency service. But it was late on Friday afternoon of Columbus Day weekend, and traffic going into North Conway was a mess. I held Atticus and was afraid he was getting worse, but there was nothing I could do. We were locked in bumper-to-bumper traffic.
When we arrived, we were met by Christine O’Connell, a young vet. She gave Atticus a shot—general anesthesia—and I
stayed with him through the surgery.
Dr. O’Connell sewed the wound closed, found other punctures in Atticus’s neck, and cleaned them and sewed some of them as well. She then inserted a long drainage tube. The dog had shaken him so fiercely it had loosened the layers of skin around the bite holes, and sacs of loose flesh were already pooling with nasty bacteria-filled fluids. She told me that Atticus was another shake or two from death, and as horrifying as the attack had been, we were very lucky.
“He’ll be all right, won’t he?” I asked.
“You’re going to have to watch him closely,” she said. She told me to check for signs of a collapsed lung. They would appear within twelve to twenty-four hours. If he was breathing heavily during the night or if his gums went blue or his upper back felt like bubble wrap—all signs that air wasn’t getting to his lungs—I was to rush him back to the hospital. She would insert an air tube into his chest, stabilize him, and I’d get him into Angell as soon as possible.
He slept soundly, having been heavily medicated.
I had stayed as strong as I could, but when we got back to Tamworth, I started to come off my emergency high and felt the impact of the attack. He’d never been injured while climbing hundreds of mountains, but there he was now, so vulnerable and in pain after a senseless attack.
My mind raced that night. I asked myself what I could have done differently as the attack played out in my mind in slow motion again and again. Of course I felt I’d let my friend down. I was usually good at seeing such things developing and stopping them before anything bad occurred. But everything had happened so quickly.
I held him as carefully that night as I’d held him when he was a puppy the first day we met. I moved my hands slowly over his body, loving him with my touch, wanting him to feel it.
As I cradled him, I could feel his full weight falling onto me, and I saw those grotesque tubes sticking out of both sides of his throat, the dried bloodstains on his hair.
I wept.
I prayed.
I pleaded.
It was to be the longest night of my life.
Dr. O’Connell had told me to check on him every ninety minutes. I didn’t dare sleep. Instead I stayed up throughout the night. With Atticus on my lap, just as he’d been after his cataract surgery, I typed out an e-mail that night, and the Friends of Atticus woke up again.
It didn’t take long for e-mails to start coming in, and by the next morning the phone wouldn’t stop ringing. People offered to help in any way they could, some offering money. I was thankful but told them prayers would be better.
The hikers on Views from the Top and Rocks on Top sent an endless stream of encouraging e-mails, and a Newburyport blog told its readers, “Pray for Atticus.”
Carter Luke, the CEO at Angell Animal Medical Center, was made aware, and emergency staff was notified that their “hero” might need their help and to be ready for him. And radio station WYKR in Wells River, Vermont, just across the New Hampshire border, ran regular Atticus updates, as did the Northcountry News Web site. I wrote a column for them called “The Adventures of Tom and Atticus,” and readers knew of the little dog’s exploits and loved him. Steve Smith wrote about the attack in his hiking column in the weekly newspaper the Mountain Ear.
Friends left messages, but I didn’t call any of them. I didn’t have it in me. Instead I sent out regular e-mail updates.
The next morning Atticus woke up in great pain and had a difficult time walking. I carried him outside so he could go to the bathroom. He moved his neck stiffly around as if checking himself for damage, and I’m sure he could sense those tubes sticking out of his throat. When his eyes met mine, they were soft and sad. I sat on the grass next to him, and he leaned his body against me.
He had made it through the night. But he wasn’t in the clear yet, and we had work to do. I remembered what Paige Foster had said when Atticus went blind: He needed the mountains. I wasn’t about to hike with him in this condition, and yet I wanted him to feel better. And I wanted him to feel safe again.
The first thing we did was drive over to the house where he was attacked. We sat in the car for a while and watched the dog watching us. Atticus looked at me as if wondering what my next step would be.
“Stay here, please,” I said as I got out of the car and closed the door. I could see those tubes and the dried blood on his fur. I could see his eyes going from the dog to me. It barked at me, and I called for the woman who lived there to come out. She’d met Atticus and was always friendly to us, but when she came to the door, she looked at me curiously, as if I were trespassing.
“What do you want?” she asked, eyeing me up and down.
I pointed to Atticus, who was watching us intently from the window. I didn’t even have to finish telling her what had happened. She saw the blood and the tubes, and tears welled up in her eyes. She grabbed hold of my arm like she needed help to stand.
She told me the two dogs belonged to a friend and that she was watching them for the weekend. She was out when the attack had taken place. That’s why we hadn’t seen the Newfoundland. He was with her. Whenever she looked over at Atticus, fresh tears filled her eyes, and she apologized again and again. “I really don’t know what to do.”
“I just wanted you to know what happened,” I said. And that was true, but it wasn’t the only reason for us to go to her house. I didn’t tell her this, but I wanted Atticus to watch me approach the dog. At first the dog appeared as if it wanted to attack again, but I was firm and looked it in the eyes and said, “Sit!”
It did. Then I told it, “Lie down.” Reluctantly, it did that as well.
In the car, Atticus was watching intently. I wanted him to see I wasn’t afraid. I wanted him to know I would make sure nothing like that would happen again. I wanted him to know he was safe.
When I got back into the car, Atticus, who always rode in the passenger seat, stood up and put his front paws on my thigh and looked into my eyes. We stayed like that for a moment before I put my hand on the back of his head and gently rubbed his ears. He pushed his face against mine. Paige’s voice came to mind: Y’all will work it out.
Atticus couldn’t climb a mountain—he wouldn’t be able to do that for a while—but he could be outside. Our next stop was to go to the Brook Path just down the road. It’s a lovely trail that follows a gentle, meandering brook through a fairyland of mossy rocks and thick trees. I carried him along the path for about a quarter of a mile until we came to a bend in the stream, and we sat down together. His face was still sad, but ever so slowly, over the next few hours, he started looking around. The song of the rushing water, the call of the birds, the gentle swirl of colorful leaves falling down around us, the smell of good earth—it all helped. I wanted him to be where he could get strength and feel peace and quiet. I wanted him to be in nature.
We sat together for three hours. Sometimes he turned and sat motionless with his back to me and gazed at the stream. Occasionally he turned toward me and looked me deep in the eyes as if asking, Why?
A bird landed on a low branch to watch us. We watched it come in closer, just three feet away from Atticus. The two of them looked at each other. They stayed that way for about a minute. When the bird flew away, Atticus came to me and pushed his nose against my arm. It was his way of saying, Let’s go.
There was one phone call I returned late in the afternoon the day after the attack. It was to Paige. I wasn’t quite sure why she was the one I called back. I suppose it was because part of me, deep down inside, always felt that Atticus was partly hers. She’d never said anything to make me feel that way, but I could sense they were connected. She had followed us closely for six and a half years. There were days we talked, days we e-mailed, and she often checked our blog. Besides, no one knew us the way Paige did.
She was concerned and loving on the phone and started out right away telling me what I needed to do. I loved that
about Paige. She felt she could fix anything bad that ever happened to Atticus. I listened to her attentively for several minutes. When I told her what we’d already done that day, she was silent for a bit and then said, “Tom Ryan, wherever did you learn to take care of that little boy so well?”
“I had a good teacher, Paige.”
We talked for several hours that afternoon. Strangely enough, after the first twenty minutes, it was not about Atticus anymore. Instead we spoke about our own lives. I was lying on the couch, and Atticus pushed up next to me, and I held him close.
Over the next couple of days, the Friends of Atticus sat and waited. We all did. I wasn’t the only person who had wept. I wasn’t the only person who was praying.
32
The Great Art of Sauntering
Six days after that vicious attack, Atticus walked the red carpet heading into the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened.
Knowing him as I did, I should have trusted that a gaping hole in his throat wouldn’t be enough to keep him down. He stepped into the building as if he’d been there a thousand times before. That little dog who was banned from the Newburyport post office and city hall was not only welcomed at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, he was honored.
The good people of the MSPCA couldn’t have been kinder to us, and especially to him. I think after seeing the photos of what he looked like after the attack, they expected a different Atticus.
Thoreau once wrote, “It is a great art to saunter.”
Watching Atticus step into that august building was watching great art. People greeted him by name, told him he looked good, wished him a good evening, and he sauntered as if he truly belonged there. It was like he was back on the streets of Newburyport again.
