Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Epilogue
This is a tale about a cattle dog. She had a name, but only one person knew it and usually he called her with herding words like cast and wait and bye and that’ll do. Mostly he called her with whistles.
This heeler had been born in the farmer’s barn. She had lived there, with an always changing herd of cattle, her entire life. As had her mother. As had her mother’s sire. Each and every cow knew the black-ticked cattle dog by her stares and by her barks — the high-pitched yelps that signaled an intruder; the whining yodel of excitement when the farmer appeared; the grumble-huff that meant “pay attention” or “freeze”; the staccato woofs that forced them to retreat or split apart; the muffled yips as her paws flicked in a dream. They knew the rake and jab of her nails against their hides, the pinch and grip of her teeth nipping their heels to get them moving. (Yes, that’s why cattle dogs are also known as heelers.)
Bred with the stamina to work for hours — maneuvering a large herd, a cattle dog might run seventy-five miles in a day — she lived for the hours spent with the farmer.
Cast! She gathered up the cattle.
Bye! She veered around left of the herd.
Away! She flew around right.
Look back! She instantly halted, pivoted, and dashed in the opposite direction to locate a missing animal.
At dawn and at dusk, she focused all her attention and funneled all her energy into marching the cattle from pasture to pasture, from barn to corral. Although the cattle dog weighed fifty pounds and each of her forty cows weighed more than a thousand, there was never a question of who was in charge. The heeler directed, stopped, separated, and gathered more than 40,000 pounds of cattle with barks, stares, nips, and a swiftness and agility that allowed her to charge among the herd’s 160 legs, weave under their bellies — under their milk-heavy udders — and even clamber onto their bony backs. It was not easy work, but it was the work her kind had been bred to do. It was the work she loved.
This is also a tale about a mother, a father, and their ten-year-old son. They, too, had names, of course, but no one else in this story knew them.
A family from Florida, they had rented a cabin in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. When the mother had lived in Ohio, nearby cousins had booked the cabins at this lodge one year and celebrated New Year’s Eve there. While both parents had grown up in the Midwest, their son had never experienced a winter with snow. The lodge had recently been renovated, according to friends, so it sounded like the ideal choice. Indeed, upon arrival, their timing seemed perfect: sunshine, mild temperatures, and light flurries to freshen the full foot of snow that already carpeted the countryside. One nearby field — a distinctly defined rectangle — was polka-dotted with bits of dried cornstalks poking through the white. Otherwise, as far as the horizons, the snowy ground was untrammeled: not a footprint, not a tire track — and certainly none of the gray slush and spattered mud that bordered the weaving roads that conducted them to the lodge.
The family rented cross-country skis and partly glided, partly stomped, across the landscape; their overlapping parallel tracks left an empty musical staff on the blank pages of the smooth fields. Later, they returned on foot and their boot prints added the notes.
They built a family of snowmen — father, mother, son — exactly their heights! They borrowed sleds from the lodge; they joined a bonfire and roasted hot dogs; they stockpiled a mound of snowballs and waged a midnight snowball fight. The paired hearts of deer tracks stamped in the snow, stalactites of icicles along their cabin’s timber eaves, snow angels, frost-crazed windowpanes — their snapshots captured every wintery thing they’d never encountered in Florida.
On their last vacation morning, a blanket of thick, wet snowflakes had settled on everything while they’d slept. The snow spackled the evergreens’ boughs. The snow whitewashed the porch chairs and the picnic table. It even erased the telephone wires. Only hints of color peeked through: a yield sign’s yellow, their car roof’s blue. Another few inches had piled onto the foot or so of snow through which they’d been tromping. Out the cabin’s windows, the ground glistened like finely grated diamonds — the sand at the beach near their home did the same thing — when the sun pried a hole in the cloud cover.
Before breakfast, the family decided to hike the half-mile to the lodge. But no sooner had they bundled into their parkas, scarves, boots, and gloves, than the sky disappeared. Tilting back their heads and gazing straight up: a dense, strangely beautiful confetti of snow blocked everything but itself from view. A sudden gust whooshed the flakes sideways for a few seconds, and then, just as abruptly, as if it had second thoughts, allowed the snow to stream downward again.
In Florida, in years past, the family had witnessed raging tides and relentless storms and thrashing hurricanes, but nothing like this snow’s dramatic antics. They had never experienced a whiteout.
Ten minutes later, the family had nearly reached the lodge, although the squall of snow prevented them from seeing it. White insisted on being the only detail within sight; snow, the only destination. So they turned around, fit their boots backward into their steps, and retreated toward their cabin.
Their previous tracks grew shallower and shallower as they trudged onward; too soon, their old steps were buried in new snow. The family wasn’t lost — but nothing offered them a clue of where they might be heading.
Two more inches of snow fell in the next half hour. Strong winds had mounded drifts deeper than the boy’s waist. His father carried him as long as he could. But slogging through such deep snow with his son’s additional weight, he was soon out of breath.
Only a bird soaring above them — and no birds appeared to be flying in the storm — could adequately appreciate the route they had traveled: They had zigzagged. They had circled. They weren’t lost — they knew they had to be close to either the lodge or the cabin. Yet, as if they were trapped in a snow globe, they had come no closer to either dwelling; they were stuck in the very same place as the storm’s flurries swirled around them and around them.
If only they had been in a snow globe where the same snowy scene simply repeats. The weather in their dome of heaven worsened. Remember, the family hadn’t eaten. Fatigue had overtaken them. The snow had so deepened that no one could lift a boot high enough to step out of and over the snow in order to place the next step. They could only shuffle forward, parting the snow with their boots, knees, and waists.
And they were, all three of them, scared — and, of course, freezing cold. When the wind kicked up, the parents sandwiched their son between them and stared into each other’s eyes to see if the other thought there was any chance that everything would be all right.
Was it an hour? Two hours? Relentlessly, the squall dumped its wet snow. Now the accumulation of the previous snows, the earlier wet blanket, and the slushy flakes was deep as the parents’ waists. The family plodded ahead, single file: The father shoved and tromped the snow to make the passage easier for his wife; she did the same for their son. The wind’s blasts slapped their faces; every tear and bead of sweat burned their skin. They had to squint so that the snowflakes would melt on their lashes instead of stab at their eyes.
Father, mother, son — the idea of screaming for help crossed each of their minds. But they all realized the wind’s howling would drown out anything they called. Besides, who was around to hear? Besides, who wanted to unwrap and rewrap a scarf in this biting wind, even for the brief moment it would take to scream? Still, the father did shape his lips and tongue t
o whistle like a siren. Two and three times, his piercing wail rang in their ears.
Did another hour pass? Two hours? By the time the blizzard weakened or simply shifted its intensity to another county, four feet of snow surrounded the family. Lifting the heels of his boots, the boy could just see above the snow. Drifts arched well over his head. While nightfall was still hours away, even if they mustered yet another burst of will and energy, they had no landmark to orient their course. If they’d held a map of this, it would show no north, no roads, no cities. They were lost, even if they were not so far from shelter.
Although the parents had no clue what to do, their son’s face told them they had to think of something. Together, they stomped in a tight circle, trampling a depression in the snow that was wide enough for the three of them to evade the wind. They hunkered together in that den, squished together, a circle of thighs packed as tight as orange segments.
It was warmer there. No one had to shout to be heard, although no one could think of much to say, let alone of what to do next. Every now and again, the father struggled to a standing position and whistled. And whistled.
When the snow changed to freezing rain, the first droplets pinged as they struck the snow. But quickly, a drenching rain fell, seeping into the snow and compacting it. Eventually, a glaze of ice coated the ground. It quickened into a thin shell that even crowned the family’s hoods and their shoulders. Then a hard crust formed; punched with a gloved fist, silver cracks shattered the lip of the icy bowl in which the family crouched.
Remember, this is also a tale about a cattle dog. From the moment the squall descended and the farmer called, the dog had been driving cows from their placid, all-morning meal at the round hay bales to the corral that connected the nearest pasture to the barn. She had coaxed the eight new calves inside the barn. She had discovered a cow, almost ready to calve, who’d sequestered herself beneath a thicket of blackberry canes by the frozen stream, and brought her back to the yard. Deep snow made the heeler’s demanding work all the more tiring; she was curled on the seat of the tractor parked below the hayloft when the faint thread of a whistle pierced her sleep.
The dog scampered to her feet and jumped from the tractor’s cab. The whistle — it definitely was not one of the farmer’s commands. Pointed in the feeble sound’s direction, her tall ears waited for the whistle to repeat. Stock-still, she listened. . . . Nothing. Nothing but the rooster fluttering his wings for no good reason. Nothing but a cow pie splatting on the barn-floor muck. Nothing — something! She bolted from the barn, hurdled a wheelbarrow, the rooster, and everything else the happenstance of cows forced her to encounter, scrabbled to the top rail of the steel-tube fence, vaulted out — all four legs fully extended — and raced across the snow.
Raced would have been the right word if the field were anything but four feet of compacted snow capped with ice. A heeler’s legs, remember, are twelve inches long; the snow was four times that . . . in its lowest spots. Even the dog’s nose reached no higher than thirty inches when she craned to sniff. This time, racing meant smacking hard into the crusted snow and slipping — one foot punching through the shell of ice, stumbling, and scrambling to get both feet repositioned. Racing meant firing up all the power and quickness and determination that she’d been exercising all her life with her cattle: She pounced onto the ice as if it were a cow’s back. She twisted, then righted herself, as if a cow’s hoof had tripped her. She struggled forward and onward, springing up and onto the snow, sinking down, and leaping again, ignoring the exhaustion and pain, because everything, absolutely everything depended on her. As it always did.
Finally, the whistle repeated. The towers of her pricked-up ears captured the vibration. At the same instant, as if the sound had a scent as well, her nose inhaled something foreign. Not the pungency of a calf’s afterbirth. Not a coyote’s musk or the rotted squirrel it had killed. Not anything like the grease and orange of the farmer’s hands or his sweaty, talcum-powdered boots. The heeler heaved herself again and again onto the blockade of snow, her nose alone directing her across the snow-emptied acres.
When the father rose again to whistle, he thought he noticed something in the distance that wasn’t white. Small, dark — it disappeared. It reappeared — was the wind cartwheeling a broken umbrella? A luffing plastic grocery bag? It disappeared. He hunkered down again with his wife and son.
But not long after that, all three cocked their heads at a noise that clearly wasn’t rain. It clearly wasn’t wind. They held still, listening harder. Something crackled in the snow. Punch-crunch. Something scraped the ice. Whatever made those sounds grew closer.
When the heeler saw two faces peer above the ice, she let out a sharp, excited bark that would have alarmed her entire herd. The faces instantly withdrew — fast as moles retreat when the dog detects their slightest movement under the leaves before she pounces. Then she produced a string of howling barks that the drizzle’s static muffled. She lurched forward again and again, the pitch of her barks even more urgent. No matter that her energy was depleted from the ordeal of her journey, she continued to crouch and jump, trying to rouse these stragglers.
In their shallow bunker, the family ducked their heads and linked arms. They formed a fortress of coats. The cattle dog’s barks clapped above them as if the skies had added thunder to its theme of disaster. They gritted their teeth and squeezed their parched lips together. Even the boy’s sobbing turned silent. How could they be trapped in a snowstorm — and attacked by some savage dog?
But then the barking modulated to a whine and the heeler leaned, then slid, into the shallow den. She prodded her muzzle between the hoods of their parkas. She slithered behind the father’s sloped back. She clawed at their arms, linked together. With her front paws pulling and her back paws pushing, she wedged her nose, then her head and shoulders, and then the whole of her body into the space she had prized among their locked-together arms and legs. And she lay there, wedged below their shallow, bitter breaths, panting and listening.
There are moments when the exceptional human power of speech fails, when silence is called upon to carry whatever needs to be said. That silence — with a few sounds like barks and whistles — serves most every other creature.
So it was that the parents could not think of what to say to each other, of what to tell their son, of what to command or beg of the dog whose chest heaved so rapidly among them. The boy rested his cheek on the dog’s chilled and soaked coat. When a tear spilled across his cheek, its warmth surprised him — the furnace inside him could still heat the water in his eyes. A second later, it cooled on the dog’s cold fur. But as he held his face against her silver-black coat, her body’s heat rose and eased the frost’s rawness on that patch of his skin.
He placed the other side of his face on the dog. He tugged the mittens from his numb fingers and slid his hands under the dog’s belly. Once his own flesh thawed the clumps of ice that clung to her fur, the dog’s heat radiated into his palms.
Soon, six cold hands flattened beneath the cattle dog’s body. What a wan furnace the four creatures built with their bodies’ heat. Their exhales, the sudden touch of a chin, made the dog’s ears twitch as they gathered words that were not bye, or way, or that’ll do.
If only to force their minds away from what was happening — or what might happen — the family trained their attention on the dog. They had never encountered a cattle dog, to say nothing of cradling one within their arms and legs or of inhaling the odors of hay and manure and whatever else infused her sodden coat.
The boy gripped her front paw in his hand — it was remarkably small. Even though she had come to them across how many acres or miles of ice, even though their bodies had no real heat to offer her, the paw seemed to hold even more heat than her body. She flexed her black toenails in his palm; he could sense the power of her forearms’ muscles. A thin stream of blood seeped from her dewclaw onto the boy’s lap.
The mother made long strokes with her numb hands down the d
og’s coat; the silver-white ticking gleamed even in the limited light. The tips of her fingers wriggled into the soft, felt-like undercoat. She pointed out the tail — there was but a nub of a tail — to her husband and son. The hind legs were feathered with light hair, she remarked, almost like a white-tailed deer.
The father cradled the dog’s head, smoothing the fur on her ears that folded back against her head at his touch. He gazed into her round, brown eyes: Unlike any dog he had ever known, she returned his gaze and didn’t look away.
After a long time, which was still shy of long enough, the dog scooted backward, retreating from the family’s embrace. As the heeler clawed and climbed to the surface, someone surely wished, If we only had paper to write a note. One of the three surely thought, Is there anything we can tie to its collar? Someone surely said a prayer or asked for a miracle. They all wished the dog would stay.
The boy reached up and grabbed for one of the dog’s rear paws. She spun around, fast as a cyclone, nipped his thumb, and without a moment’s pause, continued that spin until she was racing again in the direction from which she had come.
Nip is the right word. The dog’s teeth didn’t break the boy’s skin. It was a warning. It probably wouldn’t have hurt at all had the boy’s fingers not been tingling — frozen stiff and bloodless — from the hours of cold.
Racing, on the other hand, is even less the right word this time: The ice had thickened during the time the cattle dog had stayed with the family. Some leaps landed her on such unyielding ground that she skidded, paws splaying to each side. Other leaps, her body smashed the ice and she toppled forward; thin shards jabbed her. Her four limbs felt as if they had conflicting commands to obey, even as she had but one goal, but one place she had to be right then. No — sooner than then.
The Tale of Rescue Page 1
