The father squinted to follow the only dark object in their world as it shrank and then, all of a sudden, vanished. He had seen a magician when he was his son’s age: a white dove, a white handkerchief carefully draped over it — and instantly, nothing! Nothing but a crumpled cloth and applause. And the dove? Where was it?
And there they were, in this Ohio blizzard, left with nothing but an immeasurable white handkerchief.
Was this their best chance? The father played out another scenario: He could leave his wife and son to follow the dog’s tracks while they were still visible. They had to lead somewhere. She was no homeless animal. But how far she had traveled? And did he have some untapped endurance that could fuel him to wherever the dog lived? Yet even that assumed she headed there directly. And that people would be home. And that those people would be willing to do something. That was not their best chance. That was not a chance at all.
The wind had tapered off and the rain had ceased — for the moment. The dog’s warmth lingered, but it was like a held breath . . . soon to expire. As nightfall approached, the family knew temperatures would plummet. They shared the quiet, in lieu of hope.
The cattle dog’s impatient barks summoned the farmer from his bedroom. She saw his scowling face, his squinting eyes, when he yanked aside the curtain. Until that moment, she had always called the farmer from the barn, the pasture, or the corral when she needed him. But she had no coyote to report, no cow straining with a life-or-death birth. Now she waited five feet from his window, all but her head sunk beneath the snow.
By the time the farmer dressed, pulled on his boots, and unlocked the back door, the heeler had stationed herself beside the corral gate. She couldn’t race up and back, up and back, as usual, to hurry the farmer to follow, so she barked and barked even as the farmer called, “That’ll do!” She watched his flashlight beam survey the empty fields.
The farmer plodded too slowly through his backyard, but the cattle dog couldn’t run her circles around him to convince him of the urgency. She couldn’t dash forward and expect him to follow or leap into the farm cart as usual. He flipped on the dim barn lights. Nothing was wrong with the herd, but she couldn’t deter the man from wasting time, pointing his bright circle on the ear tags of every cow and calf — even the two roosters, even one of the barn cats.
On the floor of the dry barn, she regained her gait and her ability to better express her agitation. She coaxed the farmer to the far side of the barn and bounded, as much as she could, for a third time, into the path she had taken to and from the stranded people. The beam of the farmer’s flashlight followed her — it traveled into the distance where she headed, even as he did not. His light continued to scan the perimeter.
The cattle dog could not convince him: No, it’s not coyotes. Her eyes flashed when the beam caught her as she twisted around to bark at the farmer.
Twice she returned and maneuvered behind the man to urge him forward. He couldn’t take more than a few steps before stumbling. Each time she barked, he shouted more harshly, “That’ll do!” But she could not stop herself; she was doing what her kind does, what the man had trained her to do. Finally, he swatted her with his long flashlight. She knew it was a warning — he’d never struck her before — but the heavy light slipped from his glove and sunk into the snow ten feet away. She could see the light torpedo through the snow and stall inches above the ground. And that’s when the farmer fell silent, turned his back to the cattle dog, and marched toward the farmhouse.
What is the first rule by which a cattle dog lives? Where you go, I go. But this night the heeler knew she would have to finish the work on her own.
After a long time, which was just shy of too long, the drowsing family jerked to attention. There was a sudden snap. Or a clap. Hugging one another, they listened carefully. It was all they could do. If only one of them possessed a cattle dog’s ears! Something had cracked the snow — something more than a dog’s paws. Yet there was barking — bursts of barking — even if the volume far exceeded anything a dog could produce. It felt as if the earth had cracked along a fault and the widening rift headed directly toward them.
When the father struggled to his feet, the barking’s volume increased, but there was nothing to see other than a pale plume of vapor, as if an invisible locomotive were pounding its way toward them.
But instead of a train’s blaring horn, a bellowing resounded above the barking and the crunching of ice and the crushing of snow. The father glimpsed a flash of black — that was not a wind-flung umbrella. Was it a cow’s face? It was. And it wasn’t just one cow, but two cows side by side. It was three, four, and then five cows abreast, their rapid breaths clouding the air, their broad chests parting the frozen terrain like icebreakers on a ship’s prow. They were a stampede. A bovine thunderstorm. The snow rumbled and boomed as if some god, suddenly angered, were sending a horrible punishment upon the land.
But then the barking ceased. Then — joltingly — the herd stalled its march as if on command. To the three sets of human eyes, a black cloud — the very squall that had trapped them — had come to rest in the field not twenty yards away from the family’s meager bunker. When a cow’s ear flicked, there was a flash, briefer than a shooting star, of a yellow ear tag.
Some cows about-faced. Some raised their heads and crooned like plugged tubas. A few separated from the group. But most eyes followed the cattle dog as she veered toward the family.
For a second time, the dog wriggled among the family’s limbs. She wound herself into a circle among their frozen parkas. Her stumpy tail — her whole back end — waggled so hard she almost knocked the boy to the ground. The boy cloaked his arms around her head, and she washed the little of his face that wasn’t cloaked with her small, warm tongue. But then she bounded back to the icy surface and barked again, staring at these three lost members of someone’s herd. She backed up, barking. She rushed toward the hole again, bowed on her forelegs, and barked. She could not stop until all three humans climbed onto the ice.
The littlest one tried to shimmy across the snow on his belly; he clawed with opposite hands and feet to slide forward. The two larger ones hammered the crust; they trudged and scraped to grab their way through the snow. Once they were but a few yards from the trench the cattle had plowed, the heeler ceased her barking and her backing-up walk, and trained her entire attention on the cattle. Now, for the third time in a day, her job was to march them, every last one, back to the barnyard.
Only when the heeler had marshaled all the cows into a run ahead of her did the family tread onto the snow corridor the herd had just plowed and compacted. Where there had been an impossible impasse of snowfall, there was now a path almost as wide as the country roads they had navigated to the lodge.
The sun had set. The herd and the dog were out of sight even as the family could hear the rumbling in the distance — yes, it was exactly like sensing an imminent storm. Arms hooked together, unsteady from fear and bone-tired weakness, the family could barely negotiate the uneven channel beneath their boots. They could see the bordering walls of snow in the dim light the shrouded moon granted them. They had to trust that, wherever the cows were headed, it was — at the very least — somewhere.
Beyond exhausted, for her fifth trip across her besieged terrain, the cattle dog could at least run in the path the herd had forged. She found the three people in the middle of the corridor; they were still far from the farmhouse. And they were just sitting on the ground, the small one balled up in the man’s arms. She ran straight past the family, turned quickly, and barked at their backs. She pawed the mother’s parka. The boy reached over the man’s shoulders as if to pet the dog. She growled; he jerked his hand away before she snapped. The heeler rushed in front of the people, jockeyed to either side of them, yapped, and pawed at them until they rose, clinging to one another. The mother slipped and her legs shot out toward the cattle dog. The mother screamed; the dog had only nipped her boot.
To keep them moving, the heeler ha
d to circle them, threaten them with her bared teeth, bark at their scuffling boots. The moment she shot ahead to lead the way they froze in place, forcing her to circle back.
It was only when the barn’s yellow light cast the family’s shadows behind them that the cattle dog raced through the broken fence the cows had shattered. She trusted that the people would follow — they had to follow.
After a long time, which was nothing compared to the forever they felt was their future an hour earlier, the family emerged at the lone farmhouse. A huge vapor lamp broadcast its improbable light from under the roof’s peak as if the sun had been snagged there on its way up to noon. The light — the first they’d seen since the squall approached — illuminated the snow that frosted the black cows and cast an almost identical shadow of each animal. For an instant, someone might have thought the herd had doubled in size: the skinniest of the cows flopped onto the ground, while the other half were waiting in the yard for someone to ink in their topmost parts.
Some cows knelt in sleep; some lay on their sides. Some stood, swatted their tails, swayed a bit as if drowsy. Some munched at a long trough between the barn’s enormous sliding doors; two roosters skittered among them, pecking at the scattered grain. Big as dinosaur skeletons and bone-white with snow, the baler, skid steer, hay rake, and manure spreader — the blizzard had frozen them in their tracks as well.
The herd’s path landed the family at a wide-open gate in a yard surrounded with tubular metal fencing. Inside the corral, the cattle hadn’t completely trampled the snow. Dark piles of manure steamed on the white ground. The dog’s shallower paw prints wove among the deep hoofprints.
At the far side of the fence, beyond all the cows, feeders, and pens, the family could see that someone had shoveled a long and narrow channel from the barn to the side door of the farmhouse.
Remaining as close to the fence as possible, and moving as quickly as their enervated limbs could carry them, the family concentrated half on where they placed each step, half on what the cows might be doing. Ears flicked. Ears shifted backward and aimed right toward the family to listen. Nostrils flared open to sniff the unfamiliar bodies. With eyes on the sides of their heads, the cattle didn’t need to face them to follow their movements.
But it was only as the father began unwrapping the chain that held the gate shut — the jangling links must have signaled something — that all the cows in the yard stirred and swung their heads toward the family in the corner by the padlocked gate.
Two nearby females, their calves in tow, hurried toward them. The four animals were not charging; they did not rake the ground with a hoof, blow steam out their nostrils, lower their horned heads, and break into a run, even though that memory zoomed through the parents’ minds. Before the father had spun around to lift the boy over the fence, those four were not ten feet away, and other groups were closing in, striding toward them.
It was the boy who shouted for help.
The snow hadn’t been shoveled or trampled on the herd’s side of the fence. Ice glazed the metal rails. Trying to climb, the mother’s boots skidded across the slick surface. She tumbled to the snow. The father’s gloves slid; he bloodied his nose on the rail.
It was the boy who saw the cattle dog; his parents were facing the farmhouse as they attempted to scale the slick steel rails of the fence. Only the boy saw the single circle the dog ran between his parents and the advancing cows who instantly turned as if the wind in the dog’s wake had spun them around.
At the sudden commotion of the retreating cows, the boy’s mother and father took one glance over their shoulders. They realized this was their chance: Their eyes locked as if to vow they each could find that last reserve of energy, but it was panic that catapulted them over the slippery fence and landed them in the shoveled snow beside their son.
Even before someone in the family could explain what had happened, how they had been guided to this place in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of a blizzard, the man who opened the farmhouse door led them to the fireplace. He wedged more logs onto the orange embers. From the closet, he tugged free a stack of nearly identical afghans that someone must have knitted; he draped one and then another around each person. He brought a wet washcloth for the father’s blood-smeared face. From the tiny kitchen, he carried out steaming mugs of tea, one at a time.
Then the farmer listened to their teeth chatter as they sipped. When someone started to talk, he held up a hand, as if it were a command: Wait. It can wait.
He heated the noodle casserole he’d been eating for dinner that week. He watched their faces turn from pink to white — still a far shade from tan. The boy’s eyes could not stay open.
And then the farmer listened to their tale. They had flown to Ohio for a winter vacation. They had been lost — stranded in the blizzard. Out of nowhere, a dog had found them. She’d warmed them but then ran off into some nowhere from which she’d come. And then she’d driven a herd of cattle — fifty, maybe ninety animals — to flatten the four feet of snow into a path that led them here.
The farmer shook his head.
And then, for the first time since he’d shouted in the barnyard, the boy opened his mouth. He added to the story. The cows suddenly came at them, he said, as if they were going to attack, but when the cows were ready to crush his parents into the fence, the same dog that had rescued them — that very same dog — cut between the cows and his parents and sent the cattle running. She hadn’t even barked. And then she disappeared again.
Again, the farmer swiveled his head back and forth. He had a soft voice. He meant to calm the family. Cattle don’t just walk over and crush people, he told them. People not knowledgeable about cows might not realize that. And how come all the cows moved toward the family at the gate? The rattling chain? Most often, that means new hay, new buckets of feed.
But to the farmer’s ears, their story sounded like a dream. Granted, an awful dream. He did agree that his dog might have smelled their fear at the gate and scattered the barn cows. He did appreciate that they were on the verge of frostbite, of fainting, of shock. They were dehydrated, famished, drained. They had spent most of the day fearing they would never see another day.
But his dog? His cattle? All this had happened . . . even as he’d been right here?
He tugged on his muck boots and jacket, excused himself, and left the family to restore their bodies before the blazing fireplace. He trundled down the shoveled path to the barn.
The cattle dog lay upside down among the square bales stacked on the hay wagon. Her front paws fluttered every now and then. Her muzzle crinkled, her lips lifted, her nose flared. Each inhale filled her nostrils with the scent of her herd — the soured hay called silage, the fresh and dried manure, the cows’ grassy breaths. The rhythms of the cows’ snorts, grinding jaws, burps, and shuffling hooves provided the background music that accompanied her sleep. This was her work now: to sleep.
As far as the farmer could tell, the herd appeared to be exactly as he’d left it when the cattle dog roused him hours earlier. Mothers, calves — he didn’t count them this time. His flashlight still glowed dimly under the bank of snow.
The strangers’ story, despite its desperation, seemed impossible. They had been stranded in that blizzard — perhaps they were delusional. But then, exiting through the open barn doors, the vapor lamp illuminated the herd’s pathway through the broken fence — the same section he’d repaired twice this year. The starlight permitted him to see that the corridor continued farther into the pitch dark.
The farmer hesitated. Five, six, seven — the puffs of eight exhales rose and dispersed into the cold air as he stared at his cattle dog, asleep in her favorite position; but then he decided not to whistle and bring her into the house.
How was it the family had managed to leave that farm in Somewhere, Ohio, and never ask the name of the dog?
Maybe if they had seen the dog again. But the three had slept in front of the fire until almost ten the next morning. The farmer had
awakened them and towed the family to the lodge in a hay wagon hooked to his tractor. The sun was almost overhead by the time they arrived; it wasn’t such a long distance, but the tractor’s plowing blade could only push so much snow ahead of it. The ice shattering beneath those gigantic wheels — it was a sound the boy would never forget. Just as he would never forget the father’s desperate whistles, nor the squall’s howling, nor the earth cracking open as the herd crashed through the snow.
But the family never saw the farmer’s dog again. What might they have said to her? How could three strangers have shown the dog their — their what? Gratitude? Love? How could they have repaid it?
Yet it’s not thanks for which a dog lives. It’s not love — at least, not the kind people need. It’s work: The heeler had heard an unfamiliar whistle; she tracked the sound and the smell of something out of place; and she brought the missing back to the farm, because that’s a cattle dog’s work.
This is a tale about a cattle dog and a boy. A young cattle dog sleeps between the feet of the boy who is eighteen now and writing this story. The pup had belonged to the farmer whose dog had saved the boy and his parents.
This is how that story ends.
Years after that terrible storm, the boy set off for Ohio the week after high-school graduation. It was early June. Snow was a happily conceded memory in every state he crossed on his route from Florida. He had directions to the lodge. But the farmer’s home? He had no idea how many family farms stood in the vicinity of the lodge; the boy had no recollection of where to go.
He knocked on several doors where he saw cattle grazing in lush meadows of alfalfa that had yet to be mowed for the first time that spring. He enlarged his circle around the lodge and continued to search. He remembered the family had walked for hours in the whiteout, but he had no sense of how far they’d traveled.
The Tale of Rescue Page 2
