He started his systematic canvasing again, this time driving onto properties where he saw no cattle at all and nothing to suggest that the right farmer’s house lay at the end of this long, curving, gravel driveway — like a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. (He would never have thought of something so hokey had some child not painted the roadside mailbox to resemble a rainbow.) No, whatever the boy expected to find would not be as in a fantasy or a fairy tale — sudden fortune or immortality. Yet it might hold the ending to an old story he had lived without for nearly half his life.
When the boy wended his way into the backyard of what — amazingly — happened to be the right farmhouse, an elderly man was lobbing a tennis ball across a yard half striped with mounds of fresh clippings that had probably choked the small lawnmower abandoned in the center. A young cattle dog leaped to snatch each toss — almost pirouetting as it zoomed back to deliver the ball. Beside the pasture, knee-high with alfalfa, two cows watched from the nearly empty round-bale feeder in a barn’s shadow.
The boy approached. He explained that he was hoping to find the person who had aided his family in the blizzard eight years earlier. The farmer nodded. No one could ever forget that blizzard, he said.
The boy knew that the farmer wouldn’t recognize him — even if he did remember the elementary-school kid he had been.
Nor did the boy recognize this man with a walker who ushered him into his farmhouse — which he also didn’t recognize. Nor did he recognize the exuberant, red-ticked cattle dog who joined the man inside, hopping beside him on the couch with a tennis ball fixed in his grin. Nor the fireplace — not right away, not without any firewood or ashes in sight. And then, in an instant, he did: His family had thawed themselves in front of it that night. As imperceptibly as the scent of manure faded from his awareness, the sensation that this was the right farm grew stronger.
This was the very farm where a dog, a herd of a cattle, and a farmer had saved his family. This was the farm in which twenty-four hours shook them from their confident happiness and carefree vacation and made them fragile and mortal again.
So, too, the boy understood that, for the farmer, that particular day was simply one of many on a property where life and death — cows, calves, chickens, turkeys, dogs, rabbits, varmints, people he loved — wrestled for attention most every day.
The boy had posed many questions before another dog he hadn’t noticed, asleep on a folded afghan at the base of the stairs, let out a hushed yip that drew his attention.
Yes, the farmer said, that’s the dog who rescued your family. Yes, that’s Angus, now fifteen, now deaf as a doornail, now blind as a bat — and still — that tired girl is the best cattle dog of the four he had been privileged to work.
And this here is Angus, the farmer explained, stroking the dog who straddled his lap and stared into his eyes. Yes, all four dogs, I named them Angus. They each took up the same place in the barn, in the field, in the house — and in this old heart, that used to be young.
Stories do not always have the ending we imagine they will. The farmer had purchased the cattle-dog pup from the same breeder from which the very first Angus had come. Living in the farmhouse, rather than the barn; watching the farmer train another heeler, rather than work her: The old girl’s heart broke.
Then a month after he got the pup, the farmer’s best producing, least unpredictable cow kicked her rear hooves squarely onto the farmer’s backside and shattered his pelvis. Broke it in four places. He managed one phone call before he fell unconscious.
It is true, the farmer had intentionally shrunk his herd over the years. He kept fewer calves. He didn’t really have the drive to put up with keeping a bull on his farm for once-a-year breeding and pretty much year-round problems. Since his wife died — would have been three years before that blizzard — all farming really needed to do was keep him busy, keep him company.
From the hospital bed in Columbus, he called the Wheelers, who ran the livestock auction, and told them to head over and take all but the two oldest cows. It wasn’t their normal practice to pick up animals, but after close to fifty years of selling his cows, the farmer figured one favor wasn’t much to ask of them.
He also figured this little accident was going to cost a pretty penny, starting with the helicopter ride — first he’d ever taken. Heck, he wouldn’t even have known he’d taken it, except he awakened briefly, foggily, as the orderlies transferred him from the ER gurney to his hospital bed and said the words “life flight.”
At the hospital, even though the specialist (a woman! Now that surprised the farmer as well) said his bones would heal on their own without surgery, he’d be looking at three months of lying low. A nurse would check in on him. Someone would come three times a week and help him regain some strength and stability. All that was going to add up. No sense being all proud and then falling — that would just make the recovery worse.
The new heeler, he admitted, had been a mistake. A mistake the farmer didn’t imagine making. The pup had no work to do on the farm now, and deserved a far better life than the farmer could offer. First six weeks after the accident, the only exercise the heeler got was the farmer tossing a tennis ball down the basement steps. The dog’s feet would hit the first few steps, but then he’d leap from midstairs to the bottom, scramble around to find the ball among all the farmer’s late wife’s whatnots and the stuff his two kids expected they might want someday, bound up the stairs, his feet hitting all the steps this time, and put the ball in the man’s hand. It got to be that, in the instant it took for the farmer to reach back and toss again, the dog would already be stationed at the bottom of the stairs, all four legs cocked and ready to spring in one direction or the other, poised for the catch.
There came a longer pause in the farmer’s talking when the boy thought he might change the subject without exactly interrupting. He wanted to know something — anything, really— about the cattle dog’s training. Specifically, he wondered what the farmer might have taught the old Angus so that she could have known how to find his family? What made her drive the cows to them? Did she know that they would trample a path that the people could use?
The farmer had a lot to share about the heelers’ heritage — why, they’re bred from Australian dingoes! — and their herding instincts and their tireless determination. He explained about reward training, and how you have to keep sessions short and always successful. He said how you need a long lead on the collar and an even longer amount of patience to let out. But he had none of the answers the boy had hoped to hear.
After another pause, the boy asked if he could go out to the barn and the corral. He wanted to see if his childhood recollections were exaggerated. He didn’t think so, but some people who had heard his tale looked doubtful. The boy wanted to know how far the dog had driven the cattle that night in the blizzard. How tall was the steel gate they had to climb to escape the cows that night? Is the same tractor there — the one with the enormous wheels?
The farmer pointed toward the door that opened onto the walkway to the corral and he told the boy to go on, have your eyeful of the place, and come inside for sandwiches afterward — unless, of course, you need to head back by a certain time.
The boy pulled open the back door. The red-ticked heeler pushed through the unlatched screen door with his muzzle and sprinted toward the barn as if he knew the very answers this boy wanted and had every intention of showing the boy now — and later and as long after that as the stranger could stay.
The boy rapped on the screen door. He could see two TV trays with sandwiches and glasses of milk set in front of the couch where the farmer snored softly. He entered the farmhouse quietly. The old Angus still dozed by the stairs. The young Angus — he’d found a squirrel to pursue and left the boy as he veered toward the back porch.
The boy dropped to his knees and gradually crawled toward the sleeping dog. He didn’t want to startle her. He didn’t want her to wake. Even if she could hear or see, the dog couldn’t have p
erceived the boy as anything but a stranger — albeit, a different one than he’d been eight years ago. He sidled close to the dog’s body — watching for any sign that she might awaken — until the arch of her bony, silver-black body pressed against his chest and the tops of his thighs. This time, the warmth of the tears that slid onto the dog’s fur did not surprise him.
His top arm cinched the dog’s chest and his hand pressed the rising and falling V below her rib cage as if to cup each slow, labored breath. He matched his breathing to hers. Whatever shape he had supposed his belated, speechless gratitude might have taken, this was it. Here was the dog to whom he owed his life. A dog with the name of Angus. Angus the third. And the farm and the dogs — they would continue without her. Her work there was done.
When the farmer’s walker rattled one of the TV trays, the boy gently unwrapped himself from the dog and returned to the chair facing the fireplace, as if he, too, had simply needed a nap. The old Angus continued to dream on her afghan that, yes, the boy remembered: It had wrapped his own body that night. The new Angus pawed at the screen door. The farmer told the pup to go find something to chase and leave the grown-ups to talk a minute. Indeed, as if the earlier conversation had been a dream, upon waking, the farmer wanted to ask the questions now. So where in Florida you live? Why come to this part of Ohio? What now, after high school? Were his parents well?
The two-year-old, red-ticked cattle dog who sleeps between the feet of the boy as he finishes this story belonged to the farmer. He may be Angus the fourth, but the only name that calls him is Rescue.
The boy, who is now the sole member of the cattle dog’s herd, did not find all the answers to the questions that sent him back to Ohio. For all he learned from the farmer, he did not find a real ending to this story. Instead, he found, as every cattle dog finds every day, that answers and endings are, in truth, just beginnings trying to be patient. That there is always work to do.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or, if real, are used fictitiously.
Text copyright © 2015 by Michael J. Rosen
Illustrations copyright © 2015 by Stan Fellows
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in an information retrieval system in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, taping, and recording, without prior written permission from the publisher.
First electronic edition 2015
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 2014949722
The illustrations in this book were done in watercolor.
Candlewick Press
99 Dover Street
Somerville, Massachusetts 02144
visit us at www.candlewick.com
The Tale of Rescue Page 3
