Rose in a Storm (20 page)

She sensed the coyotes gathering on the hill, hungry, even desperate, watching, observing the death and confusion down below. Frightened ewes, weakening cows, a tired old dog, the absence of people, Rose.

She saw the farm as the coyote would have seen it. Prey everywhere, sustenance. The survival of his pack all gathered in one place, and nothing powerful enough to stop him.

They would make a plan; they always did. Unlike Rose, they were many strong, working in concert. They didn’t cajole by nipping. They waited until their prey was vulnerable, defenseless, and they overwhelmed with numbers, speed, and fear, killing quickly and savagely.

The coyote had to succeed or his den would face death—which he could not permit any more than Rose could permit the extinction of the farm animals.

They were on the move, she could feel them. In her mind, she could see them, circling, hiding, watching, waiting. The coyote would have gathered his den by now, and they would have spread out all over the hilltop, behind the drifts, in the clump of trees, behind the fence and the big trees.

*   *   *

R
OSE SLID OUTSIDE
through the door. She had not adapted to the reality of the storm. Each time she returned to it she was startled by the bleak and frigid landscape. Every time she returned to it, it was different, and she had to reorient herself.

She turned and went back inside, where she found the wild dog lying where she had left him. She lay beside the spent dog, who was breathing slowly, but who lifted his head and turned his eyes to hers. He was giving her permission to go, as they both knew she had to.

He was nearly done.

Rose stayed with him for a few more minutes, both of them listening to the howl of the wind, the snow thumping off the roof, the distant bleating of the sheep.

There was nothing to do now. The two dogs waited together. They both slept, briefly. They each had simple dreams—moving sheep, cows, running through the woods. These dreams were nourishing, reassuring. They called up the history of dogs, of work completed, of successes.

It was night now. The snow was still falling, the wind a little quieter. The farm was buried, impassable.

The wild dog was lying on his side, whining a bit in his dreams, his stomach heaving slowly. Rose looked at him one more time.

Again she touched his nose. At first, this dog was just another creature running in the woods, another danger to the farm, something to be monitored, barked at, kept in check. One afternoon, Rose had looked down from the pasture and seen this old dog looking up at her. Something stirred inside of her—as it used to when she was a puppy with her mother.

He wasn’t, then, trying to come into the farm, wasn’t aggressive
or challenging. He simply stared at her, and perhaps it was then that she knew. Or perhaps it was when she first led him into the barn. Or when he tried to stand by her when she faced the coyotes, and she protected him.

Or only right now, as he lay so peacefully and so accepting, near the end of his life. It was a series of moments rather than one.

She did not know if he recognized her as his daughter, but she had known, on some level, from the first, that he was her father.

THIRTEEN

R
OSE LEFT THE WILD DOG ASLEEP IN THE KITCHEN AND MOVED
slowly back toward the door, toward the storm. She closed her eyes, put her head down, and plunged back out, moving slowly and deliberately in the direction of the barn.

She heard the goats calling out in complaint from inside their shed. There was nothing she could do for them. They would be eating down the hay Sam had stuffed into their sheds before he’d gotten hurt. She saw Brownie through the mist and snow, breath still steaming from his nostrils, two cows stamping their feet behind him.

Up in the pole barn, exhausted, limp, waiting, were the sheep and lambs. She could hear and smell them, but could hardly see them. More snow had fallen off the roof, surrounding them in impassable drifts and mounds of ice. The flock was too weak and tired to move, and too frightened. Rose heard Winston crowing in the barn, perhaps calling to one of his hens, who had wandered out into the storm and disappeared.

Looking up through the snow and the mist, Rose stopped.
She saw the line of dark shapes barely visible against snow-banks behind them. They were coyotes, no longer bothering to hide. They were gathering.

And they were watching her. There were no machines to fear, no humans, not even a second dog. The coyotes drifted in and out of sight, as the snow thickened and waned, and that made them seem even more ghostly. It appeared to Rose that they were on the move even though they were sitting still, waiting and watching.

Her mind was quiet, the images gray, almost moribund. She had never been so tired, so weak, or so confused. She had been jolted just a day earlier by her choices, but now there were none left.

She made her way past the barn. Inside, Winston and the hens were prowling the barn floor, pecking for bits of grain. Of all the animals on the farm, they were perhaps best suited to survive such a storm. They could eat almost anything, and they were so thin-blooded they could handle extreme cold as long as they had some semblance of shelter.

She looked through the hole in the back of the barn. Brownie was still standing, although he looked weak and was barely moving. He might not survive too many more days of such cold and wind, so little food.

There was nothing for Rose to do in there. She had a sense of her own limits—of having reached them.

Then, one idea emerged from the others. Two more ewes were lying in the snow, weakened during the march back up the hill. A shivering lamb lay between them. Rose knew it was the lamb she and Sam had pulled out of the ewe that night that seemed like such a long time ago now. Rose would not let these sheep freeze to death in the snow.

She made her way slowly up the hill. It was snowing still, and the cold shot up through her paws and into her bones. It was hard to see through the ice and snow crust on her eyes.

She pushed on to the edge of the pole barn. Normally, the sheep would have sprung to their feet, ready to move, up the hill to the pasture, or down to the feeders near the barn. Today, they lay still. Now for the first time in her life, she knew she could not get them up. And she had no reason to try; there was nowhere to take them.

She met the flock’s hungry gaze again, and they looked back at her with the same feelings of fatigue and appeal. Had she come to take them to grass? Old instincts die hard.

One or two stirred, but Rose broke off eye contact and calmly surveyed the survivors. The map in her head was being rewritten again, and it was grim, smaller.

Rose went around the pole barn and sat on the other side, facing up the hill, where the coyotes could see her.

There, out in the snow, she would wait.

This was her place, in front of her sheep, guarding the flock, keeping them safe to the end. This was her work, her destiny, the point of her. Katie flashed into her head, her calm, sure voice. Rose, too, felt calm and sure.

To get them to pasture, to give them time to eat, to protect them. To keep them from ravines and gullies into which they could fall, streams in which they could drown, woods in which they could wander and become lost. To get them home before dark. She did this for them, and to serve the humans her kind served, who had worked with her line all the way back through time.

She kept them safe. She would do that now, whether Sam was here or not, whether it was possible or not.

Until this storm, Rose had never lost a ewe or ram, never
lost a sheep to a ravine, a stream, a coyote, had never shown any less than complete vigilance and care.

Had Sam been in the farmhouse and looked out, he would have been amazed to see this solitary dog, covered in a coating of white, staring up the hill, giving eye to the wind, the snow, the coyotes, to life and the world, to her choices and her duty. He would have marveled at her responsibility, her loyalty, and her bravery. Rose had never run, never backed down, never failed to get it done. He had said that about her so many times—he bragged about her like she was his child, although never in her presence. It would have been patronizing, even insulting, to praise Rose too much to her face. Work was her reward.

But there was no one to see this dog on the hill, and no human would ever know what was about to happen there.

Rose closed her eyes as the snow gathered on her fur, and the cold sank deeper into her bones. She dreamt of the sun, of fresh water, of running through the woods, heading off the sheep, loping in the wind. She dreamed of Katie and her stories, and Sam and his work, and the wild dog, sleeping safely in the house, where he could survive the cold. She dreamed of so many dogs, of sheep and goats and cows, over so many years.

For a moment, she closed her eyes.

The wind told her a million stories, and this was her favorite thing, her favorite dream. Running down the path, hearing the woods, and there, at the end of the path, was Katie, waiting for her, waiting to give her some food, to talk to her.

Then she opened her eyes.

She turned up to the gray sky and she howled, a haunting, piercing wail that cut through the storm and bounced off the barns and out into the woods and off the snow-covered trees.

All the animals who heard it paused and listened, and many trembled.

S
HE BLINKED AWAKE
, shook the snow off.

She tipped her head toward the coyotes at the edge of the woods. It seemed natural that she and they would be at different ends of this hill, in this storm. She had this strange sensation that she had dreamt of this day, experienced it before.

By now the little dog was almost invisible in the snow. She saw a thousand hills and meadows, too many sheep to count, fires and windstorms, lightning and floods, barns and houses, and it seemed that her images went further and further back, that the storm had opened doors inside her head and she was rushing past them in time, almost too fast to see clearly, through so many blue lights, so many spirits.

U
P AT THE
top of the hill, the coyote saw that his moment had come. The little dog had come out and lay down, opening herself up to him. The sheep were in the den behind her, weak and vulnerable. He saw the bodies of the cows and steers, almost frozen where they stood. The dog was speaking to him. She was saying, this is the time. Neither she nor he had human notions of victory or defeat.

They simply did what they did. And what happened was what happened. It meant nothing more to them.

The coyote saw that two or three of the cows were alive but barely able to move. He would not attack the big brown one. He would let him die and then feast off the remains.

He had seen the other dog go into the house—they would never go into places where humans lived.

So it was his time. He was cautious, and looked carefully around, for other dogs, for humans. He raised his nose to take in any scents, and pricked his ears for strange sounds. He found nothing and was satisfied. He knew there were cats in the barn, and chickens, but coyotes did not go into barns or buildings. That was the work of lesser animals—foxes, raccoons. Coyotes hunted in the open.

He turned to the other coyotes. They all knew the plan, communicated through body language, eyes, turns of the head.

Three of them went off to the left, moving slowly down the hill to flank the dog on one side and cut off any escape for the sheep. Three went off and circled to the right. Both groups would go below Rose and the pole barn, so that the sheep would have nowhere to run when the coyotes closed in from above, the one with the blue eyes and his den.

They would all move in at once, yipping and barking, circling and charging, tearing at throats, killing quickly, spreading panic, feasting there and hauling off meat back to the den, for them and for their pups.

The dog was weak and tired and could not stop the pack, and even if she fought—for he saw that she would fight—she would be killed quickly.

The coyote leader lay and waited until the other coyotes were down the hill and in place.

Rose saw the coyotes beginning to circle. She knew they were ready to attack. She began a low growl, and her ruff went up. She would fight.

Her mind seemed to be running off without her, still racing back through time, to different places, new scenes, powerful and disturbing images. She imagined being more powerful, wished to find some story to draw from, some memory to call upon. She found none.

She sat up, shook off the snow, waited.

Rose felt at ease, a sense of resignation. The snow swirled around her in little tornadoes, the wind howled loudly down the hill. All of the other animals, sensing what was coming, were still. She peered up at the hill. There was no movement.

T
HE COYOTE LEADER
yipped, a chilling chorus echoing back and forth through the wind and dark and the blowing snow. The signal given and received that the hunt was on, the pack was to move in for the kill. He lowered his head, took the lead, and headed straight for the little dog, who stood up to face him.

The wind was blowing into his face, the ice made footing difficult, the snow was thick, and from time to time he could hardly see the form of the dog. He felt no emotion about killing her—it was what had to be done, and he would do it—though he felt the respect the two of them had had, each for the other from the first.

He loped down the hill. He saw the others in place, advancing from the left and the right, deferring to him, expecting him to draw the first blood. The winds whistled and shrieked, ruffling fur, sending up swirls of snow in the darkness.

Rose looked up, into the storm. She could run, or she could fight. To stay still and be taken was not a choice.

The coyote in front of her hesitated, advanced, then slowed to a crawl, perhaps a change in strategy or an effort to distract or confuse her. As he slowed, the two to her right closed in, just as one did from the left.

She was now uncertain where the attack would come from, and she saw that this was deliberate. She couldn’t look everywhere at once, especially if the coyotes were using the blinding snow as cover.