Rose in a Storm (7 page)

Soon the cows’ own momentum was carrying them onward to familiar ground, and they came rumbling down the hill, slowed only by the snow and biting wind in their faces.

Sam had thrown some hay out onto the ground, and in a few minutes, the cows were back in the pasture and the gate was closed. Satisfied, Rose and Sam began their walk back through the barn to the farmhouse.

“Good girl,” he said, appreciative, but also focused on other things. There was still much to do to get the farm ready for the worst of the storm.

He did lean over and look at her head. Her tongue was long, and she was panting. Her eye was slightly swollen from the goat-butting. The cows had not touched or harmed her, and she had moved them easily enough.

“You’re okay,” he said.

An hour later, Sam ventured back out to the barn to try to get his spare generator, broken for more than a year, working again, and also to haul more hay to the animals and see if he couldn’t keep the paths clear.

While she waited for him, Rose lay down in the snow and wind, and, briefly, closed her eyes.

SIX

B
Y LATE AFTERNOON
,
IN THE FADING LIGHT
,
DRIFTS WERE
beginning to pile up around the walls and tree trunks and ridges in the ground, and the gusts were so strong they nearly blew Rose off her feet.

She looked up at the altered landscape, and there was nothing in her memory like it. The farm was at the edge of a valley, wide and open fields for miles, ringed by rolling hills and one or two mountains. None of that was visible now. Rose’s world was blue and white, snow whirling up and down across the pastures, the wind a steady roar now, mist steaming up from the hills as the temperature continued to plunge.

The wind was disorienting to her. Because of it, everything was moving—snow, tree limbs, drifts—and the roar of the air made it difficult for her to sort out sounds. Still, her senses were gradually adapting, separating the movement of the storm from the things living within it.

Rose caught a strange scent on the wind. She raised her head, then felt, rather than saw, an animal near the barn that did not belong there. That was not unusual. There were almost
always animals of one kind or another for her to keep track of. But as she went to check on the sheep, she picked up a scent of dog, familiar, but closer than usual. She recognized it, and focused on the smell. It was within her territory.

Now she heard it moving. It was large, but it wasn’t the coyote, nor any other coyote—not before nightfall, not in the storm, not so close.

Rose, moving behind the farmhouse, had to turn her head out of the wind. The snow was blinding now and she needed to leap over the larger drifts.

Today she was not surprised, as she might normally have been, to look through the curtain of white and see the old wild dog, sitting by the big barn, patiently, calmly, his coat covered with snow.

The dog was looking right at Rose, but it was not a challenge, as such looks between dogs often are. His look was plain to her: The wild dog was seeking shelter, asking to come in from the storm. And he was waiting for permission, as a gesture of deference and respect to her. He wouldn’t proceed without her agreement.

He conveyed to Rose—she saw it in his eyes, body posture, scent, tail, and shoulders—that he could not survive this storm out in the woods. That he was tired, weakening.

Rose’s eyes met his and she froze for nearly a full minute. Fifty yards separated them, the snow and wind swirling about them. It was up to her. One kind of look and he would vanish into the maelstrom, the wind and the drifts, not be seen again. Another and he would follow her where she led him. She could drive the wild dog away with a mere change in posture. He was signaling to her that he would accept this by not advancing, and looking away dropping his shoulders, lowering his tail and ears.

She could accept his presence, and bring him into the barn,
where it would be safe and dry, and where the dog could find shelter and, perhaps, some food. A number of images raced through her mind. Would the chickens and rooster and the sheep be safe?

For a minute, the wild dog was obscured by blowing snow. When it cleared, she searched his eyes again.

She knew this dog. He had never been on the farm, yet his smell and presence had been known to her for a long time. He was not a threat to the animals. He was emaciated, she could see, his ribs protruding, his eyes bloodshot, his fur matted with ice and twigs and brush. His breath was weak, irregular. The wild dog was no longer a predator, but was now, she saw, prey, especially for the coyotes, out in the woods. Crippled and alone, he could not run fast or fight hard. Rose understood that she was communicating with an animal near the end of his life, his spirit draining.

She relaxed her shoulders and ears. He could take shelter here.

He would not challenge her, or harm or seek food from the other animals. He could not move freely about the farm. She could not protect him from humans or predators. This was all understood.

He returned the gaze, then lowered his head, looking away. He had accepted. Rose, increasingly blinded by the wind and battered by the pelting sharp snow—and feeling, uncharacteristically for her, the sting of bitter cold—led the wild dog to the rear pasture gate. There she jumped over the snowdrift, already halfway up to the top of the fence there.

The wild dog, head down, followed her slowly. Rose felt his presence behind her and sensed his struggle. She hopped down the other side, and he made his way carefully, slipping, nearly falling, several times.

Rose went ahead, saw the sheep stir, reacting to the sight of a strange dog—she held them in place with a look—and then she and the wild dog entered through the open side door of the barn. The wild dog followed Rose inside as she surveyed the space. The chickens fled to the rear of the barn, and the two barn cats came hissing down out of the rafters, keeping their distance, showing their contempt for Rose and the new dog, then slinking away. Rose ignored them, as did the wild dog.

Up the hill, the goats were bleating in alarm at his sight and smell. He followed Rose toward the rear of the barn, below the circling cats, where the cow feed was stored, past Winston the rooster, who feared no dog.

Winston, Rose saw, held his ground in part to protect the hens. He took a look at the wild dog, and then at Rose, who was calm, and he seemed to grasp what was happening. Rose was startled when Brownie stuck his huge head through the open barn window. Steers were not usually interested in dogs who were not interested in them.

Rose and the wild dog made their way to the wooden plank that covered the grain bin but which was rarely closed all the way. The wild dog clambered up, stuck his nose through the opening, and ate hungrily, pausing to look at Rose and to make sure of her continued permission. Rose watched him eat for several minutes. Then, sated, he crawled to a pile of hay, where he lay down and closed his eyes.

Once he was asleep, the animals around him, Rose sensed, accepted his presence and moved on. The barn was dark and quiet. The chickens hobbled back to their warm roosts, with Winston following, and Rose watching over them all.

*   *   *

S
AM HAD ONCE
known him as “Flash,” but now called him “that wild dog,” and Rose connected him to that name. She had halfheartedly chased this dog away from the farm so many times that it was just another chore to her. Until now, he had never come near the house or animals, which was curious to her. Most stray dogs tried to get close to the barns, to the chickens, to food. But he always watched from the safety of the woods, and all it took was a look or bark or growl to make him vanish.

She’d never considered the old dog a threat, and she had never really seen him up close. Still, there was something about him that drew her, some cloudy connection—an air of dominance, dignity, a posture that suggested authority and strength. He seemed careful to defer to her here, yet there was something uncomfortable about that role. He was puzzling.

But apart from chasing him off, as she did deer and raccoons and other stray dogs, she’d had no reason to consider this animal much until now. What was beyond the fences of the farm was another world, something of curiosity, but not of importance since it was not her work.

S
AM
,
HOWEVER
, did have reason to consider this dog more carefully. It was, for him, a personal story, because the dog had belonged to his friend Harold McEachron. Harold had run a hundred-head dairy farm a couple of miles away in the valley, and he and Sam worked some rental acreage together, planted and plowed the land, shared equipment, traded gossip, hard-luck stories, and news of farm life. Harold was tough, and a tough negotiator. But he was also fair and honest.

This dog was a working dog when Sam first knew him,
just like Rose. A border collie/shepherd mix, smart, aggressive with other dogs, shy of most people. He was tough and tireless, and he herded cattle and sheep and rode around with his farmer on his tractor half the day.

Like Sam, Harold didn’t have much time for dog training, or much interest in it. Animals had to work to pay their way, or take their own chances. But Harold loved his dog in the same way that Sam loved Rose, and the two were inseparable.

Sam remembered the funeral. Harold McEachron and his wife, both killed in a car accident five years earlier. He had wondered about the dog, talked about him with McEachron’s sons. No one was living at the farm, the livestock tended by neighboring farmers while the couple’s sons decided what to do with the place. Flash had always slept outside in the barns, even in winter, and he wouldn’t come near the house after Harold died, wouldn’t let anyone come near him.

The sons had come by the farm for days, calling to him, trying to lure him in, but they said the dog had become hostile, almost feral, living on his own, scavenging garbage, hunting for rabbits and chickens. Knowing how much Harold had loved the dog, Sam sometimes, when he had a free moment, would drive his truck around in the woods on logging trails and fire roads and call for him. But he was never able to catch him, or even get close.

In the months that followed, the dog was seen from time to time in the woods and pastures around Harold’s farm. Sam had left some food out for him a couple of times, and it was usually gone in the morning, but he never knew if it was the dog that ate it, and he knew it was bad practice to leave food out near a farm as it attracted foxes and coyotes, and mice and rats as well. After a while, he stopped, and it seemed that the dog became increasingly wild, his sightings rare and farther
away. Sam hated to think of this loyal dog out in the winter, foraging for food in the bitter cold.

The wild dog had become almost a kind of local myth, seen everywhere, too wily to catch. After a couple of years, the family decided to sell the farm, and Sam came by to help them close the place up and get it ready to show. Sam was surprised to see the old working dog running out in the pasture. It happened only once, and that was when Harold McEachron’s tractor was turned on.

Harold’s children moved away—the farm was too full of painful reminders for them—and never returned. The wild dog became just another wild animal in the woods, like the coyotes or bobcats or deer. He was no longer the kind of animal a farmer would tolerate around a farm. Besides, the dog was determined to stay in the woods, and that was his choice. It had happened to working dogs before, Sam knew, loyal to an owner beyond reason or change. He often wondered what Rose would do if anything happened to him. God help the person who tried to catch her.

In the past year or so, Sam had noticed the wild dog hanging around the woods near his own farm. Rose had barked at him several times. To Sam, he was just another wild animal now, a potential source of disease and trouble, a threat to the farm.

Once when Sam spotted him in the near woods where the hens foraged for bugs, he grabbed the .30-06 and took a few shots into the air above him, aiming to scare him off—not kill him—and the dog did run off, at least out of sight. Sam thought of his old friend with some regret, but knew Harold would understand that he had no choice.

Now the wild dog lived more like a coyote than a dog, Sam thought. According to the few people who had gotten
close enough to see him, he limped badly and had all kinds of injuries—scars from battles with raccoons, coyotes, and other dogs.

N
OW
S
AM HEARD
a commotion coming from the barn. Like most farmers, he had a sense of the familiar, an intuition a little like Rose’s map. Farms are intimate, personal places, bounded by rhythmic chores, sights, and sounds. Sam knew every inch of his.

Everything on the place—the old buildings, scraggly fences, troughs, rusting engines, animals, swinging gates, wind whistling through barn walls—had a distinctive sound to him. Morning sounded one way, night another. Safe and contented animals made one kind of noise, hungry and disturbed ones another.

Like Rose, Sam often sensed rather than saw or heard things, and when he noticed the excited clucking of the chickens, the clamoring of the goats, he understood something different was happening, that something was out of place.

He looked out the window, peered through the snow, and saw the sheep backing up nervously into the pole barn.

And he didn’t see Rose. Or hear her bark.

He put on his jacket and boots and walked through the snow and wind and cold to the barn. It was the only place Rose could be. If something had bothered the chickens, surely she would investigate. But by now everything was quiet again.

Sam stumbled in the icy snow, recovered, and shook his head. The brute force of the wind and cold and the mounting snow suggested that for once weather forecasters’ hysteria might be warranted.

Sam unlatched the gate, slid open the barn door, and
turned on the single bare bulb that lit up the cavernous, dusty barn. He stopped. He saw Rose move over to what at first appeared to be a dead dog lying on the ground. The dog lifted his head, then lowered it again warily.