Rose in a Storm

by Jon Katz

  And he saw that Rose was hurt as well. He looked down at the blood in the snow, then noticed her paws. He shook his head.

  “Thanks, Rose. Thanks. Good girl.” Rose’s tail was wagging steadily. But it was no time for praise. She still had work to do. The snow was falling thickly, the wind blowing furiously, the cold bitter, relentless, and Sam couldn’t move.

  Sam could feel his right arm dangling, and his right knee was in so much pain he could barely move. He knew it would be a long crawl back to the farmhouse, that he had no hope of standing or walking, but he also knew he had better get there, get inside, and get help. He would not last much longer outside.

  Sam looked at his watch. It was just after eight p.m. He feared frostbite in his fingers or toes. He figured he had been in the snow for nearly an hour, and Rose, who was hobbling, had probably been digging the whole time. He leaned over and patted her head, and she licked his hand.

  He moved slowly, pulling himself through the snow until the pain was too much, then taking a breath. He had to keep going. He had to stop dwelling on the cold. There was a first-aid kit in the bathroom. He thought of the emergency plan the state police had set up for crises, and he knew where the flare gun was in the pantry. According to the plan, watchers would be looking for flares in the morning, at midday, and then again in the evening. He might be past the evening’s appointed time. He’d probably have to hold out until morning.

  Every farmer knew the plan. More than one had used it—in floods, fires, when tractors fell over, or limbs got caught in hayers, or cows kicked someone in the head.

  The flare guns were powerful, bright, and if shot high could be seen for miles, through clouds and snow. It was his only chance. He would fire off one round in the night, just in case, and one in the morning.

  But, injured as he was, he wasn’t ready to abandon the farm and the animals. Maybe … maybe he could get some hay out to the animals one more time before they carried him away.

  Outside, Rose followed slowly as Sam crawled, then collapsed, then crawled again, inch by inch making his way back to the farmhouse. He pushed and pulled with his good hand and his feet against the snow. Sam had torn a ligament in his leg in a fall from a tractor years earlier, and he could feel pain coming from that old injury as well as his arm. It was blinding, but he hoped if he kept the pressure off it he would be able to stand up once he got inside, out of the snow and ice. It was impossible to walk through the drifts, but he only had about two hundred feet to go.

  By the time he made it to the farmhouse door, he could see the clock in the kitchen through the window. It was nearly nine. Rose followed all the way, sometimes circling ahead, then coming back as if to push from the rear.

  “Rose, we have to get each other through this,” he said. “If we’re lucky, we’ll get help in the morning.”

  He thought Rose looked at him curiously, tilting her head. Lord, he thought, how must I look to her, crabbing around like this? Can she know how hurt I am?

  ROSE SNIFFED the blood on the ground, a trail both of them had left from the barn through the snow to the back door, then followed Sam inside.

  The light powered by the generator lit the entranceway in the back, the kitchen, and the living room. Sam fumbled in a drawer and then a light appeared in his hand. He lit a thick candle.

  Rose waited outside the bathroom where Sam had gone, but when she heard his shouts, she ran in. Sam was leaning into the sink, gripping a towel between his teeth.

  “God,” he said. Rose’s head tilted, and she tensed, her nostrils flaring, as she listened to his cries.

  She saw his bent posture. She saw everything. The twisted grimace in his face. The gasps and grunts and shouts of pain. She smelled his injuries, the mangled arm, felt the heat from his arms and legs, the cold from the frostbite.

  She had heard some of these noises from him once or twice before, when he had fallen off the tractor and injured his shoulder, and again just after Katie had left the house that last time.

  He was talking to her now, looking at her. She understood the hurt, the alarm. Only a few words were clear to her, “hay,” and “sheep,” and “work,” and then, once or twice, her name and Katie’s. But Sam was not making any sense, did not sound anything like himself.

  Rose could not really differentiate between physical pain and grief. They both sounded the same to her, both generated powerful smells that alarmed her, giving rise to her own anxiousness and fear. She had no idea what to do in response.

  ONCE SAM got his coat and shirt off—an agonizing process—he saw that his arm was broken. The bone was poking through the skin below the elbow.

  It took him a long time to wrap a gauze bandage over his shattered, bloody arm, fashioning a sling out of a long towel and tying a knot with his teeth. He stayed calm, knowing his life depended on it. He found some adhesive tape, which he unrolled with his teeth and used to help hold the sling in place. He took a half dozen headache tablets, gulping them down with water from his cupped hand. His small generator had kept water running from the well, and there was still some pressure in the tank.

  Drops of sweat were forming on his forehead. Rose came over to sniff the fear, and wonder at it. She looked anxious, concerned.

  But there was nothing for her to do.

  With his good hand, Sam reached for his cell phone, then put it down. It was dead. He was grateful at least that he had bought the generator. He would have some light, at least until morning. And the woodstove was still going and would give him some heat. He could not haul logs to the fireplace.

  He was shivering. He knew he was disoriented, probably on the verge of shock, and that he would only get worse.

  ROSE HAD NEVER SEEN Sam so ashen. She could smell the wounds, feel the pain, sense the confusion and distress. She whined, agitated and unsure. She turned toward the rear of the house to listen for sounds from the barn or the pasture. She didn’t hear any.

  She lay down to lick her own wounds, her shredded, bloodstained paw pads. Every step in the snow and ice had sent pain shooting up her legs.

  She looked up when Sam dropped to one knee on the bathroom floor, grimacing in pain, and then called her, told her to stay, and shook some powder onto her bloody pads, telling her to be still.

  IT TOOK A WHILE for Sam and Rose to make their way back into the living room, near the stove. Sam walked slowly across the floor, opened the stove door with one hand, and threw a log in, then closed the door again. He took a bottle of scotch from the cabinet on the wall and swallowed several mouthfuls, then came over and lay on the couch, his arm wrapped in his improvised sling and held close to his body.

  He was still in his wet pants, and shirtless, but he had no energy to do more. He pulled the blanket that lay on the couch over himself. He was half-asleep almost immediately, breathing heavily, mumbling, occasionally crying out when his arm moved or shifted.

  Rose padded over to his side, put her nose on his outstretched hand, which was hanging off the sofa. He reached his hand down, let her lick it.

  “Hey, girl,” he said. “I’m in trouble here. We have to get out of here, both of us. Maybe … when the snow stops …”

  ROSE LISTENED. Sam’s heart was strong, his breathing steady. But she could feel the spreading pain, and sadness. She smelled the blood, sniffed the broken arm, the bone, sensed the shock that Sam was slipping into. Images raced through her mind.

  In her head, she moved sheep, cows, watched for coyotes. None of these images helped her, or told her what to do. Helplessness was alien to her. She whined, sniffed at Sam’s frostbitten hand.

  She decided she would sit by him, watch and wait. She couldn’t grasp the idea of help from outside, medicine, or rescue. Only acceptance of the reality of the moment, of what she could see, and what her instincts conveyed to her. And a search for the work to do.

  Rose went to the water bowl, drank half of it, then ate some of the kibble Sam had put out for her. She was limping off her right knee, which was badly sprained, perh
aps torn from pushing through the snow. Her paws stung, but the bleeding had stopped. Her legs ached.

  The ice had cut and bloodied her nose as well. Now and then she shook her head, trying to shake away the pain. Snow and ice clumps still hung off her tail and coat. She lay down and closed her eyes.

  Half asleep, Sam called out to her, “Rose, girl … where are you?”

  Her ears shot up, and she was by the sofa in an instant. She put her nose to his hand. His eyes were closed, his chest moving in time with his breath.

  After Sam fell back asleep, Rose went to sit near the kitchen window. The Sam she knew, the one whose routines and commands defined every day of her life, seemed to have been blown away by the storm, along with the predictable, defined life she had known.

  The past couple of days, before he had fallen off the barn roof, he was always going to the window, sometimes rushing outside to drag hay to the feeders, shovel snow from the paths, try to clear the barn doors, bang the frozen deicers with his hammer, haul warm water to the troughs, even if the animals got only a few laps before it froze again.

  Rose had never seen him look like that, so defeated, void of commands and direction. It created a vacuum, a black space. The less he did, the more she sensed she had to do. Her map had changed again, in perhaps the biggest way.

  She had, for almost the first time, a notion of herself apart from Sam.

  Except for the first weeks of her life, running on a different farm with her mother and siblings, Rose had always been solitary, apart from the other animals, attached only to her one human. And then to Katie, who now was gone.

  In the farmhouse, she had her corner in the unused room, where she brought bones, Katie’s sneakers, scraps of food, one of Sam’s socks, and sometimes she would retreat there. She’d go under the bed with her few things and curl up with them. In her waking dreams she played, ran with other dogs, rolled in the sun.

  It was so quiet now she could hear the sound of her own heart beating. She sat by the window and felt the world was too confusing, complex, immovable. Though she didn’t have words to frame this fear and sadness, she had instincts piercing enough to make her feel like the tiniest speck about to be devoured by a sea of snow, ice, wind, and cold.

  She listened for sounds from the barn, but there were none. All she heard was the wind and the blowing snow.

  She glanced at Sam, who was talking in his sleep again.

  EVENTUALLY Sam stirred awake, opened his eyes, grimaced in pain, and pulled himself up.

  Sam hobbled slowly, painfully, using a broom as a crutch, over to the window to look out with Rose. The candles had burned down, and it was pitch black outside, a darkness highlighted by the dim lights in the farmhouse.

  He knew that all of the animals would soon be hopelessly trapped right where they were, if they weren’t already. And there was nothing he could do about it. The tractor was useless, it was impossible to move hay, and even if he could it would soon be covered in snow and ice.

  His father and grandfather, both of whom had lost friends to farm accidents, had told him at different times that as much as you loved your farm, sometimes you had to love yourself more.

  You had to survive. It was you that kept it going.

  He knew that lesson well enough; had just learned it once again. There was no glory in dying alone in this awful storm and cold—that would just mean the end of the farm, the end of two hundred years of hard work on the part of his family, whose very blood was ground into the soil.

  As the temperature plunged further, he knew that the animals, unable to move, were losing warmth and energy. The cold alone could kill them, especially without fresh feed and water. But he had to stop thinking about it and get himself some help. This was the fate of farm animals; they did not come first, could not. He had to think beyond this awful storm. He had to save himself and Rose.

  He remembered telling Katie that he never thought of Rose as “just an animal” anymore. It was something he would never dare say to another farmer.

  IN HER LIFETIME, Rose had never experienced such a scene, such a sense of bleakness. She lay down by the back door and closed her eyes briefly.

  In her memory, she was playing in the snow with her siblings. Her mother sat on a mound above, looking up at the sheep, down at her pups. For a moment, Rose stopped playing, looked into her mother’s eyes, and her head filled with images as she followed her mother’s gaze—to that farmhouse, to that farmer, to the sheep, to the cows, and back to her and her siblings. It was the first time Rose had seen those colors, swirls, those rich and sensual smells, each telling her a different story.

  Her mother closed her eyes for a moment, as if to take all of it in, and Rose remembered sensing, just for a second, the loneliness in her mother’s love for all that she saw in her vigilance, in her responsibility. It was a feeling that was imprinted on her, that never left her mother and, from that moment on, never left Rose.

  Now she felt it again, in this storm, on this farm, with this farmer, and these animals, pressing down on her, and it had the effect of washing away all confusion and pain. And fear.

  * * *

  SAM FELL ASLEEP in a chair in the kitchen by the back door, his head slumped onto the table. Rose felt a need to do her work.

  She went out through the dog door to check on the wild dog. She was not so baffled by the snow now and maneuvered more confidently, and with more agility, through the drifts. She was adapting. Snow was blowing off the big barn roofs and piling up all around.

  She looked around before going into the barn. The dark shapes of the cows and steers were off to her right, standing by their shelter, covered in snow and ice. She looked up the hill to the pole barn. The sheep, still cowed from the coyote attack, were huddled in a corner of the structure.

  She entered the barn through the side door. It was dark and bitterly cold and the wind was pouring through the wooden slats. The rooster and chickens were still in the dark and she could hear their soft clucking as they slept.

  The wild dog was lying awake, his breathing labored, in pain, weary, hungry. A picture sprung into her mind suddenly—there was a bag of grain, for the cows, in the barn. She had seen Sam tear such bags open with his knife many times, and the grain poured out into buckets for the steers and the sheep.

  She saw herself tearing open one of those bags with her teeth. Then a picture of the wild dog, who might not be able to make it now to the farmhouse, to the food bowl, eating the grain.

  She trotted over to the wild dog, heard his weakening heart. She headed to the corner of the dark barn, past the chickens sitting up in their roost, past Winston, who was watching her carefully. Rose got to the bag of grain, and tore into it.

  She sensed the wild dog’s eyes on her as the top of the bag came open, and rich, sweet-smelling pellets poured out onto the ground. She gobbled one mouthful after another until her belly was so swollen it hurt, and then she ran back over to the wild dog, who was struggling to get up, and vomited the grain on the ground in front of him, the pellets intact. The wild dog leaned forward, licked Rose’s face clean, and then sat up to meet her eyes. Then he walked over and ate two or three mouthfuls. Satisfied, Rose squeezed back out through the door, widening the snow passage with her claws, and looked around at the awful and gloomy scene. She heard the coyotes, who had been circling all day and the night before, howling up at the top of the hill.

  She had been with Sam, shoulder to shoulder through many farm dramas and troubles, and she felt his distress. She had experienced it many times.

  It touched something deep and old within her.

  In a sense, it was hers now, as well as his.

  ONCE THEY HAD CONNECTED, Rose always knew when Katie was addressing her, and she grasped the loving nature of her words and her tone.

  They had a routine. When Rose was not working with Sam, she would come looking for Katie, and Katie would turn to the dog, and ask, “You done with your work?” and Rose would wag her tail and wiggle a bit, then go
stand by the boots Katie used for walking in the woods.

  “I’m done with my chores, too,” Katie would say. “Let’s us girls take a break.” Anything that was connected to people, and that involved patterns or routines, quickly became cherished work for Rose. A human being’s enthusiasm was apparent—something she picked up on instantly.

  After just a few walks together, Rose got to know the coat Katie wore for them, the boots, and the other signals that even Katie didn’t know she was giving out—how she looked out the window, glanced at the door, reached for a shawl, checked the thermometer, made sure the stove was turned off.

  A glance at Katie’s feet would tell Rose what was about to happen, as Rose had become a scholar of shoes. She knew the work boots Katie wore for pasture or farm work, and the hiking boots she wore for walks in the woods. The shiny black shoes meant Rose would most likely be left behind, that there was no work for her to do.

  The two were connected by an invisible tether on these walks. Katie never brought a leash—Rose had never been on one, not even to go to the vet—and it was unimaginable that Rose would ever take off. Although tempted, she never chased the chipmunks or deer they encountered. Rose always kept an eye on Katie, as she did on Sam when they were out working. How could she do that if she ran away?

  On their walks down the path, Rose would rush ahead, circle back, walk alongside, sniffing and listening for the sounds of the woods—the coyotes, wild turkeys, birds building nests, bats squeaking in their sleep, chipmunks and squirrels cracking nuts, deer eating berries and leaves. The various smells and sounds all brought their news to her.

  Every now and then Katie would pick up a stick and toss it. Rose would leap up into the air and snatch and run it back to her. Sam never saw this, never even knew about it. Rose did not play with Sam.

  They always walked to the same spot: the stump of a giant oak marking the front lawn of a farm abandoned long ago. In nice weather, Katie would sit and take out some home-baked bread. She would eat a piece, and toss another to Rose. The two of them would sit quietly together for a few minutes and soak up the sun.