by Jon Katz
Rose did not understand what he said, but she recognized the resignation, the submission. She waited until he was settled back on the sofa before returning to the barnyard on her own.
ELEVEN
THERE WAS A BREAK IN THE STORM LATE THAT AFTERNOON, AN interruption in the heavy falling snow—although the killing cold was, if anything, worse.
Rose’s ears pricked up at the sound of a powerful, thumping engine. The sound came from above and was still very far away. In her mind she connected it with Sam. She left the barn and began climbing over the drifts, stumbling back toward the farmhouse.
Her paws still hurt. Her head hurt even more. Numerous different images rushed through her mind, conflicting concerns. The cows and steers might still freeze, right where they stood, if they didn’t move or eat. The night before they nearly had. This image was shoved aside as the chop-chop sound of a helicopter drew closer, deeper into the valley, through the mist and fog and snow. It was heading straight for the farm, and Rose locked on to it.
* * *
SAM HAD BEEN thinking about the flare ever since he’d shot it off, wondering if it had been seen. By now, Sam guessed that his arm had become infected. He hoped he wouldn’t lose it. Shooting pains and fever were spreading through his body. Earlier that day, during a brief break in the storm that had coincided with the agreed-upon time for sending up such signals, he had crawled out into the front yard with his flare gun and launched the little rocket into the sky, trailed by a column of smoke. He knew that other farmers would be looking for the flares, and also that choppers might be circling over the trapped and isolated farms, looking for signals. If it didn’t work, he planned to try again in a few hours.
Sam had attempted to pack an overnight bag. He tried to stay awake through the drowsiness and the chills, and kept calling out to Rose to come in. There was no way he was leaving her alone on the farm; she would come with him. But if anything went awry, he wanted to make sure she wasn’t without food. So he used his good arm to pull a huge bag of kibble off the shelf and dumped it by the back door, the dog door, so that she would have food if somehow they got separated. The effort cost him, and took him a long time.
But this was just to put his mind at rest. He was determined to get her to leave. She would mind him. She always had. Except for that morning.
WHEN THE HELICOPTER appeared across the valley, the animals heard it long before Sam did. As it got closer, it dropped rocket flares and crackling fireworks to alert Sam to its arrival. The engine noise made the animals anxious, the booms frightened them. Rose herself jumped at the sudden bangs.
She ran to the back door, anxious, unable to sort out this new happening. She came in under the overhang, pushed open the swivel door, and was startled at the pile of dog food on the floor, and the bowls of water, one of them already covered with a thin sheen of ice. With a low growl, she went looking for Sam, her ruff standing on end.
He was waiting by the front door, holding a bag loosely with his good arm, and Rose took in the heat coming off him, the sweat and confused demeanor. She could spot a sick human or animal instantly. He was disoriented, not himself.
The engine sound drew closer, until it seemed it was hovering right over the house. Rose cowered, barked, and backed up a bit, until Sam called to her, urging her forward.
The huge green chopper looked to Rose like some monstrous and menacing bird. It descended in a roaring whirl, snow blowing everywhere as it approached the front yard, hovering low over the ground.
Sam was standing in the doorway, shielding himself from the rotor blast and blowing snow. Outside in the front yard, a ladder dropped down right out of the sky. The chop-chop sound was almost deafening to Rose. These kinds of sounds unnerved her, but Sam was calling, yelling to her to come. She saw the pale-yellow look of his face, his red-rimmed eyes, the smell of pain and worry on him.
In her seven years of life, Rose had always come when Sam called her. Maybe once or twice she hadn’t heard him, when she was in hot pursuit of a ewe or ram—or a tractor on the road—but when she heard, she had always obeyed.
Until now.
SAM LOOKED her right in the eye and said in a loud, clear voice, “Rose, come. Come to me. Right now. I’m hurt. We can’t stay here. If I don’t get out now, I won’t get out. Rose, come. We have to go.”
It was at that moment, for the first time, that it occurred to Sam that Rose might not leave the farm.
He knew that she was frightened when she saw a ladder fall and two men in blue clothes, green helmets over their faces, dropping suddenly into the front yard. She growled and barked and whirled, then lunged, probably not recognizing them as people, trying to drive them off. Sam told her to be quiet, get back.
Sam held his good arm out to Rose, pleaded with her, ordered her, turned to the two men and begged for time. He told them he couldn’t leave the dog. They looked up at the sky, the swirling, gathering clouds, then shook their heads and moved toward him. Each stood on one side of Sam, one taking his good arm, carefully guiding him, gently but firmly, out onto the porch. He was in so much pain he could not even think of resisting.
He saw the great drifts of snow blowing all over the yard and then turned back to his dog, cowering from the rotor.
“Rose,” he said. “Come. Please.” There were tears in his eyes, something he’d felt only a handful of times in his life. He thought of Katie. He saw Rose cock her head in puzzlement. She moved a few feet back, edging toward the rear door. He knew then, from the look in her eyes.
“Wait,” he yelled to one of the Guardsmen, shouting over the roar, “I forgot my wife’s photo. I have to take a picture. Katie. It’s right there.” He pointed to a photo of Katie on the hallway table. “I’ve got to take it. I have to have something of hers,” he pleaded.
One of the Guardsmen nodded, then ran to get it.
Rose backed away, out of reach, watching as the Guardsman put the photo into a side pocket and jogged back out to Sam. Sam paused again and called to Rose one more time. “Come here, dog, let’s get you out of here.” But she growled, showed her teeth, then backed into the living room, well out of reach.
Sam looked around, trying to absorb what was happening. Clouds of snow blew around in swirls, the chopper’s thunk-a-thunk drowned out almost every other noise, and Sam felt as if he were trapped in a nightmare. He guessed he was.
For Rose, it was all confusing, strange, and frightening.
But Sam saw that something was different.
Rose had heard him call out Katie’s name, and she had become calmer, more focused, as if this were a command she understood. As if she suddenly comprehended what was happening, how to work for him.
Rose seemed to make a decision. She turned, backed away, disappeared deep into the house. Sam was surprised. He could only guess that she was getting away from the noise of the helicopter.
He called to her again, and when she returned, he saw that she was holding something. She did not bring it to him. She simply dropped it in the living room, away from the door.
Then Sam realized what it was: one of Katie’s sneakers, the kind she always wore on her walks in the woods with Rose. Was it for him?
Sam called to the Guardsmen, but they kept guiding him out onto the porch. Then he shouted, and pointed, and one of them ran into the house and picked up the sneaker.
Rose had stopped growling and trembling now, no longer cowering or backing up. But she remained out of reach, simply watching Sam.
“Rose,” Sam yelled. “Thank you.”
He began to plead with her, a tone Rose had never heard before, and she tilted her head to make out the sounds more clearly. “Come. Please. Come with me.”
Sam could not command her now, he knew that. He could only ask.
Finally Sam turned to the two men, who were pulling him into a harness, strapping it around his torso, bracing his arm. They had already pumped some morphine into him, and he was beginning to feel it.
“She won’t come,” he
yelled. “She’ll never leave the sheep, she’ll never leave the farm.” But the two men were no longer interested in Rose, and soon he was strapped in. I am losing everything, he thought. I’ve already lost Katie. And I will never see this dog again.
He shook his head, tried to collect himself.
“Rose, I’ll be back. As soon as I can. I left food.” He felt foolish, embarrassed—he knew she couldn’t understand, but the words escaped him anyway. He wasn’t used to showing so much emotion in front of anybody, let alone two men who were strangers.
He pleaded once more with the men to try to get Rose, but they shook their heads. And he knew they’d never catch her if she didn’t want to be caught.
He understood now that she would never get on the helicopter, not alive.
This time her gaze met his, and the two creatures, farmer and working dog, looked into each other’s eyes. Neither one had the language, the words.
As he left the ground, tears streamed down his cheeks. He held up his arm, clutching Katie’s sneaker. “Take care of yourself. Take care of things.”
And then, simply: “Rose.”
THE LAST of Sam that Rose heard was his weakening calls of her name as he vanished up into the sky, something beyond her comprehension.
If he had not imagined her refusing to come along, she had never imagined his leaving this way.
Rose had seen tears in his eyes, and she had cocked her head again in puzzlement. She could smell his sadness through the snow and wind.
Rose was usually sure of her world, but some things happened that she could not begin to grasp.
As the helicopter pulled away, the snow settled, and the roar became fainter, she ventured up to the front window to look in wonder. The sound of the machine changed as it began to move away from the farmhouse, taking the biggest piece of Rose’s world with it.
She looked around her. As the helicopter receded into the distance, the place became still again. Sometimes, when Sam left in his truck, the farm settled like this, as if part of its soul had fled. But this stillness did not seem familiar or routine. Sam had vanished, eaten up by the sky and the storm.
Now, there was only the sound of the wind, the snow falling on creaky roofs; now she knew an emptiness, a stillness that she had never experienced before. Overwhelmed, she lay down, as if struck by the sudden sensation of being alone. She was still, her eyes half closed, her nose down, trying to get her bearings.
She thought briefly that Katie might be upstairs, but she heard and smelled nothing.
Her head came up. The pull of work stirred her.
There was a lot to do.
Rose went back into the kitchen, wolfed down some food, gulped some water, and sat again, listening. All she heard was silence. The forest and woods were still, and even inside the house she felt the cold as the wind began to howl again and the snow began to fall more heavily.
Sam was gone. He was not there for her to worry about, follow, keep track of. He was not there to support, direct, command. Rose did not know loneliness, but she felt alone in a different way than she had ever experienced.
Defying Sam had been new and strange to her, and somehow frightening. She had never done it before; it went against her nature, her instincts, everything she had known and learned. It had torn her in half. She was as surprised by it as Sam had been. It changed things. Yet it was clear, simple in its own way.
She could not leave the farm. She could not go with those people, not leave the sheep and the cows. And Katie.
Her map, her senses, her mind, all of it was a jumble. The stories in her head were not of being alone. They were not of the incoherent experience of having no direction, no context, no others. She had no images for this.
She stopped, looked to the front door, and then climbed up the stairs and into the bedroom where Katie and Sam had slept. She went to the other sneaker, under the bed, where it always was. She picked it up and brought it downstairs. She wandered with it a moment, then dropped it on the kitchen floor and sniffed at it.
Carefully, deliberately, she licked the front edge of it, working her way around the side, taking in the rich smells the moisture revived in it. When she got around to the laces, she chewed through two or three strands, and then pulled one out.
The house was quiet, except for the sounds of snow buffeting the windows, sliding off the roof, the old beams creaking and stirring under the stress of the snow and the wind. Rose chewed slowly and deliberately.
When she was finished, she picked up the shoe and brought it into the living room, where she hid it under the footstool by the old black sofa.
THE SKIES DARKENED and the snow thickened as Rose made her way back to the barn. She turned to look up at the sky, hoping for a glimpse of Sam, some sense of where he had gone, whether he might be coming back down again, but there was none.
Inside the barn the wild dog came up, still limping, to greet her. The once-more insolent cats were slinking around, the goats were calling out to her, the chickens were pecking for fleas and crumbs and bits of hay and grain.
She plowed through the snow in the opening of the side barn door, burrowed and dove her way up the hill again to the pole barn. Two or three times she was almost halted by the wind and snow, blowing with renewed fury into her face.
The sheep were anxious, up and moving about, hungry, edgy, close to panic. They were so frightened that few of them even seemed to notice Rose, or lift their heads, or back up as they always did when her eyes met theirs.
Rose knew the consequences if she did not keep the sheep calm. One or two, then others, would panic, scatter, run off into the cold to die and freeze, or into the waiting jaws of the coyotes. Their only safety, their only warmth, was to stay together where they were.
Now inside the relative shelter of the pole barn, she lay down.
Here, more than ever, she needed to focus, to collect herself, but the images in her head came and went too quickly. It was a baffling time. So much to do. So little she could do.
SHE HEARD THE wild dog barking urgently from the barn, heard a frantic braying. She looked down toward the barn and saw the wild dog barking, and Carol, who was lying on her side, crying out in panic, struggling to get up, unable to stand in the snow and ice.
Rose rushed down the hill.
Carol was now lying still, disoriented. Rose moved closer and listened to her heart.
It was clear that Carol was beginning to go into shock, something Rose had seen the sheep and cows do when they were terrified or trapped, slipping into a kind of paralyzed, semiconscious state. Usually, death followed quickly, and Rose could see, even from a few feet away, that Carol was shutting down.
She saw from the tracks that Carol had come up the hill from the barn and then slid back down, getting herself wedged between a mound of snow and the outside wall of the barn. She was almost upside down, a terrifying and helpless position for any animal, and Rose could see her fear and confusion.
The wild dog was standing above her. This was not, Rose could see, in his experience. Nor was it in hers. But he had called to her, had brought her running.
Rose looked to the wild dog. She looked at the barn. She looked back to the house. She called upon her memory. But she had no notion, really, of what to do, no training to fall back on. She hesitated, listening to Carol’s frantic braying, her hooves thumping against the barn, bloodying her ankles and legs. Rose had to settle her down.
Rose crawled and slid down the embankment, trotting around to Carol’s head. The donkey was alternately quiet, then flailing, frantically trying to find purchase so as to right herself. Thick clumps of snow were falling on her from the roof, sliding down the hill on top of her.
Rose barked once, to get her attention.
Carol was startled, but she turned her head to look into Rose’s eyes. Rose saw things in Carol’s eyes she had never seen before—her dreams, her memory, her weariness, the pain in her old legs. She saw things that only animals see in one another. They were differe
nt, these two, yet there were things that connected them, and some connection was being forged now as each met the other’s gaze.
Carol was an old girl, she had suffered much, seen a lot, and, looking into her eyes, Rose saw some of Carol’s life rushing between the two of them. She saw sadness, but she also saw acceptance.
Rose moved closer. She was trying to calm Carol with her look, and within a minute or so Carol stopped flailing. She continued watching Rose intensely, as if her very life depended on it, as if this were the comfort she needed to steady herself and go where she was to go. Rose still had no notion of how to help Carol get up, sandwiched as she was between the tightly packed snow and the smooth wall of the barn. She could not help as the donkey had helped her. Carol seemed to know it, too.
Until now, they had always been viscerally wary of each other, two very different creatures, even though there was a sense of being in the family of the farm, in Sam’s care. But just hours before, they had crossed a line together, and Carol knew her life was now in Rose’s care.
Among Rose’s keenest instincts was a deep understanding of what she could and could not do, but there was no experience for her to draw on now, no skill to use, no battle to fight.
Rose lowered her head, listening. She could hear that Carol’s heart was beating slowly and would soon stop. Rose knew this thumping sound well. She knew when a sheep was close to death, usually well before the sheep even sensed it.
Carol’s heart was very faint, hard even for Rose to hear above the wind.
The cold had weakened her. The storm was wearing down her tired old body. Rose saw it for what it was: simply the way of things. Rose had no strategy for fighting that.
Meeting Carol’s gaze, Rose saw the spirit draining out of her, drifting up into the snowy sky—a blue streak, a vapor, an impulsion of light and energy.
Carol snorted, brayed softly. Rose, squinting against the snow and the wind, leaned forward to sniff Carol’s forehead, gently. Carol leaned her head to the side, one eye covered by snow, only one free, to look at Rose, meet her eyes.