Storm Dog

by L. M. Elliott

  Five

  AS SERGEANT JOSIE’S HAND CLOSED ON mine, I winced and yelped. I’d forgotten how bloodied I was with scratches.

  She turned over my hand to see where the brambles had torn open my skin. She even pulled out a tiger claw–sized thorn from my arm. “Those cuts need doctoring.” Sergeant Josie led me to a wooden table and sat me in a chair. “I’m going to open the door. Maybe the dog will just come in on his own while I bandage you.”

  She propped open the screen door and whistled sharp and commandingly. Nothing. “It’s all right, boy.” She softened her voice and backed away slowly. “Nothing but friends in here. Come. When you’re ready.” Picking up her gun, she unloaded it, and shoved it in a bureau drawer before coming back with a medic-worthy first-aid kit.

  She cleaned and wrapped my gashes in minutes.

  “Are you a nurse?” I asked.

  “Nope.” She shook her head. “Just needed to know how to quick-bandage.” She put away the gauze and glanced at the door. “I think you’re the one who needs to call him. He obviously feels some connection with you.”

  “I haven’t even petted him.”

  She shrugged. “The military uses that breed of dog because their instinct is to protect and defend. That kind of dog chooses his people. And then is incredibly loyal. Much better than people in that regard.” Sergeant Josie crept to the door and leaned against the wall to look out. The rain was still gushing like a full-force fire hose. “He’s crawled closer. Come look but move slowly so you don’t frighten him.”

  I tiptoed to her. In the downpour, the fur of that poor dog was plastered to his body. He was squashed flat to the ground, his nose practically touching the bottom step, desperate for someone to notice and invite him in. “Do you have any treats?” I asked.

  Sergeant Josie smiled. “There you go. Thinking like a dog-handler.” She glanced over her shoulder to the kitchen part of the cabin. “I have some ham.”

  When she put a plate on the floor with a few cold cuts on it, the dog immediately raised his head.

  “Pull back. Give him space.”

  We backed our butts into chairs. We waited. Rain pounded the cabin roof.

  “Come on, boy,” I murmured. A body could drown out there.

  Finally, I could see a twitching nose on the top step, then paws, then his head on the edge of the porch.

  “Don’t move,” whispered Sergeant Josie. “Encourage with your voice.”

  “That’s it, fella. Come on,” I called.

  The dog wormed its body onto the porch, trembling all over. It about broke my heart seeing how scared he was.

  “Come on. That’s it.”

  He started inching, belly to the ground in that Special Forces commando crawl of his, leaving a trail of wet, he was so soaked. A little more. Closer. Closer. Oh, he was almost to the door when he flattened his body again, only raising his snout to sniff and snuff . . . sniff and snuff. Drool oozed out and hung in slimy ribbons from his mouth. I’d have been pretty grossed out about it, except I knew that meant he wanted that ham—bad. But he didn’t move. Just sucked in smells like a crazed, furry vacuum cleaner.

  “Why won’t he come?” I whispered. I turned to look at Sergeant Josie. Her eyes were welled up with tears—not what I expected from a gun-toting, dystopian-novel action heroine.

  “I’m wondering if . . .” She broke off, swallowed hard, and her tears were gone. “Have you heard of the military K-9 units, the MWDs they use for special operations?”

  “Sure,” I answered. “Military working dogs, right? For the 9/11 anniversary last year we read in school about the one they took on the Osama bin Laden raid. His name was Cairo.” I remembered because I’d been amazed a dog would parachute out of a helicopter strapped to his handler. How loyal and brave is that? Evidently hundreds of dogs have been deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan. I kept meaning to ask George if he knew one.

  Sergeant Josie looked pleased.

  Okay, score one for me, I thought.

  “Working dogs are very special,” she continued. “They search for IEDs that soldiers can’t see. Such a lofty-sounding term—improvised explosive devices,” she muttered, “like they’re some clever school science project. They’re devious, snake-in-the-grass, homemade bombs packed with things like nails to tear people’s flesh open. The enemy hides them purposefully where people walk all the time. Civilians. Our soldiers. They don’t know pain is lying in wait for them at their very next step. Not until they trip the unseen wire. Then BOOM!”

  I jumped a little at the BOOM. The dog whimpered.

  “Sorry.” Sergeant Josie sighed. “But dogs like that, trained right, will sniff out those booby traps. They save dozens of lives every week. One of the places insurgents plant bombs is in doors. So K-9s have to check every entry point before their soldiers step through them. Smelling every inch. Just like this dog is doing.” She pointed toward him. “When those dogs determine it’s safe, they let their handlers know. That’s when our troops kick down doors. Or throw noisy flash-bang grenades through entrances. Which can’t help but scare the poor dog, even after intensive training. So working dogs always associate doors with danger.” She glanced over at me. “Where did you find this dog?”

  “In the hills, maybe a half mile from here? I don’t know: he led me on a pretty wild-goose chase.”

  “And yet, he brought you here.” She looked back to the dog. “To shelter in a storm.”

  “You’re not thinking this dog is military, are you?”

  She shrugged.

  “That dog? Cowering like a terrified cottontail rabbit? He’s so afraid of everything. He couldn’t be . . .” I stopped short. I’d seen my own brother’s nervousness when we Skyped. Would George, full-of-life George, marching band–confident George, be like this when he came home? I felt sick with the thought.

  “Yes, that dog.” Sergeant Josie shot me a look that reminded me this woman had a gun handy. “Wouldn’t you learn to be afraid if you spent months in-country and whenever you walked down a road you had to worry about a homemade bomb exploding beneath your feet? Or about being shot by a sniper you can’t see? Or that the child waving so friendly at you could be strapped with a suicide vest?” She was getting seriously worked up as she talked. “Having dozens of lives dependent on your being suspicious, your head on a swivel, on super-alert every single moment? That dog would have pushed himself to do his duty over there. No matter what. But how do you come back down from that to normal civilian life? The problems would have started back home . . . after.”

  She bolted to her feet. “You people just don’t get it!”

  I fell off my chair. The dog backpedaled like mad. But he stayed on the edge of the porch, watching. It was hard to tell for sure over the thunder that was still rumbling around, but I thought I heard him growling. Was the growl for me or at me? Could I run away from this woman, out the door, and survive?

  I must have looked terrified because Sergeant Josie apologized about a hundred times in ten seconds. She held her hands up again and backed herself to the wall, away from the bureau with the gun, away from me, away from the dog.

  “I’m sorry, Ariel. Ever since returning from my tour of duty . . .” She stopped. “I’m working through some stuff. Leftover stuff. The army docs say I’ve got PTSD. You know, post-traumatic stress. Me and almost everybody else I know that shipped out with me. It’s not like I’m crazy or anything. Just a little . . . jumpy.” She closed her eyes and breathed in—a long cleansing gulp—and then blew out slowly. She opened her eyes. “Listen, I can help you with that dog if you want. I used to be a K-9 handler in Afghanistan.”

  “My brother is in Afghanistan right now,” I squeaked, still pretty freaked out by her.

  “Vaya con Dios, man.” She murmured and made the sign of the cross. “You want to get that dog to come to you out of the rain?”

  I nodded.

  “You’ll need to train him to know what is safe. If he really was a working dog, he’ll need to learn
what is appropriate behavior now that he’s back home.” She gave me a kind of crooked, self-conscious smile. “He and I can learn about that together.” She crossed her arms and gazed at the dog for a long moment.

  “The first thing is to get him to trust you enough to come through that door. To convince him, you must be firm, Ariel, but still empathetic. Patient but not coddling. Just like a good mother loves her child enough to sometimes say no and then takes it when her kid screams at her about it. Right?”

  A truly good mother? “I wouldn’t know,” I answered, I guess with a little too much spit in my tone because Sergeant Josie’s eyebrow shot up in that aha-I just-learned-something-about-you expression that teachers get sometimes. But she only said, “Ready?”

  I sat inside the cabin, by the open screen door as she instructed, right behind the plate of ham. Because he seemed so petrified of the threshold, we put two more plates of ham outside on the porch, leading in a trail toward the door. The closer he got to it with nothing bad happening to him—and getting a treat to boot!—might help him trust that the door was safe, she said.

  “We’ll have to be patient,” she added. “This may take awhile. Remember that comforting him when he’s fright-ened will make him think you’re pleased when he’s afraid. Instead, you need to show him that what really pleases you is when he follows your cues.”

  As soon as I positioned myself just inside with the final plate of food, the dog’s tail began to wag, tapping the porch floor. Thump-thump-thump.

  “That’s right, boy. Come on,” I urged.

  Thump-thump-thump.

  “It’s easy-peasy, fella.” I picked up a piece of ham and wiggled it.

  Quivering, the dog eased himself up to a crouching, hesitant walk. One paw, then the next, he crept from the edge of the porch, where he had retreated, back toward the door.

  “Good job.” Sergeant Josie whispered encouragement. “Carry on. Just like you’re doing.”

  I nodded. “It’s okay, boy. Come.” I held up the ham again. The dog made it to the first plate and inhaled the meat. Then he wriggled backward a foot or so, licking his chops. He stayed rooted.

  “Why doesn’t he come to the next plate?”

  “Hmmmm.” Sergeant Josie thought a moment. “Some handlers use a technique called treat and retreat. He may be repeating something he learned—meeting a challenge, getting a treat, and then retreating to let go of the tension of the situation. Give him a minute.”

  After what felt like a hour, but I know was only ten minutes or so, the dog slow-motion crawled forward to the second plate. With a slurp, that ham was gone. He flattened himself to the porch floor and studied me.

  “It’s okay, boy. Come on. It’s safe. I promise.” I nodded as I spoke and smiled. I dangled the ham again. “Come on.”

  Never taking his eyes off me, the dog crept forward again, inch by painful inch. I held my breath as he tested the opening with a paw and a thousand sniffs. But he sat down and hung his head. Stalled.

  I lowered the treat, disappointed and defeated. Maybe he didn’t like me. Of course, I thought. Who did?

  Sergeant Josie frowned. “Don’t give up that easily, Ariel. Don’t expect success to be handed to you. Try again.”

  I held a piece of ham up to my own my nose. “Mmmmmm. Smells goooooood.”

  The dog lay down. He started sniffing and snuffing again—so hard he might have sucked in any fly within a mile.

  “It’s all right, fella, really it is.” But he didn’t move.

  I’d love to tell you that it was my empathy that made me keep working. But in truth, the rain was so awful, I was stuck there in that cabin and couldn’t give up and stomp away in a huff. So I kept at it.

  I pretended to eat the ham. The dog whined.

  I made kissy noises at him.

  The dog just farted—talk about bombs.

  Very slowly, so as not to startle him, I put my hand through the door to show him it was safe, but the dog howled as if to warn me off.

  Finally, since there seemed to be nothing to do but wait for his courage to take hold, I started humming like I used to do to make myself relax when I was afraid of the dark at bedtime. And the thing I hummed was a slow, sweet melody that George had played on his soprano saxophone. I used to hear him practicing it downstairs when I had been sent off to bed for the night—usually early and in disgrace for some misdeed. It was a solo with the jazz band for a big competition. George practiced it over and over. I had fallen asleep listening to that tune dozens of times.

  The dog’s ears twitched. He started doing that gentle little whimper-whine dogs do to get a person’s attention, like musical breathing. Then—wonders of wonders—he started wriggling toward the door again.

  I can’t really describe how painful it was to see a dog so terrified of a door. But I kept humming and he kept coming, squirming along until finally he was halfway across the threshold and his huge tongue shot out like an anteater’s to lap up a piece of ham from the plate beside me.

  “Good boy!” I sang.

  Piece by piece he wolfed down those last cold cuts. Then he hurled himself into my outstretched arms. He licked me so much, I thought he’d wipe my nose right off my face. Soaking wet, smelly, slimy with mud—that mess of happy dog rolling all over me was the best hug of my life.

  Six

  AFTER THE RAINS CLEARED, I LEFT for home. Sergeant Josie offered to keep the dog overnight. Tomorrow she and I could figure out what to do next. Like finding out if he belonged to someone. I was so attached to him already, I asked if we could forgo that bit of truth telling. But she’d have none of it.

  She told me how to find the main path to Sky Meadows and even pulled out an old-school compass to give me. “Due southeast,” she said. Turns out her cabin was only a couple hundred yards from the main trails, which made me all kinds of irritated with that dog, given our submarining through briar patches. But my aggravation melted as I left and the dog hovered just inside the door watching me, like he could hardly wait for me to return.

  I wondered how Sergeant Josie would get him out the door to relieve himself that night and then back inside over that threshold. But I figured if Sergeant Josie survived Afghanistan, she knew what she was doing. I certainly had obeyed her—she made so much sense when she spoke. Like telling me, IF the dog didn’t already belong to someone, I needed to name him. To give him personality and a listen-up-fella identity to use with the cues we would need to train him.

  I was considering calling him Oscar—since it was Oscar Mayer ham that brought him to me. But I wasn’t so sure that was heroic sounding enough. As I hiked down to where I’d ditched my bike, I ran through names from novels I loved: Merlin . . . Arthur . . . Lancelot . . . Aslan . . . Reepicheep . . . Caspian . . . Martin . . . Matthias . . . Gorath . . . Harry . . . Hagrid . . . Ron.

  No, no, no, no.

  When I finally got home, dirty and worn out, I went straight to the library to look in books for name ideas. And guess what I found?

  Gloria and her boyfriend making out on the couch.

  Now, I have to admit that I did spy on them and on George and Emma sometimes. I don’t think I’ll ever forget the sight of George and Emma the night before he had to leave for deployment. They were slow dancing on the old fieldstone patio awash in the moonlight, long after everyone else had gone to bed. He was playing that gorgeous song “Stand by Me.” Hearing the line, “No, I won’t be afraid, just as long as you stand, stand by me” about broke my heart, thinking on his going off to battle. I’m sure it did Emma’s. Their romance was so pretty and . . . well, romantic.

  Gloria and Marcus? Not so much.

  “Hey there!” I chirped from the door. Yeah, I know, that was kind of a jerk move, but I was still steamed at G-L-O-R-I-A from the morning.

  They fell onto the floor in an avalanche of old National Geographic magazines that Daddy must have been reading and they hadn’t even bothered to push aside.

  “Ariel, you little . . . ,” Gloria shriek
ed.

  I thought the word she used next was right shocking for a Blossom princess.

  Marcus, on the other hand, burst out laughing. “Hey yourself, Ariel.”

  Here’s the thing about Marcus. I like him. You can see yourself, he’s got a sense of humor. And he sure isn’t boring. Maybe that comes from his being homeschooled in a double-wide by a mama who’s a psychic and a daddy who’s a Revolutionary War reenactor named Morgan—in honor of Winchester’s Continental Army general, Daniel Morgan. As a result, Marcus approaches everything with a sense of destiny and fanfare.

  For instance, you can hear his car coming all the way up our hickory-lined lane blasting “Crazy” by Patsy Cline, that tragic blues-and-country crooner from Winchester he claims to be related to. And he’s got sayings like “carpe diem” tattooed all up and down his arms.

  (“Carpe diem” means “seize the day.” I looked it up.)

  He’s also dead honest. Like now. “Do me a solid, Ariel,” he said, getting serious. “Don’t tattle, okay? It’ll get Gloria in a world of trouble. It’s my fault. Your sister is just so darn beautiful and I’m so in love with her, I can’t help kissing her.”

  Now, how many guys do you know who’d be that upfront about how they feel?

  So as much as I’d love to get Gloria in trouble—Mama hated her dating Marcus—I promised I wouldn’t tell. And I keep my promises.

  He kissed Gloria on her head and got up to leave. Grinning at me, he said, “Come on out to the car, Ariel. I’ve got something to give you.”

  I walked out with him, thinking with some sadness that my promise probably wouldn’t do Marcus much good. Just the other morning, in fact, when he had texted, Mama snatched up Gloria’s phone and deleted Marcus’s message before Gloria got to read it. “You don’t want to be limiting yourself to the likes of him, Beautiful,” she’d said. “I grew up with boys like Marcus. Believe me. No matter how nice they are, no matter how sexy that country rebel-with-a-cause image is, in the end, it’s going to be near impossible for them to amount to much in this world. Too much stacked against them. At the Festival, you’ll meet all sorts of university boys. Marines will escort you at the parade. You want to keep your eyes”—she cupped Gloria’s chin and tilted her face up so she was paying close attention to Mama’s words—“and your options open.”