by Debbie Burns
And it made her want to know what he was thinking.
Mia was about to suggest they look elsewhere when Ben called her attention to the large prairie wetland south of her. Mia was standing on the Victorian Bridge that had been in the park prior to the 1904 World’s Fair, and Ben was fifty feet ahead on the wetland walking trail. Taye and Ollie were at the water’s edge, poking sticks into the mud after not having any luck with their search.
“I must have scanned past it a couple of times, but look over there in the cattails,” Ben called. “On the other side of the wetland. Its coat is reddish brown and white, so it blends in, especially in the sunlight.”
Mia scanned the thick cattails but didn’t see what he was talking about until she picked up on a slight movement in the brush. A dog was sprawled at the edge of the wetland, collapsed on its side and nearly camouflaged by the tall wintry-brown grass surrounding it. Even from here, she could make out the folded forward, triangular ears that were a common characteristic of border collies. Its mouth was hanging open in an easy pant, as if the animal was exhausted but content. Well, at least one of them has gotten worn out.
Since Mia was farther back than the rest, it made sense for her to circle back first. She cupped her hands and called to Ben. “Want to stay there where you can see her?” When he gave her a thumbs up, she added, “Yell if she takes off. I’ll circle back and come up behind her. Once I’m south of her, you can come back around and flank her on the north side.” She couldn’t say why, but she had a suspicion the dog was female.
Ben agreed with her plan, so she asked Ollie and Taye to stay put, then walk with Ben. Soon, all four of them were in place on the west side of the wetland, the boys flanking the middle, and she and Ben on opposite ends. The prairie grass was so thick, it was impossible to see if the dog was still in her spot, though Mia hoped to spy an area of rustling grass if the dog took off.
“Ollie and Taye, remember not to grab at her if she runs your way,” she reminded them. “Since we don’t know how she is around people, you shouldn’t do anything more than toss some treats to her. Ben and I’ll decide whether or not to try to catch her, depending on how she’s acting.” Then to Ben, who was now about a hundred feet away, Mia called out, “I’ll go in.”
Ben’s lips seemed to press into a frown before he nodded, but from here that was possibly just her imagination.
Mia headed into the dried prairie grasses, most of which were chest high. She did her best to meander through the least dense pathway possible in hopes of not scaring the dog away with a noisy approach. The further in she got, the more loaded with burrs and fluffy seed pods her furry fleece jacket became. She raised an arm and blew at some of the fluffy pods. “I’m a walking dandelion.”
Closer to the water, the grasses were even taller. Eventually she was meandering through cattails that were over her head, and the spongy ground under her feet soaked through her shoes and moisture-wicking socks.
Although she could hardly see more than a few feet in front of her, she hadn’t heard Ben call out that he’d seen the spooked dog running off, and she hadn’t heard her jump into the water either. When she reached the edge of the wetland, Mia headed what she hoped was north based on the angle of the sun. She was doing her best to orient herself in the tall grass when she heard a startled yip directly in front of her.
Mia stopped in her tracks. The dog was just feet away. As frightened as the poor thing appeared, Mia was surprised she hadn’t run off. Instead, the startled animal jumped to her feet and faced Mia, letting out a single growl that rolled into a startlingly loud warning bark. Then, almost immediately, the beautiful animal sat back on her haunches and cocked her head cautiously up at her.
“Easy, girl. I’m not going hurt you.” Moving slowly but confidently, Mia pulled a couple of moist treats from her jacket pocket and held them out. She was by no means an expert, but knew now that she had the dog’s attention, it was important to maintain nonthreatening eye contact and not make any sudden movements. She wanted to keep the dog’s attention without scaring her off. “Something tells me you’re hungry after all that running.”
Mia held her hand steady, not tossing the treats or overextending her reach. With the border collie’s keen nose, she’d be able to smell them.
“How’d you wind up in here by yourself, girl? Did you get lost, or are you a loner by nature?” The dog was strikingly beautiful up close. And Megan had been right; she was collarless.
From the dog’s distinctive coat pattern, Mia knew she was a red merle. The remarkable-looking animal had soft brownish-red patches of fur that blended into creamy white along her belly and legs. The top of her head was mostly dark brown, and she had light-brown, almost golden eyes. She looked grungy and her coat was matted in places, but that might’ve happened this morning while running loose in the park. Otherwise, the remarkable animal showed no obvious evidence of being mistreated.
Rather than backing away when Mia clicked her tongue, the dog barked again, causing Mia to jump in surprise. It was quite the ear-piercing bark for a dog her size. Perhaps the tall grass surrounding them was channeling it in her direction. Hoping to entice the dog closer, Mia sank to the balls of her feet and extended her hand with several treats on her fingers.
The border collie cocked her head and wagged her tail, watching Mia intently. When the curious animal neither moved closer nor backed away, Mia tossed a few treats in her direction. The pretty girl bent to sniff them, her eyes still on Mia, then swept them up with a few quick flicks of the tongue.
Still offering a soft stream of praise, Mia fished into her pocket for a new round of treats. She was extending her hand when the dog burst forward and began inundating Mia’s chin with eager licks.
“Good girl!” Mia exclaimed before it occurred to her to make fast work of sliding the slipknot leash over the dog’s head and pulling it snug with one hand while drawing the dog’s attention to the treats with the other. “Well done, Mia Chambers,” she murmured to herself.
When the dog didn’t mind being petted, Mia gave her a thorough scratching of her shoulders and hoped it would take the dog’s attention off the fact that she’d been caught.
Keeping the treats extended but just out of reach, Mia stood up and started to coax her in the direction of the car. At first the sweet-tempered dog followed along willingly, intermittently jumping up in attempt to reach the treats.
By the time they were out of the cattails and making their way through the shorter prairie grasses, the dog seemed to notice the leash around her neck for the first time. She stopped following Mia and shook her head, then sat on her haunches to scratch it with her back foot. When that didn’t work, she started tugging backward and barking. Mia held tight, terrified she was going to lose her grip.
The dog’s panic escalated the way many shelter puppies did the first time they felt the tug of a leash, making Mia suspect this dog had never been walked on a leash before. She held tight while the dog tugged and lurched and squirmed. Even though the four-legged creature was only thirty-five or forty pounds, it was all muscle. The jerks and jars raced along Mia’s arms, settling in the joints of her elbow, shoulders, and neck.
She was debating how long she could hang on when Ben reached her. “I don’t…think she’s…ever been leashed,” Mia managed to get out.
Ben slipped off his jacket and circled behind the panicking dog. Mia was impossibly close to losing her grip when he lunged forward and clamped his jacket over the top of her, draping it over her face and the upper half of her body. To Mia’s surprise, it was as if a switch had been flipped. The dog went from intensely struggling to frozen in half a second.
“I thought I was going to lose her.” Mia exhaled. “Thanks, Ben.”
“Yeah, well it looked like she was going to tug your arms out of their sockets.” Hands clamped over the jacketed dog, Ben raised an eyebrow Mia’s way. “You okay?”
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nbsp; Mia rolled her shoulders and shook out her hands. A sharply stinging case of rope burn was setting in. “Yeah, I’m good.”
Ben lifted the dog into his arms. “How about we save the leash lesson for later?”
“I won’t argue that.”
Not wanting the extra leash to trip Ben up, she draped it over the dog’s covered back and Ben’s shoulder and got a strong whiff of wet dog in the process. “Whoa! I’m pretty sure that’s wet dog at its worst.”
“Yeah, no kidding. She must’ve gone for a dip in the wetlands earlier.”
“How are you not gagging?” Mia fanned her nose.
“Spend seven weeks acclimating and climbing Everest, and you’ll never think the same about how things smell.”
She laughed and squinched her nose. “While you were climbing, I think I read a lifetime’s worth of blogs about life at base camp and higher. I don’t even want to try to imagine.”
“When you get high enough, the saving grace is that it gets too cold to smell anything.”
“I don’t know how you made it through any of it, honestly.” Mia suppressed a shudder and pulled the walkie-talkie from her pocket, mindful of her stinging palms. She turned up the volume after having muted it as she’d headed into the grass. She’d not wanted the crackly sound to scare the pretty girl off. Fidel was talking; he and Sarah had caught a dog as well.
“We just caught one too,” Mia offered when he finished. “We’re in the wetlands north of Steinberg Rink. She was deep in the cattails. She’s friendly and she’s had treats before, but it doesn’t seem like she’s ever been on a leash. She was freaking out. Now Ben’s carrying her in his jacket. Her face is covered, so she’s calm.”
“Awesome, Mia! And Ben!” Megan piped up on her walkie-talkie. “Adrianne and I just got one who was chasing a jogger through the park. He ran into our arms when we finally got his attention. I wouldn’t put him at more than eight or nine months, and I doubt he’s ever been leashed. After a few complete flips trying to free himself, he surrendered. But like you said, he’s friendly as can be. I wouldn’t guess he’s ever been mistreated.”
“Same here. And as far as anyone’s seen, they’re all border collies?” Border collies were a popular, sought-after breed. Mia couldn’t imagine someone dumping a dozen of them in the park for no reason.
“So far,” Megan replied, her voice crackling over the radio. “Crazy, I know.”
Mia slipped the walkie-talkie into her pocket and stumbled on a mound of uneven ground. She caught Ben’s arm, her hand automatically locking around his rock-solid triceps. She let go fast. The heat radiating up her arm from her hand wasn’t from the rope burn.
“Thanks for helping,” she said to fill the silence. “Sorry you’re getting all full of burrs. With them and the wet-dog smell, I owe your jacket a dry cleaning.”
Ben gave an almost imperceptible shrug of one shoulder. “I’m happy to be here. And I wouldn’t have left you to do this alone.”
His answer made her breath catch in her throat. For the second time in one day.
They took a few steps in silence, the only sound the rhythm of their feet and legs as they pushed through the dried grass. When the silence felt more intimate than his words, she felt a need to fill it. “How old do you think she is? I’m guessing two or three, though border collies always look young to me.”
“Your guess is better than mine.”
Mia ducked to inspect the portion of the dog’s belly that wasn’t covered by Ben’s jacket. Several distended teats were visible, and the encircling hair was patchy, thin, and short. “She’s had some pups, that’s for sure, but it doesn’t look as if she has active milk now.”
She glanced over her shoulder and scanned the tall grass behind them for any sign of movement. “I think I would’ve seen if she’d had pups nearby, don’t you?” She stopped walking and closed a hand over Ben’s arm, intentionally this time. “Ben, I won’t sleep tonight if I don’t go back and check. There probably aren’t any, but I have to make sure.”
He’d stopped alongside her, and his brown eyes held her locked in place for a solid second before he nodded. “Go. I’ll get her in the crate and come back and help. She’ll be safe inside it. What about the boys? Let them hang out in the mowed grass, or do you want their help searching?”
Mia glanced over at Ollie, who seemed happy enough to be hanging out with Taye. “They can decide. I’m sure they’ll want to help you get her situated first. Tell Taye if he wants to help search, I can deburr his clothes before you take him home.”
When Ben nodded, Mia wasted no time turning back into the deeper brush near the wetlands. She doubted she’d notice any paw prints unless they’d made a significant impression in the spongy ground, something a lightweight border collie puppy wouldn’t easily do. She did, however, notice plenty of areas at the base of the grass where small animals seemed to have been moving between the water and drier earth. Without prints, she had no idea if the trails were carved by rabbits, muskrats, or newly lost puppies.
Doing her best to move through the grass in a steady pattern, Mia searched the area as the sun fell behind a cloud and a slight wind picked up. Her hands were stinging from rope burn. She kept her fingers splayed open to keep the cool air flowing over them.
Before long, she’d acquired hundreds more burrs and clingy seeds, enough that she could feel them poking through her jeans and stiffening her jacket. She made kissing sounds every so often as she walked, hoping that if there were any puppies, they’d been socialized enough to have a positive association with people and to respond with a whine or bark.
Five or ten minutes into her search, Ben joined her. “We’ll separate to cover more ground,” he said, surprising her by reaching for one of her hands. He turned it over and inspected her palm. “I brought a burn cream sample from the first aid kit. How bad are they hurting?”
“Just stinging some,” she admitted.
Ben tore open the packet and squeezed some of the creamy, white ointment onto her palm. He cupped her hand and gently brushed a dollup across her sores. “Tell me if it hurts.”
Tell me if it hurts. So much had hurt for so long… What could she possibly say to him? His grip was strong and confident. Mia’s insides were in a twist again, the same as when they were standing on his balcony this summer.
“That helps. Thanks.” She swallowed and pulled her hands away when he was finished applying the cream. From the corner of her eye, she noticed the boys meandering the wide berth of prairie grass on the west side of the wetland. Would they notice if she stepped close and wrapped her arms around him? If she buried her face in his chest and soaked up the feel of him like she wanted to? If she told him all the things that hurt?
Before she could summon herself into action, Ben headed into the deep grass in the opposite direction.
Mia was left to calm her racing heart and refocus on the search, with her hands stinging in a different way.
Another five or ten minutes passed, and Mia began to feel it was fruitless. She was going to feel bad if the extra search was for nothing, considering the burrs they were all accumulating.
Over at the edge of the road, Ben had left one window of his Jeep down. Even this far over, Mia could hear the border collie’s wildly irregular bark. If Mia could hear it, so could any puppies that had been accidentally left behind. Surely if there were puppies in this mess of grass, they’d be crying for their mother.
After a while, Fidel radioed in that two more dogs had been caught on the far side of the park. Both were fully grown border collies. Mia wasn’t sure if the person responsible for this would turn out to be a breeder who’d reached their wit’s end in terms of care, or if this was the work of a border collie hoarder.
She was close to giving up the search when she and Ben met up in the middle of the grassland a second time. Ollie and Taye were thirty feet away, and Mia could he
ar Ollie starting to whine that he was tired. Probably because Taye was taller and better at creating a path in the grass, Ollie had been following him around the prairie while carrying a tall, bent cattail like a wand.
Instead of meeting Ben’s gaze, Mia studied the burrs on his jacket. It was a sleeker material and had accumulated far fewer than her furry fleece, but it still struck her how the seeds and burrs in the creases of his elbows and along his sides gave him a certain vulnerability she’d never spotted before. He was so athletic and lithe that vulnerable wasn’t a word she’d ever associated with him.
“I think you were right to insist on this, Mia. When I put her in the crate,” he said, oblivious to her thoughts, “she wanted something in this direction, and badly. If it comes to that, we can try walking her around here on the leash again. Maybe she’d get over her dislike of it enough to lead us to whatever it is she wants.”
Mia was about to reply when a soft sound not far behind her caught her attention. “Did you hear that? It sounded like a sneeze. A tiny one.”
“Yeah, I heard it. It came from that way.” Ben pointed toward the dense patch of grass behind her.
Mia backtracked and pressed carefully into the dense, dry grass. She scanned the ground but found nothing except a thick crown of fibrous sandy-colored roots that rose above the soil.
“I don’t see anything, do you?” Ben was a few feet back, searching too.
“No, but the grass is so thick in here. Do rabbits sneeze? I’m guessing they do.”
Then, rather than carefully parting the grass the way she was doing, he noisily shook a section.
To Mia’s surprise, a high-pitched yip erupted from the ground near Ben’s feet. Mostly hidden in a mess of dried grass, a furry puppy had been startled and was attempting to back deeper into the grass. It just wasn’t having much luck. It was sandy-brown, cream, and white with long fur that looked as if it’d be as soft as down if it wasn’t full of mud and burrs.