Jon Katz Page 6

  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.

  NOW SAM 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.

  “The wild dog,” he said softly. It pierced his heart to see this battered creature, Harold McEachron’s old border collie mix—for so many years a shadow in the woods, a rumor—now lying in his barn.

  “You look a wreck,” he said. “But you can’t stay in here, old boy.” The words came spilling out of his mouth, a farmer’s reflex. Almost anything from outside the fences was a potential danger or problem. It was never a simple thing to bring a new animal onto a farm, especially a wild dog into the midst of chickens and sheep.

  He was amazed that Rose had allowed it.

  Sam took a few steps toward the dog, who growled, quietly but clearly, and then stopped. Rose lay still, almost stiff. She rarely looked into Sam’s eyes and he was startled to see her looking into his eyes now.

  “You let him in, didn’t you?”

  Rose did not move.

  The last thing he needed was another animal now, let alone a sick old dog. He tried to figure out what had happened; normally Rose chased strays off and would have prevented any dog from coming onto the property. Now she was lying next to Harold’s old dog, Flash, a dog Sam had pretty much given up for dead.

  “Rose,” he said, quietly.

  She lay still, but looked away. The wild dog remained still as well, his eyes closed, his stomach heaving gently. It was clear he was spent.

  Sam took a deep breath. He might not have a lot of time to think about things, but when he did, it was carefully. He looked at this loyal dog, and felt he owed this to Rose. It was her farm, too. He thought of her dignity, here in the barn, in front of the animals, and her pride. She had never asked a thing of him, and gave so much, every day of her life.

  It was dark in the barn, even with the bare bulb, and they were all cast in flickering shadow. The barn was rich in smells—hay, manure, dirt, animals. The wind was shrieking outside, and piercing the slats in the walls. Inside, the cold was tolerable, but still biting.

  Sam left the barn and walked back toward the house. In a few minutes, he reappeared with a large bowl of dog food and put it on the floor near the old dog.

  “See you in the house,” he said to Rose, and left again. Outside, night had fallen, and the snow swirled through blackness.

  SEVEN

  THAT NIGHT, ROSE WAS UNEASY, PACING THE HOUSE. Occasionally she walked over to the bedroom window upstairs, the one that faced the pasture. A few feet away Sam slept fitfully in the big bed. By midnight, the snow was piled up to the lower windowpanes downstairs, and Rose could no longer see the sheep, although she could make out the dark outline of the barn.

  She heard the wind, the snow falling, the bellow of a cow or the call of an anxious ewe. Then she heard another sound, faint, but to her distinct. There were squawks coming from the barn. Chickens almost never make noise at night, sound sleepers up in their roosts. And this was a sound of alarm.

  There were things for which she awakened Sam—a ewe in labor, animals out of the fences—and things she did not, things that were her work alone. This time she did not bark for Sam.

  She tore out the back door and raced through the snow.

  She could hear what was happening, piecing it together from the noise a bit more with each step. She heard the yip-yip of a fox, the crowing of Winston, the rapid, excited clucking of the hens.

  The drifts had grown since she’d come inside earlier that evening. She dove over and through them, scrambling and clawing her way to the gate, and then squirmed under it. She threw herself through the open side door of the barn and into the dimly lit space, where she was greeted by chaos. The cats were nowhere to be seen. There were feathers on the barn floor, and tracks and blood in the snow and ice on the cement.

  At first, it seemed she was too late. She saw where a fox must have slipped in, through a wind-s
hattered window above the chicken roost. At the rear of the barn, which was built into an incline, the ground came up nearly to the windows, and the snow would have made it easy for the fox to get the rest of the way. It was a savvy way to get at the chickens without coming through the main doors of the barn.

  Winston, she saw, would have been the first to see the fox creep along the platform, around the old hay bales, toward the chicken coop. Winston would have darted in front of the hens, one of which had panicked and rushed across to try to hide in a corner. That was where Rose found the fox, stalking the hen. Rose sensed other foxes must be nearby, waiting for a signal from this one. That was what the yipping had been—a signal.

  Rose heard the wild dog barking, circling, and she could see him struggling, limping, unable to jump. He was weak and confused. The fox—poised—was watching him, sizing him up, but he did not run. The wild dog was no threat.

  As always, a strategy came instantly to Rose’s mind.

  Winston was desperately trying to draw the fox off and distract him by puffing himself up and crowing as loudly as he could. The wild dog was barking, but could not get close.

  The fox, who could have easily killed Winston, was not distracted or fooled. He was down in a crouch, ready to strike, to grab the hen by the throat and carry her up and out through the nearby window. Winston puffed up his wings again and prepared to charge the fox, to sacrifice himself, if necessary.

  Rose hesitated and thought of Sam, of sounding the alarm. Part of her work was to alert him when there was trouble. But there was no time to get him. If she left the barn, she knew that the fox, gray and sleek, efficient and quick, would soon be long gone, at least one hen along with him. So she stayed.

  Rose moved quickly but calmly across the barn floor, jumped up onto a hay bale and onto the platform that supported the roost. She glanced at the wild dog, keeping him back. It wasn’t necessary. She knew he could not jump or fight, and his barking would help unnerve, perhaps even distract, the fox.

  Rose barked, went into a crouch, showed her teeth, and jumped onto a feed sack to gain height, and then charged across the dark, wooden floor. The roosts were between her and the fox, momentarily blocking his view of her.

  Then she whirled around and faced him.

  The fox, momentarily uncertain, spun but held his ground, a hen circling in panic behind him. The fox was alert and low, with bright blue-gray eyes. And he was very calm, looking Rose in the eye, considering her, gauging his situation. Rose saw that he was not afraid of her.

  Winston rushed around her to get himself in front of the hen, to make a last stand, if necessary. Rose imagined the fox snapping this officious bird in two, however gallant he was.

  She moved closer, matching the fox’s cool with her own, an old and ritualistic dance. It was a test of nerves and strategy, not necessarily strength and power. She would use her eyes—her keenest weapon—as well as her teeth. Rose always battled bigger and stronger creatures. Her eyes caused them to pause, made them uncertain.

  Rose came within inches of the fox, who bared his teeth, lowered his head, and refused to give ground. He lunged at her, and she backed up, growling slowly, steadily, and then she moved off to the right of the fox, making him turn, as she circled around behind him in a sudden herding move, lunging forward, nipping at his tail and haunches. She saw in his eyes that he had lost a measure of his calm. He’d never seen this sort of movement before. He had been expecting a charge, a fight.

  The fox lunged and nipped at her shoulder, but got only fur, and Rose lowered her head and tore at his throat, drawing blood and a sharp yelp. Then she jumped back and circled again, moving sideways, staring at the fox, confusing him further.

  The fox was clever, had chosen his approach well. He could not have guessed that Rose would come in from the far side. The wild dog could see the fox, but he could not get at him, even though he made a fearful amount of noise.

  The fox listened to the roaring, and turned as Winston pecked at his tail from the rear. Rose growled and lowered her head to charge again.

  The fox backed up, looked around, calculated. Rose sensed that he was much like her, that he moved in the same deliberate ways.

  This barn was different from his usual hunts, a solitary stalking of rabbit, cat, or mouse. This challenger—this dog—was a strange animal, and she behaved erratically, and seemed determined. Rose waited. There was no need to fight. She could almost see the fox make up its mind. Finally, slowly, deliberately, the fox turned, darted up onto a hay bale, then out through the broken window and into the dark.

  Winston huffed and clucked and the hen ran back to the other side of the coop with the others. The rooster strutted proudly in a circle around the floor of the barn.

  The wild dog quieted, and Rose stuck her head out into the night to make sure the fox was really gone, and that there were no others. The tracks were already being covered over with fresh-blown snow, but she could hear him making his way through the drifts and over the fence. She looked at the hen, who had a wound on one of her thighs, which was bleeding slightly. She saw that Winston was not injured, and that she had escaped intact herself.

  She jumped back down off the raised platform and onto the barn floor, where the wild dog was lying on the ground, panting. He was exhausted from his efforts to get to the fox. She touched her nose to his and he walked over to the straw and curled up, falling asleep immediately.

  Rose made her way back to the farmhouse, through the snow. When she was back inside, she ambled up the stairs to check on Sam. He was still asleep.

  Sam had no idea what Rose did at night. When she found something wrong—a predator, a sick sheep, a fence blown open—she barked or growled to awaken him. Otherwise, her night rounds were her own business, her secret.

  Sometimes, in the morning, when he got up, he looked at her, and asked, “So, how was the night, girl? Everything quiet?” But he knew that some parts of her life were hers alone, and he would never know about them. That there were things that went on in her world all the time that he would never see or grasp.

  On this night, she was watching her world turn white, a wall of wind and snow coming between her windows and the barn animals. She was feeling the storm rage, filling up the world around her. Cold crept in around the window frame, as did some powdery snow blown in by the wind.

  Rose sighed, shook herself off, and lay down. Sam was exhausted from his previous day trudging between the barn and pastures, dragging water and hay, checking generators, clearing gates, chipping ice, knocking snow off rooftops, kicking, shoveling, and cursing at the massive storm. His deep sleep revealed that he was stiff and drained.

  At night, in the dark, sitting by a window, pictures often came streaming through her mind. When Sam was asleep, and there was no work to do, the sounds of the farm and the world beyond seeped into her consciousness. Ewes breathing. Cows snorting. Cats hunting. Bats flying.

  Tonight—wind and snow, wind and snow. She had never witnessed so bleak and foreboding a landscape, and it stirred something in her, and in her memory. In the very darkest hours of the night, she closed her eyes, thought of warmth, of green hills rolling out of sight, of sheep stretched almost to the horizon and grass bent in the wind as far as the eye could see.

  ROSE OPENED her eyes. She heard a thump from the rear of the house and rushed to a window at the back. She saw a long chunk of drainpipe blow off the roof and fly out toward the pasture and into the dark. She growled.

  Storms had always frightened her, especially thunder and lightning. So did gunshots and sudden noises. They were inexplicable, and she had no sense of how to respond to them. She ran back to check on Sam, who was still asleep.

  She sniffed his leg, touched his knee with her nose. She went into the kitchen, gulped down some water, ate some food, and stuck her head out of the dog door.

  Although the snow was already coming up to the ground-floor windows, Sam had built a dormer to shield the back door—and the dog door—from snow and rai
n. Rose could still open it, but if she went out, she would quickly run into a wall of snow and drifts.

  She could hear the sheep calling out to their lambs and to one another, though it was muffled by the storm. She could barely see the barn. In seconds, her nose was covered in snow. She drew her head back inside and lay down. She closed her eyes.

  There was a continuous sound now, a roaring of air, and a shifting of snow on the roof, and none of it was especially familiar to her. It was difficult for her to lie still for too long.

  Rose thought she heard a movement outside and ran to the window again, but this time saw only some snow sliding off the barn roof, slowly, hitting the ground with a thud.

  She moved around upstairs, from window to window, looking out, seeing little, hearing the wind, watching the snow, feeling the cold. She listened for further sounds from the barns and the pastures, but she heard nothing, not even the complaining of the goats.

  Sam moved in his sleep, rolled over. She hopped up on his bed, sniffed his hand, and he mumbled something to her. She returned to the window.

  The storm made her even more alert, hypersensitive to sound and movement. She did not panic, but she was keenly tuned to danger, and a sense of that suffused her being—her body, which was tense, even rigid, and her mind, which was spinning. A storm outside, a storm inside.

  * * *

  AT LONG LAST day came, although not the sun. The storm was blowing harder than ever, the farmhouse groaning in the wind and thick new snow still falling.

  Sam came downstairs, made coffee, and then stood for a long time looking out the windows. He told Rose they would stay inside, but he lasted only a few minutes before pulling on his boots and reaching for his heavy gloves and hooded jacket.