Rescuing Riley, Saving Myself (5 page)

Every day, I bring a bag lunch and take my sandwich out and look at it and keep my head down, perfecting my thirty-inch stare, while all around me people are laughing and socializing and yelling, the usual chaos of a high school cafeteria. I’m not a stranger or a new kid. Cudahy, Wisconsin, is a suburb of Milwaukee but it feels like a small town where everybody knows everybody. It’s a small school, only about seven hundred students. Everybody knows me, but everybody also knows my label. Sitting by myself every day is in-my-face proof that I’m worthless. I am unwanted. I do not dare ask to sit with anybody because if they say no, that would be even more humiliating. And no one wants to sit with me because it’s just easier not to. And safer. Anyone sitting with me risks being labeled a loser, too.

I look around the cafeteria and wonder why everybody else is smart enough to figure out how to be in a group. The jocks have groups. The really pretty girls have groups and sub-groups of not-as-pretty girls who act as entourages to the really pretty girls. Every ethnic minority has its own minority group. There’s even a group of unpopular kids—a group for kids who don’t have a group—but they don’t seem to want me either. If I gathered the courage to ask, I wonder if they’d let me join them, but I don’t try, because it would be too embarrassing if they rejected me, too. The loneliness I feel is merciless, and the message comes across clear as a bell: “You’re on your own.”

I let the dog eat and didn’t try to pet him, but I sat with him to let him know someone was there. Buck Brannaman, the horse trainer on whom both the book and the movie
Horse Whisperer
were based, never had to use physical pain to discipline his horses because he understood that the pain of isolation was worse and that depriving an animal of the safety and security of its social community was a more powerful negative reinforcement than any spur or whip. I sat with the dog, thinking that dogs are social animals, just like horses, and that unless he’d learned to mistrust humans entirely, my presence might comfort him. When he stopped eating, not because he’d had enough but because, I assumed, what was left of his atrophied stomach couldn’t hold any more, he moved to the drinking water I’d poured in a bowl for him. He took slow, deliberate laps of water. I wasn’t exactly sure why I felt the need, but I decided to shoot some video footage of him to document his condition and perhaps to help me process, later, what I was experiencing. It wasn’t making sense now, but maybe it would upon further contemplation.

Shortly after partaking of food and water, the dog collapsed. It reaffirmed what I’d surmised earlier: he was too frail to carry out of the canyon the easy way. He was small, so his weight wasn’t the issue—I guessed he was maybe five months old and weighed about seventeen pounds, soaking wet. What I feared was the act of simply placing him in my backpack and climbing back out. His positioning inside (scrunched up and folded over himself), paired with possible jostling as I worked quickly to get him out of there, could have resulted in broken bones and other probable traumas. I was going to have to lift him in some kind of crate, straight up and out of the canyon.

I hollowed out five depressions in the soft caked mud at the bottom of the pothole and then set a Styrofoam bowl in each, testing to make sure the dog wouldn’t be able to tip the bowls over and spill the contents. When I was satisfied, I filled three bowls with water and two with dog food. I briefly worried that the strong aroma of the dog food would attract predators, or perhaps vultures from high above who might see the dog and think they wouldn’t have to wait very long for a meal, but it was a risk I couldn’t avoid. I had to trust that the bottom of a slot canyon was the last place any creature in the food chain was going to look for sustenance.

I looked up, out of instinct, to gauge how much daylight I had left, even though from the bottom of a slot canyon, it’s impossible to tell time that way. I looked at my watch. It was a little after 4:30 p.m. I took a blue towel from my pack, one I carry for those occasions when a lake or stream presents me with the opportunity to bathe, set it on the canyon floor folded in half, then moved to where the dog was lying. I slid my hands under him and gently lifted. He was almost literally a bag of bones. If he were healthy, I thought, he ought to weight thirty or more pounds, but he was light as a kitten and limp in my hands. I set him down carefully on the center of the towel, which would insulate him from the cold mud that would otherwise conduct heat away from his body. It was hard to understand how he hadn’t already succumbed to hypothermia, sleeping for however many days down here. If he had the strength, the food and water were there for him.

“I’ll be back tomorrow morning,” I told him. “I promise.”

I wondered what the sound of my voice did for him. I wondered if he could tell that today had been better than yesterday, and tomorrow would be better than today. I could clearly recall days when nobody could have convinced me of that, but perhaps this was where my human intelligence and the dog’s diverged. Humans who experience trauma learn from it, over and over again, reviewing the traumatic experience and reliving it as a memory, carrying the pain and the hurt over from one day to the next. I wondered how the canine intelligence handles something like this—how traumatized would the dog be? Would he be mentally and emotionally damaged, even if he recovered his physical health, or would he find a way to forget?

On my way back up the rope, I negotiated the free-hangs and the ledges and, in perhaps fifteen minutes, maybe less, I was back at the top. My arms were weary. How was I going to do the same climb tomorrow with the dog in tow? I would have to find a way.

On the hour-long drive back to Page, I thought of how the dog’s life was now in my hands. I had a responsibility to him. I didn’t choose it, but I couldn’t turn away from it, either. As I drove, an ember of anger burned inside me. The more I thought about it, the more certain I was that the dog at the bottom of the canyon did not arrive there by accident. Someone put him there quite intentionally.

I considered, again, the obstacles I had to overcome to find him in the first place, a twenty-foot free-hanging rappel and a ten-foot sheer wall at an eighty-degree incline in pitch blackness. No. The dog did not wander down the canyon on his own—he would have broken a leg at the very least. He did not get washed to where I found him in a flood—he would have been dashed against the rocks or, surviving that, he would have drowned while treading water in the pothole.

Someone put him there.

I couldn’t stop thinking about who would do such a thing. Why would they do it?

It made no sense. I could imagine—not that this made
sense
exactly—how someone, for whatever twisted reason, might be cruel to an animal as a kind of hands-on experience, where there’s some kind of pleasure derived from the animal’s tortured reaction. In Elizabethan England, they used to bait bears by chaining a bear to a stake and then worrying it with dogs as a kind of public spectacle, and people would cheer, the way (I assume) they cheer today at dog fights or cock fights. In the Roman Colosseum, thousands of years ago, spectacles of pure cruelty were near-daily invents.

But there was no element of spectacle to the dog in the canyon, nobody there to savor the animal’s suffering. There were no witnesses. In fact, you could hardly find a place less likely to ever have witnesses. Whoever had done it did so hoping not to be caught. No one could derive pleasure from the dog’s reaction, except conceptually. How long would it take to kill a dog by starving it? However long it was, there was no immediate return, no instant gratification.

I could even explain finding a dog in that condition as a result of neglect, somebody who, for example, leaves a dog in a house and never goes back and somehow manages to banish from his or her thoughts any recollection of leaving behind a pet without food—but neglect is a passive kind of cruelty. It’s a crime of omission, a lack of action. The dog in the canyon had not been passively neglected.

Someone had gone to a great deal of trouble to put it there. Someone used ropes and climbing gear, as I had, to reach the pothole where I found the dog. The dog was probably lowered by rope over the difficult sections, all an enormous effort to get a dog down there. Someone had quite intentionally, with planning and malice aforethought and with considerable exertion, brought the dog deep into the canyon and left it there to die.

I am fourteen. I am in my room, sitting on my mattress on the floor. My mother is in the living room, but she is beyond reach, inaccessible, the last person I could possibly turn to. I am absolutely alone, and nothing is going to change, and I think that all I really want is for the pain I feel to stop, and the only way I can imagine it stopping is if I was dead. I, too, have been left to die. At the age of fourteen, the idea of being dead has considerable appeal. I would not do it to spite anyone or hurt anyone, only to end the misery. Sometimes it feels as if I have no other way out.

B
ack in Page, teenagers on bicycles loitered in front of the convenience stores, their curfews approaching, probably talking about how boring their lives were, because that’s what teenagers everywhere think—especially on a Sunday when nothing is open, and even more so when it’s summer, which seems to last forever when you’re a teenager. Old people at the other end of their lives clogged the streets with their lumbering RVs, which I found frustrating because I needed to reach the fire station as soon as possible. I didn’t know where else to ask for help—going to the police station seemed too extreme. It seemed reasonable to expect that in an area with so much surrounding wilderness, there could have been some kind of volunteer search-and-rescue organization or unit to get advice from, if not actual assistance. I wasn’t sure how much assistance I could expect from the fire department, given that I was only rescuing a dog, but you see stories all the time about heroic firemen rescuing cats from trees. I hoped I’d be able to persuade them, though it seemed unlikely they’d care as much as I did.

The fire station, a nondescript brick and glass building with three large bays in the front for fire engines, was next to the police station on Coppermine Road, just down from the Motel 6, where a sign said there was a vacancy. Ordinarily, I prefer to camp in the truck, but tonight I decided to get a room, to prepare. I parked in a nearly empty parking lot, hoping that someone would be inside to offer assistance. As I walked into the fire station, I considered how I would plead my case and thought I might spin it a bit and mention what great publicity it would be for whoever helped me.

The lobby was empty, but there was a red telephone on a desk next to a sign that said “Please Call for Assistance.” A woman answered, and when I told her the reason for my visit, she told me to hang on and someone would be out shortly.

A minute later, a kid who looked like he was in his mid-twenties, with a buzz cut that reminded me of my time in the Marines, came out and asked me nonchalantly what was up. He was wearing a navy blue T-shirt and baggy firefighting pants held up by yellow and silver reflective suspenders.

“I was in a canyon today, about an hour from here,” I said, telling him where it was, “and I found a dog in a pothole, and I think he’s going to die if we can’t get him out.”

“Okay,” he said.

“I was wondering if you had any thoughts.”

“If I have any thoughts?”

“Yeah.”

“Well,” he said, “we can’t really send out the manpower and the equipment you’d need to do that. We have to be on standby if we get a call to a fire.”

“That makes sense,” I told him, and it did, but it was disappointing. “Is there any sort of volunteer search-and-rescue group I could contact?”

“In Page?”

“Yeah.”

“Not in Page. That I know of.”

“What do you do if someone gets lost in the Grand Canyon?”

“That’s the Park Service. You find the dog in a National Park?”

“No.”

“Sorry.”

I could tell that he really was. He was still trying to think of a way to help me, but he was coming up empty. I thanked him anyway.

“You going in yourself?”

“I guess,” I said.

“You know what you’re doing?”

“I think so,” I said. “If I screw it up and get stuck myself, then will you come get us both?”

“Sure,” he said.

“Don’t worry—that’s not part of the plan,” I said, though it occurred to me that if all else failed, it could be. “Is there an animal hospital in town?”

He wrote down the name and the address, gave me directions, and wished me luck. I told him I’d need it.

Page Animal Hospital was a small, single-story white cottage with an addition for offices on the side, on the corner of Eighth and Elm in the center of town. As I parked the truck, I felt relieved, thinking I would at least be getting some kind of good professional advice. The sun was getting lower in the sky, intensifying the light. The front door was open, but the lobby was empty, and the front desk was unoccupied. On a Sunday night, I was happy the door was open. The place was dead quiet. The floor was gray linoleum. Charts on the walls displayed the anatomies of cats and dogs.

When I heard a noise, I called out, “Hello?”

I heard someone shout back, “Just a minute.”

A few seconds later, a weathered looking woman in her early fifties came out, a rag in one hand and a spray bottle of Windex in the other. The only help I could get was from the cleaning lady. She told me the doctor would be back in the morning. I briefly described the situation and asked if she knew where I could get some kind of cat or dog carrier to transport the puppy in. She said they had a few I could choose from and led me to a back room, where I selected one of an appropriate size, red plastic with mesh windows and doors and a handle on the top. I asked her if she thought the doctor would be able to treat a sick animal. I knew it was a stupid question—that’s what they did.

“Oh sure,” she said. “Dr. Roundtree takes all kinds of strays.” A diploma on the wall indicated the head veterinarian was a Dr. Jerry Roundtree, DVM.