The Dog Harlan Left Behind

Then I put it on. It came down past my knees and the sleeves hung over my hands. I turned the cuffs back twice, took my flashlight, and said, “Come on, Chief.”

I took it one step at a time. Sixty yards from the porch to the shed, over gravel gone to glass. I made it to within fifteen steps.

I do not remember the fall. I remember the sky turning over, and a sound like a green branch breaking, which was my left wrist, and then my hip hitting the ground so hard that all the air went out of me at once.

I lay on my back on the ice. The flashlight skittered off into the dark and went out.

The first thing I thought was, Don’t move.

The second thing I thought was, Harlan, you old fool, you left me instructions for the generator and none for the ice.

And then something warm lay down against my side.

It was Chief. He had come around slowly and laid himself along my right side, shoulder to knee. He put his chin down on my chest.

The same way he had put it on Harlan.

I lay there and understood exactly where I was. Fifteen steps from the open door of that machine shed. Near enough the same distance from where I had knelt on the concrete four months before.

And I understood that this dog knew how to do this. He had done it once already. He knew how to stay beside someone who could not get up.

“Oh, Chief,” I said. “Oh, you good boy.”

The rain turned to sleet and the sleet tapped the sheepskin. The cold came up through the ground into my back, a slow heavy cold that gets in your bones and makes itself at home. It was twenty-six degrees and falling, and I wore a flannel nightgown under that coat.

Chief barked.

He lifted his head and sent one bark out into the dark, toward the lane. I had not heard that bark in a long time. It had gone cracked and rusty in the last year.

He waited a minute, and he barked again.

And again. All that long night, every minute or two, an old dog with a bad voice sent his bark across the frozen yard toward a road where nothing moved. He barked until it was only a rasp.

I know that at some point I stopped shivering, and that is a bad sign, though I did not know it.

And then headlights.

They swung off the county road and came up the lane, slow, throwing long light across the ice. I thought, It’s Gene. I thought, It’s the Lord. I could not lift my head.

Chief got to his feet.

On those hips, on that ice, with his legs sliding out from under him, my old dog got up and put his body between me and the light. He planted his feet. He barked, and it was the loudest bark of his life.

A truck door slammed. I heard my son’s voice, high and raw, a voice I had not heard since he was a little boy lost in the Hy-Vee.

“Mom! Mom!”

Wade told me afterward what he saw. I will give it to you in his words, because they are better than mine.

He had been calling since a quarter to seven. He called the landline eleven times, and my cell phone, which I never keep charged, went straight to a recording. When the weather alert crossed his phone at eight, he stopped trying and got in the truck.