Dorothy's Day Out
Dorothy nearly died today. A few minutes ago, in fact. Just a smattering of yards away from me while my mind was turned to silly things, nothing involving life or death. Nothing so important as that.
Dorothy is one year old - that's seven in German Shepherd years, which is what Dorothy is. We've had her about a month. A month of joy, a month of hell. We love Dorothy and she loves us, but more than us, she loves freedom.
She's jumped the six-foot cedar backyard fence so many times, we've taken to putting her on a 40-foot cable. The first time she got out, she was gone for 24 hours. We'd only had her a week - we'd gotten her from the animal shelter about a month after our beloved old Black Lab, Luke, had died - but she came ambling back, all rubber-bodied and limber, her tail a fluffy flag knocking the air around. Since that day, she's gotten out a dozen more times. Twice, she's come back on her own, but mostly, we get in the car and drive around until we find her. Dorothy is a very smart dog. Perhaps too smart.
We don't like keeping her on a cable while we're gone at work and school all day, but we have to do it. On the loose, she could get hit by a car, or stolen, or she could bite somebody - not that she's the kind of dog to do that, but you never know. The man who lives two doors up told a passerby three weeks ago he was going to put a couple of bullets in Dorothy's brain if he ever saw her on the loose again. We'd only had her a week; the man has a fenced yard. We don't know why he would tell such a thing to a total stranger. We've never met the man, but we believe him. The world has left me wary and jaded and if a lunatic says he's going to shoot my dog, I'm going to believe him.
So the bright-eyed, energetic Dorothy is kept on a cable until we can install an electronic fence around our yard. The Final Solution. If an electronic fence won't keep Dorothy in, then she is answering a higher call, and we'll just have to wait and see what happens.
Yesterday, Katie let Dorothy out to do her morning business and without waiting, Dorothy ran to the back fence and jumped over it, even while Katie called, begged, pleaded for her to come back. Mike got in the car and rounded Dorothy up before she could get too far, and it was back on the damned cable for the day until the girls got home from school.
Which brings me to today. Just now. Just a few minutes ago.
Since we can't trust Dorothy to do her business and not jump over the fence, even while we're standing there watching her, I put her out this morning on the cable. I attached it to the deck railing to give her a bit more space since she ends up twining it around every bush and tree in the yard then sits there with one foot of cable for who knows how long. Damn dog. Poor damn dumb dog.
I came back in the house and logged on to check my email. I had planned to drop Katie off at school then head on in to work. So I read a few messages, sent some others, then I shut down the computer. Oh, I thought, better check on Dorothy. Bring her back inside to eat until it's time for us to go.
I went to the sliding glass doors that open onto the deck and I saw the cable, but didn't see Dorothy. I called to her. Then my eyes followed the line of the cable down and around the rose bushes, and up to the back fence, and over it. Over it. Over it.
I knew how long the cable was, and how far it would reach. And how far it would not reach.
My brain emptied somewhere. Whoosh. Gone. No thoughts entered there. I shoved the door open and ran down the steps and across the yard. Last night's rain had left everything soggy, mucky. I was dressed for work, not that it mattered. My eye never left that taut cable that stretched over the back fence and disappeared.
There is a mound of rocks and dirt near the fence that I had built up to plant flowers around. A point of interest in the garden, as it were, just beneath the yellow-budded forsythia. Dorothy had used that mound as her jumping off place.
I was yelling her name I think, looking at the two houses that back up to ours. Windows dark, drapes drawn. Nobody home. I grabbed the fence in my fingers and pulled myself up to look over. Dorothy hung there by a three-foot length of cable. Halfway to the ground, her collar had strangled her. I screamed her name. Over and over and over. All the while, I frantically tried to loosen the cable, but her sixty-pound body kept it tightly strung over the fencing so all I could do was slide the cable to the left. It kept getting caught in the boards, but I shoved and shoved.
"Help me! Help me, please! Somebody help me!" I screamed. Words I've never uttered in my life. A phrase I'd only seen in movies. I shouted those words to the air, to the neighbors, to anybody who might run to the fence and loosen the cable from Dorothy's limp neck. Somebody would hear me, somebody would come. They would lift her body enough so I could slacken her metal noose. Somehow. Some way. Nobody came.
I pulled myself up again and looked over the fence again, but it was no use. So I yelled some more. I kept yelling. I yelled and yelled and pulled at the cable and clawed at the fence until Katie ran out onto the deck. Her beautiful face was ravaged with fear. She had a hairbrush in her hand and she was barefoot. I don't know why I noticed those things.
"Is she dead?" she wailed. "Did she jump the fence? Is she dead? Mommy, no! Tell me she's not dead!"
"Loosen the cable!" I screamed, my voice a raspy choke after all the screaming I'd already done.
But Katie couldn't loosen the cable because Dorothy's body kept it taut. I was already working the cable across the fence to try to give it more slack. Just enough, just enough and Katie was able to reach down and unclamp the metal hook and the cable fell slack. I jumped up on the mound of earth again and looked over. Dorothy's dead body lay there, her four legs limp and motionless, her front paws crossed politely. Her eyes were closed. She had no breath. She made no sound. There was nothing.
I stood down from the fence. For a moment, I just tried to breathe. I began to hyperventilate. I cried and couldn't seem to pull any air into my lungs. My hands found my face and I stood there, shaking, trembling, burning up inside with grief and remorse.
There was no air in the world anymore and I was suffocating. Katie was screaming and crying. She wanted to look over the fence, look at poor dead Dorothy, just to see for herself it was true.
"Go get your shoes on," I choked. "You have to help me drive around and get Dorothy's body. I'm sorry. I'm sorry to ask you, but I can't lift her myself. I'm sorry. I'm sorry, sweetie." I babbled. My brain still was not ready to accept this. It had happened too quickly. Dorothy was alive, and now Dorothy was dead. And it had happened just that fast.
"She's dead," Katie wailed. "She's really dead?"
"Yes." I put my arms around Katie and hugged her. "It's my fault. Blame me. I should have known. Should have anticipated . . ."
Together, Katie and I trudged back through the mud and up the stairs and into the house. I was still hyperventilating, barely able to speak. My lungs pumped in and out and my throat hurt like it was being rubbed with sandpaper. I grabbed my keys, and the biggest bath towel I could find to use as a litter.
I left the sliding doors open. I left the garage door open. I left my purse in the kitchen. I just drove around the block and up to the house that backs up against ours. The house where Dorothy lay dangling, dead, over the cedar fencing. Katie would have to see it, and I didn't want her to. But I couldn't lift Dorothy by myself.
I rang the doorbell and two little boys came to the door. I hadn't thought anybody was home, but they were in there. Why hadn't they heard me screaming my guts out for help? Their father came to the door. I was crying, bent, my body hurt and so did my heart.
"I'm your neighbor, from behind," I panted. "My dog . . . my dog jumped over the fence. She's in your yard. I came to get her."
He didn't get it. He smiled and said something like, "Well then, let's go take a look."
"No," I said. "She's dead. I'm sorry. She jumped over the fence and she strangled. She's dead. I'm sorry. I've come to get her body. I'm sorry."
The house is small and narrow and he was able to walk from the front door to the sliding doors that led to his back yard in only a few steps. His sons peered up at me, their eyes huge with shock, curiosity. I stood there while their father went to the back of the house and said, "Oh no. She's okay. She's just sitting there."
For a split-second, the tiniest, eensiest bit of a moment, for a fragment of a portion of time too small to even measure, I thought, no. The guy's an idiot.
He looked out the window again, then back at me. "See?" he said cheerily. "Just sitting there."
Uninvited, I entered the front door of this man's house and went out through the now open sliding doors. And there sat Dorothy, looking like somebody had just beaned her with a ten-pound iron skillet. I could almost see a crown of little cartoon birds circling just above her head. She sat a little crooked and her eyes didn't quite focus, but she wasn't dead. No, Dorothy was not dead.
Katie and I ran to her and hugged her and cried and called her name, but she just stared at us like she'd never seen us before. Then her tail wagged the tiniest bit.
I thanked and apologized to my apparently deaf-but-chipper new neighbor as Katie and I walked around the house out to the car where Dorothy slowly and with great deliberation climbed into the backseat.
When we got home, Dorothy stepped out of the car and willingly padded into the house where she went to the kitchen and drank fifteen gallons of water. Her tail wagged a little more. She eyed me like I had just tried to murder her. She sidled up to Katie, and eyed me some more.
Katie wanted to go to school, so she finished getting ready and left. When you're twelve and your dog nearly strangles to death on a steel cable, and your actions save her life, you have to go to school and tell all your friends. Me, I sat down to write.
I am still shaken and didn't think I was in shape to drive the commute to work, not so soon after the ordeal. Now, two hours have passed since we brought Dorothy home, and I'm still unnerved.
Dorothy followed me downstairs and is asleep at my feet. I imagine she's going to sleep a lot today. As for me, I'm still dealing with the complex emotional and physical toll this incident created.
I have a huge bruise on my right arm where I tried to half-climb over the fence to loosen the cable. Both my arms are covered with scratches from the fence and I must have a hundred little splinters imbedded under my skin. I have dirt under my fingernails, although I have no idea how it got there. My right arm hurts from yanking on the cable and my left shoulder is stiff. The arthritis usually doesn't bother me so much these days, but right now, I'm very aware I have it. My throat's still sore and I've been coughing. Hyperventilating does really odd things to your lungs.
I wrenched my left knee somehow, the knee with the worst arthritis in it, of course. My fingers hurt from my death grip on the fence and the steering wheel of my car. Both my wrists are stiff and sore. My whole body feels tight and stiff. It's kind of like being in a car accident where your muscles cramp up, then hours later you realize you've strained them.
Mostly, I have no energy. None. The adrenaline rush that swept through me took it all, and now I have to wait for it to come back. In the meantime, the shock has worn off and every bone and muscle is beginning to ache. But I don't care.
When I clenched my fingers over the top of that rough fence and pulled myself up enough to see over it, when I looked straight down and saw my dog hanging there, halfway to the ground, limp, lifeless, my heart began to cry. She had suffered and it was my fault. I should have anticipated she would do this, Dorothy, being innocent and strong and smart and capable. She was dead and gone and I couldn't bring her back and it was my fault. And she had surely suffered.
I don't know what made me hurry to loosen the cable when I thought she was already dead. I don't know why I kept screaming for help, even though nobody came. I don't know how long Dorothy had been hanging there, but I think it was only a few minutes. When I'd shut off the computer, I'd thought I'd heard a scraping sound in the backyard, which made me think of Dorothy and how I should let her in. If she had jumped right then, right at that moment, it still took me several minutes to find her. Several more to try to loosen the cable. More to drive around the block to retrieve her body. Even more talking to my neighbor about who I was and why I was standing in his doorway crying my eyes out.
How long Dorothy was unconscious, I don't know. How close she came, is beyond my ability to calculate. Did she incur any permanent damage? Time will tell I suppose. She seems fine now, but if dogs have the ability to reckon and reason, I hope she reckons jumping over fences is a bad idea. I hope she decides there's no reason to do it again. She's Dorothy, after all, and therefore, there's no place like home.
~~Marianne Stillings, March 12, 2003
There's no Place Like Home
