2004-04-12 - 12:14 p.m.
Groaning, Sirius rose at the sound of the car's arrival and joined the other two at the door. As Dad walked in they all shot out like the Bumpas's dogs, joining Teddy for a romp in the yard.
When a little bit later Dad started calling, I knew Sirius and Chance had gotten away. “You might as well save your breath,” I said. “They’re already gone.”
Chance returned within hours, all muddy, apologetic. Sirius, I guessed, would soon follow. As usual he was probably just hanging back, waiting to make an appearance.
I didn’t worry even when he hadn’t shown himself by nightfall, assuming he’d just decided to sleep in the barn. Even so, I half expected at some point in the night to hear him scratching on the door to come in. He didn’t, and by the middle of the next morning I knew something was seriously wrong.
The dogs sensed it too. I took them out to look, asking Chance over and over: “Where’s Sirius?” In response he would gaze off towards the woods and give a feeble wag of his tail, but it seemed he had no more clue than I did. When we returned home, Beau made a beeline to the lower barn. He led to the shop and waited while I slid open the door; running in, he stopped in the middle of the floor and turned back with a look of perplexed disappointment that his friend wasn’t there. Going to the other side of the barn, he then entered a hole in the wall leading to the dogs' secret place above the old milk-house. He found nothing there, either.
That night I didn’t sleep, thinking all the things I didn’t want to think.
The next day Dad stopped to see if there was any news. When I said there wasn’t he slumped in the chair, looking older than I have ever seen him before. “I’m sorry,” he said, and I knew he felt responsible for letting the dogs go. “It’s not your fault,” I said. “It wasn’t the first time they’d run off; it wouldn’t have been the last.”
The worst part is having no idea what happened to my dog or where he might be. I have gone around to the neighbors and put up posters bearing his picture; I have searched and re-searched miles and miles of woods; I have waited for the phone to ring. I wait still.
I lie in bed nights imagining a frightened dog caught in a steel trap or maybe surrounded by coyotes. I imagine strangers—the surveyors, perhaps, whose fluorescent orange tape still flutters in the field up the hill—enticing him into their van with a piece of meat; I imagine him balking, too late, and the door closing behind him. I imagine him shot. I imagine him dead…
I wake at night with a jolt and feel my heart physically ache.
Last night I thought I heard a scratching at the back door. I waited, listening in the dark for the sound to come again, until finally I fell back asleep. It is now Sunday morning, Easter, the Christian day of hope. It's been almost a week and I've all but given up.
I look south across the backyard towards the woods and see the poplar sapling I planted our first spring here now risen twenty feet tall. It is crooked at the base from where Sirius, still then a new pup, bit nearly through it. Looking past the poplar, I remember the old coop at the top of the rise that temporarily served as his home. I can still see his head poking above the tall grass as he jumped and strained against the chain to greet me. I open the back door, expecting even now to see him curled on the stoop. I go to the kitchen to make coffee and look north while it brews.
There is still a little snow, a slice of it, lying on the wooded hillside directly across the road. The daffodils in the front lawn are budded and ready to bloom. I consider the passage of time, and think back on the winter and the year that has passed; how I wish there were some way to retrieve it.
I pour a cup of coffee and gaze out the window while Chance and Beau wait patiently by the door for me to finish and take them out for a walk.
