Rescuing Riley, Saving Myself (16 page)

It was in Marine Corps boot camp that I first learned to rappel, which began inauspiciously when I stood at the top of a sixty-foot wall while the instructor screamed at me (again with the screaming) to go over the side. So I did, but I forgot to lock my knees and slammed hard into the wall. I had remembered, however, not to release my braking hand and avoided a free fall and certain death. You don’t get points in the Marines for trying. The instructor yelled, “See what happens when you don’t lock your legs?”

I haven’t made that mistake since then, which tells me that sometimes screaming helps.

We later trained off a seventy-five-foot tower at a base in Singapore. When the instructor, a Lieutenant Farnum, saw my enthusiasm, he asked me if I wanted to learn to rappel upside down. I wasn’t sure if it would ever come in handy, but it sounded like fun. The feat is accomplished by lowering yourself ten feet or so from the top and then rotating your body clockwise until your feet are above your head and your right arm is pointing straight towards the ground. To this day, I enjoy rappelling upside down because it is simply exhilarating. Looking straight down, maybe a hundred feet or more, and controlling your fear is something that energizes me.

If I learned nothing else as a Marine, I learned how to conquer my fears. When we learned during the same deployment that some CH-46 helicopter pilots needed to practice inserting and extracting combat troops using a long line with D-rings attached to it, I volunteered, and half an hour later, I was hanging from a rope from the bottom of a helicopter that was flying several hundred feet above the Indian Ocean at a forward airspeed of maybe sixty-five knots. Given the circumstances, it seemed like a perfect opportunity to practice my air-guitar.

Being a Marine means learning to suppress your feelings. In one sense, it might seem I’d have been a natural at it. Part of making a man, or perhaps more accurately a boy, into an effective soldier requires that he learns to conquer a number of things in himself, including his fears and his self-imposed limitations. For example, part of my training led me to CWSS training, which stands for Combat Water Safety Swimmer. It’s designed to teach you how to save your fellow Marines during shore landings where you have to negotiate large waves and rip tides, all while wearing heavy gear. When I was on the swim team in high school, I was competitive at the state level and could turn in winning times at distances anywhere between fifty and five hundred yards. Rescue swimming, however, was an entirely different endeavor, because it meant taking tough Marines, guys who generally think they’re badasses with something to prove, and pushing them past their breaking points.

On the last day of training, we had to execute mock rescues, with the instructors posing as victims. When it was my turn, I jumped in after my “victim,” but immediately found it challenging to swim with just my legs, using my arms to secure the “victim.” Then, just as I dove down and locked my arms around him, he used his hands to push against the water and drive us down, something you’d think a genuine drowning victim wouldn’t do. When I finally managed to surface with him, I let out an explosive breath and gasped to take as much new air in as possible, and then we were below the surface again. We surfaced three times, until I thought I was going hypoxic. When I finally managed to swim with him toward the edge of the pool, I lost control of him and he started to sink, while three instructors on the edge of the pool screamed at me, telling me my victim was going to either drown or suffer from brain damage. The idea was to reproduce the stress of an actual combat situation, and it played all kinds of tricks on my brain.

I managed to pass the test, but also nearly passed out. You know it’s valuable, because if the time comes and you’re the one who ends up being the victim, you want to know the men around you won’t panic, but it exacts a heavy cost on your mental well-being because suppressing all those feeling only means they come back to bite you twice as hard at some later opportunity. I could say, honestly, that for better or worse, the Marines provided me with an environment to mature into a man in a way nothing else I know of could do, and I am extremely grateful for the experience.

Lying in the back of my truck, gazing up at the sky above the Colorado Plateau, I realized it’s both the size of the dog in the fight
and
the size of the fight in the dog, but the size of the fight in the dog comes first. That spark, that persistence gene, that little tenaciously optimistic bit, is what drives the dog to get stronger, to keep running and build muscles as it runs. The spark had almost died inside me, but at the last minute, almost in the nick of time, I found a way to tap into it. There was an ember inside me, buried deep beneath the accumulated ashes, and I was able to bring it back to life and then feed the fire until it blazed.

I hoped the puppy I found could do it, too. If he survived, he was, by nature and by definition, more dogged than I would ever be.

T
he next morning at the Page Animal Hospital, Dr. Roundtree was busy, and a girl I didn’t recognize was sitting behind the desk, but Krista was there. She smiled when she saw me.

“How’s he doing?” I asked.

“Better than he was yesterday,” she said, “but we’re not out of the woods. You wanna see?”

She led me down the hall to a room full of cages. I knew which cage was his because only one had an IV drip stand outside of it. I’d expected some kind of isolated ICU, the way emergency patients might be treated in a hospital. I felt like I should have donned latex gloves or a hospital gown first. Krista told me he’d gone through an entire drip bag overnight and was on his second. He had wet himself, too, which was promising, but there were still other concerns, such as possible permanent cognitive impairment and organ damage, most likely the kidneys.

“He also had a weak bowel movement this morning, the consistency of tar,” she told me.

I understood that renal failure was usually fatal. I had a dog at home, an Australian blue heeler named Kohi, and I knew a bit about dog health in general. I knew that grapes and raisins were poisonous to dogs, for example. Scientists aren’t exactly sure why this is; they simply know that grapes or raisins can cause renal tubule necrosis, destroying the small conduits the kidneys use to filter and break down toxins and produce urine. When the kidney can’t make urine to flush the toxins, there’s no hope, unless, I supposed, you could put a dog on a kidney machine, which I was sure people with a lot of money did, but I wasn’t people with a lot of money.

“Go ahead and open the door if you want,” she told me.

I knelt down in front of the cage and opened the door. He still smelled, and he looked horrible, lying on his side, covered in mud with the catheter taped to his paw. I supposed, on a healthier dog, they might have put one of those big plastic cones around his neck to keep him from chewing on the catheter, but with this dog, no such precaution was necessary. This dog lacked the strength to move as he stared off into space, seemingly immobile. However, when I knelt down, he wagged his tail. Just the tip of it—just once, rising an inch off the mat before falling back.

To me, the tiny tail wag was a brave thumbs up, the kind you see when they carry a previously unconscious football player off the field on a stretcher. Before he goes into the locker room, he gives the crowd a sign to tell them he’s going to be alright, and the crowd cheers. The crowd inside me cheered, too. I wanted to believe not only that he was giving me a positive signal, but also that he recognized me somehow. It might have been simply an acknowledgment that someone, anyone, was there next to him, maybe even an involuntary reflex. As far as I could tell, the dog had been virtually unconscious the day before, but I knew that dogs have incredible noses and can identify smells thousands of times better than people can. By the time I’d worked up a sweat climbing out of the canyon, I must have been fairly identifiable.

“Has he moved at all?” I asked.

“Nope,” a technician told me. “We’ve been moving him every couple of hours to keep him from getting sore. He’s on his second bag of fluids though, so that’s good.”

I was wary of anthropomorphizing the animal. People think that when a dog licks your face, he’s giving you a kiss, bestowing affection—what he’s doing, according to the experts, is exhibiting a common pup behavior where juvenile canines lick the mother’s lips to encourage her to regurgitate food for them to subsequently eat. We make inferences and project our own emotions onto dogs, coloring our interpretations of how they behave and why. I think it’s important to try to understand a dog on a dog’s terms. Yet, it struck me as remarkable how closely those terms parallel our own, where we—man and dog—have somehow learned to communicate with each other in a way no two species ever have. I don’t know if we learned their language, more than they learned ours, but the point remains that both sides tried.

The first evidence anthropologists have to document the relationship between men and dogs dates back to about thirty thousand years ago, when early man lived in small tribal groups or villages that were, if not permanent habitations, occupied for several seasons, long enough to build up a residue of garbage, including discarded animal bones from which the early canines scavenged and fed. In North America, the wolf sat at the top of the food chain, at least until the early humans made it across the land bridge from Siberia, and then wolves and humans competed for the position. Then someone, somehow, one of us, or maybe both of us, signaled for a truce.

If you watch how one dog meets another unfamiliar dog, you can typically observe a pattern of behavior where, as the dogs come rushing in to meet, face-to-face, they both stiffen up. This is a tentative moment, one in which they try to assess, “Are you friendly or do I have to be on guard?” When the tails wag to signal a mutual acceptance of the rules of engagement the two dogs slowly circle in to sniff each other’s butts. Some kind of signal must have transpired, thirty thousand years ago, between man and dog, giving each other permission to approach. It may have been a wag of a tail.

We had reasons to fear each other. We still fear each other, even though wolves have more reason to fear us than we have to fear them. It may have been that the first wolves to approach the human garbage dumps and campfires were puppies, juveniles who hadn’t yet learned to be afraid. Ethnologists describe the differences between how wolves and dogs behave as paedomorphism, meaning a kind of incomplete or partial evolution where the adult of one species imitates the juvenile characteristics of another. Adult dogs will sit, stay, obey commands, wait to be fed, and bond with other species, as will juvenile wolves. Mature wolves won’t do any of those things, which is why they can’t be kept as pets. The juvenile wolves we adopted, thirty thousand years ago, may have retained their juvenile characteristics simply because they had no reason not to—as long as we kept them fed and happy, why fix what wasn’t broken? While working at the Institute of Cytology and Genetics in Novosibirsk, Russia, a scientist named Dmitri Belyaev bred wild foxes by choosing the tamest among them (the ones that allowed humans to approach them) and was able to domesticate them in about forty generations, rendering the foxes that resulted as quite “dog-like.” Humans and dogs have been living together for perhaps fifteen thousand generations, working, for thirty millennia, to understand and collaborate with each other.

I’m not an expert in these things. My hope is just to explain why I felt connected to the puppy. It could have been entirely my imagination, but if it was, I was imagining the same thing the first Cro-Magnon man imagined when the first juvenile wolf stepped from the darkness into the light of the campfire. My sense, leaning down to pet the dog in the crate with the IV drip in him, was that he understood something—not that he understood something about me, but that we both understood the same thing. He’d been abused and abandoned, left to die, and maybe he hadn’t put it all together yet, but if someone could transport him to the bottom of a canyon and leave him there to die, it was reasonable for him to assume that I could also be a threat to him. But he wasn’t threatened by me. He wagged his tail to tell me that, somehow, he knew I was trustworthy. That he was willing to give mankind another chance.

I wondered if the dog experienced stress, and the release from stress, the same way I did. Once on a previous wilderness excursion, when I’d gotten lost in the mountains near Los Angeles in the snow—without adequate food, water, or clothing—I went into a survival mode, my only focus on finding the road I’d somehow lost. From that focus, I derived a kind of calmness or composure, but once I was safe and back on the road, all the emotions I’d been suppressing caught up to me, and only then did I realize or appreciate how close I’d come to getting myself into serious trouble. Maybe the dog was having a similar delayed reaction, and only now, safe and in good hands, could he let his guard down.

I wondered, seeing him lying in the crate, what made a lone wolf separate from the pack. Did he not fit in, or did he choose to go out on his own? I assumed it was the former. Maybe they were wolves who for some reason failed to recognize the signals, didn’t wag their tails soon enough or often enough, or didn’t notice when more dominant wolves did? Then I wondered what would happen if two lone wolves met. Would they fight, or would they empathize with each other and realize they had something in common? Would they realize they’d be better off if they teamed up?

Would they wag their tails or bare their teeth?

“He’s exhausted,” Krista said, looking over my shoulder.

On my way out, I looked into a room off to the side and saw Dr. Roundtree, who was in the middle of some sort of surgical procedure on a cat. The cat, black with white paws and cowl, was lying on its back with a tube down its throat, and some of his internal organs had been lifted from his chest cavity to make room for the veterinarian to do whatever it was he was doing. It may sound odd to think a former US Marine sergeant might feel squeamish around blood and gore, but I had to suppress a brief gag reflex. I should have been tougher, in theory, but, in truth, I’ve always been queasy around blood. In third grade, I attached a fake bloody eyeball from a costume shop to my forehead for Halloween, but when I looked in the mirror, the sight of the eye and the fake blood actually caused me to see stars and almost faint. I was reminded that the animal hospital was a portal, a place where sick animals came; some or most went home better, but some didn’t make it. It happened every day. It happened no matter how skilled the surgeon or how lucky the patient.