Rescuing Riley, Saving Myself (3 page)

It felt utterly strange to look at an animal and not know for certain what kind of animal it was. Clearly the thing in the bottom of the hole was suffering from extreme malnutrition and starvation, so emaciated that it didn’t look like a dog any more—if that’s, in fact, what it was.

“Hey!” I called out softly. I wanted to be gentle to it, and I didn’t want to frighten it.

I needn’t have worried. It didn’t look up or show any sign that it heard me. It only paced back and forth, head down because it didn’t have the strength to lift it. It was weakened, desperate, looking for a way out, walking back and forth, as if hoping the rock walls would open up somehow. The pothole was perhaps fifteen feet deep from where I crouched and eight feet across. The rim opposite me was maybe ten feet from the bottom, the hole shaped more like a ladle than a bowl.

The animal’s fur was black and caked with mud. I could almost count the vertebrae in his spine. He had only a cavity where the belly should be. I tried to recall the survival training I received as a Marine. I didn’t know about dogs, which I finally decided the creature was, but I knew a man can go as long as a month without nutrition and less than a week without water. The mud-caked fur meant there must have been standing water in the hole at some point. My best guess was that the poor creature was in that final stage of starvation. I knew as well that a kind of madness accompanies malnutrition and, in particular, dehydration when it reaches the point that the body can no longer flush itself of toxins, which then affect brain function by causing chemical imbalances. I recalled that my mother used to say she had a “chemical imbalance,” though not from dehydration. I had no way of telling how far gone mentally this poor dog was.

The tail hung limp and seemed incapable of wagging. I couldn’t tear my eyes away from its shoulder blades and pelvic bones, which were now the most dominant features on its body. As I watched, the animal collapsed, dropping first to its elbows before falling into the dirt, where it lowered its head to the ground and lay motionless. I wondered if it had died, right before my eyes.

I looked up. The canyon walls were too high to see the topmost edge. I was minimally two hundred feet deep—but perhaps twice that. The sky was a broken narrow blue line. I tried but could not for the life of me figure out how this animal arrived here. It surely could not have fallen and survived.

I looked up-canyon to recall how I’d already used seven twenty-five-foot lengths of rope to reach this spot. I’d needed hand lines to navigate several difficult scrambles and had completed two free-hanging rappels—the dog could not have casually ambled away from its owners and made its way here on its own.

I wondered if he’d arrived here by some natural event. Occasionally, exploring places like this, you come across the carcass or skeleton of a dead animal that got washed into the canyon during a flood. I found the body of a coyote once. Slot canyons are generally not full of life, beyond the birds that make their nests on the canyon walls. Slot canyons are typically too dry and bereft of sunlight to support vegetation. Because there is too little to eat, prey species don’t come down into slot canyons, which means predators don’t frequent them, either. When there is water, it pours through with such force that it would kill any animal—small or large—caught in the current. About a mile up-canyon, I’d passed beneath a large logjam of tree branches wedged between the canyon walls by the force of flood waters. The logjam had been sixty feet above my head.

In other words, the dog could not have tried to ford a shallow wash or arroyo upstream and gotten carried here. It would have been dashed against the walls.

I took a moment to assess the situation. The first task was to identify and evaluate the problem, but I couldn’t do that unless I went down into the pothole. I couldn’t go down into the pothole without a hand line at the very least, but I couldn’t see any way to rig a hand line—nothing to tie off to, no raw materials to arrange as a dead-man’s anchor, no logs or rocks. I would need to set a bolt, but my tools to do that were in my backpack, which I’d left behind.

I almost said, “Wait here,” though the dog hardly had a choice. It didn’t move, but something told me it was still alive. Maybe that was just the hopeful part of me engaging in wishful thinking. If it was still alive, it was alive the way a candle smolders after you blow out the flame, and for a moment, the tip of the wick glows orange.

I set off to retrieve my pack, and as I moved, I arrived at the only conclusion that remained. I recalled the old Sherlock Holmes stories I read as a boy where the great fictional detective says, “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” The conclusion I reached was that the dog did not find his way into the pothole by accident, by wandering, by an act of nature. He was there because someone put him there.

The thought was appalling, and I picked up my pace.

Then I’m running.

I’m running because I’m being chased. I’m thirteen years old, and a kid is following me home from junior high because he wants to hurt me. If I let him, it will be the second time I’ve been attacked today. I’m not even sure why he’s chasing me, because I haven’t done anything to him, but I have been identified as an easy target for bullying. It’s a label I’ve worn, and a burden I’ve carried, since I was five. I’m afraid of everybody, because it’s safer than trying to figure out who might be friendly and who might be a bully. Sometimes it feels like I give off some kind of signal that brings out the bully in kids who are never bullies to anybody else, though I can’t for the life of me figure out what it is. I’m isolated and alone, because it’s not safe for kids who aren’t bullies to be seen with me or stick up for me, because then they’d run the risk of getting picked on, too. It is not considered “cool” to stick up for someone who’s unpopular. It’s like saying you like a band everybody else hates, except, of course, kids who get bullied are not bands.

I can’t even remember the first time somebody bullied me. Once, in preschool, somebody called me “stupid head,” and everyone else laughed. Was that the first time? Or did I miss the first time? I didn’t react, didn’t know how to react or realize that I needed to react, and that invited more abuse, because then the goal was to get a reaction from me, the kid who was clueless. Somehow, somewhere, I’d been “chosen” to be the butt of everyone’s joke.

I reach the back door of the apartment where I live with my mother, let myself in, and lock the door behind me. I ask myself the same question I’ve been asking since the bullying first started: “Why is this happening? Why me?” If I knew what the reason was, I could change whatever it is about me that made me so vulnerable to bullying, whatever it is that made me such an inviting target. I’m a normal boy. I’m not weird. I’m not a nerd. I don’t smell. I like Star Wars, just like everybody else. I like the same TV shows other kids like. Why have I been singled out? What have I done to deserve it? What did the kids who’ve escaped bullying do to avoid it—what’s the trick?

Somehow, I carry a stigma everywhere I go. When kids choose sides for sports teams at school, I am invariably chosen last, not because I’m a bad athlete, but simply because I’m unpopular. Moving to a different school and starting over is not an option because Cudahy, Wisconsin, does not have school choice, nor could my mother, Sandra, an X-ray technician, make anywhere near enough money to send me to a private school. And even if I went to a new school, I would again be singled out as “the new kid.” I understand that some kids are more popular than others, but I am well below merely “unpopular.” I am ignored by most people and scorned and abused by others, and I never did anything to hurt anybody.

At home, behind my locked door, I’m safe, but I know I can’t go back to school. When my mother gets home from work, I will pretend to be sick, and tomorrow morning, I’ll say I have a stomachache. I will not tell her what’s happening at school, because I can’t talk to her. To be honest, I don’t even know if she cares about my troubles. And if I did tell her, she would probably blame me for doing something wrong. I’m safe, temporarily, but I’m still terrified, because I know that the abuse I’ve been suffering is not going to end. It’s not going to get better, and, very likely, it’s going to get worse.

I ran for my pack, thinking about a dog that was alone, abandoned, abused, isolated, left for dead by someone. I didn’t know who, and I couldn’t say why, but I knew, I was certain, what the dog was feeling. Our paths had crossed, and now we were connected, either by destiny or random chance, but from the moment I first saw him, I knew I wanted to prove something to him—that even though some other human had done this to him, this one wasn’t like that.

In that moment, I also knew I was not going to leave him where he was, or pretend I hadn’t seen what I saw, or that it was not my responsibility to save him. That part was almost simple. I didn’t need to ask,
Could I live with myself, if I didn’t do something to save him?. Would I ever be able to get the image out of my head of the poor creature, abandoned at the bottom of a hole?
The easy answer to both questions was no.

I retrieved my pack. For the first time since leaving Salt Lake City, I wished I wasn’t alone. I returned to the pothole, took out my cordless drill, notched a drill bit, and tightened the chuck. I picked a spot in the rock at the top of the chute and began to drill, setting my bit at an angle perpendicular to the rock face. After about thirty seconds, my bit was perhaps six inches into the soft sandstone, deep enough to set a bolt and hanger. I took a bolt from my pack, a five-inch-long threaded zinc screw with a sleeve around the threads, pounded it in with my hammer, and tightened it with a wrench, turning it several full rotations clockwise. The hanger attached to the bolt compressed between the sandstone and the nut, locking up tight. I clipped into it and tested it. It seemed secure, but if I was wrong, I could find myself in the same predicament the dog was in: trapped without food or water.

I put on my climbing gloves, leather with padded palms for grip and protection from friction, and backed down the chute hand-over-hand. I felt the air turn damp and several degrees cooler as I descended. The bottom of the pothole sloped down-canyon, and at the lower end, there was a layer of damp mud.

I knelt down next to the dog. His eyes were open, but he didn’t look at me. He stared off into nothing, listless and unresponsive. I took off my gloves and laid my hand on his side. I could feel his ribs, hardly any muscle tissue between them, and the ends felt sharp, as if they could perforate his skin. I couldn’t feel a heartbeat, but his rib cage expanded, barely, as he breathed. I tried to give him an affectionate touch, a scratch behind the ears, but he was unresponsive and motionless. I wondered how he’d summoned the strength to walk in circles when I first saw him.

Now it was as if he knew I was there, and he was giving himself over to me.

“You’re going to be all right,” I said softly. “I’m going to get you out of here.”

Was I trying to convince myself or the dog?

I found my water bottle and unscrewed the cap. I positioned the mouth of the bottle close to the dog’s lips. Suddenly he lifted his head and opened his mouth to display his teeth, one last effort to defend himself, perhaps, but when he tried to growl, I heard only a rasp. His head went down again. It was all he could do.

I poured some water onto the rock in front of his mouth. He didn’t notice.

“Come on,” I said. “You have to drink something.”

I poured more water in front of his mouth, splashing it onto his lips, but again, no response. I considered pouring water directly into his mouth, though I feared he might gag on it or even drown. Then, when I accidentally spilled water onto his paw, directly in front of his face, he seemed to understand what I was offering him for the first time. His eyes moved slowly. His small tongue came out, dry and almost white, and he licked the top of his paw, but in slow motion, his tongue absorbing the water like a sponge before he transferred it to his mouth and throat.

That deep in the canyon, no surface sounds penetrated. The angles of the rock walls formed acoustic baffles to dampen any noise. In the quiet, above the sound of my own breathing and maybe the pounding of my heart, I heard his stomach gurgling. One drip at a time, I put water on his paw and he lapped at it.

I was encouraged, but his extreme weakness and frailty concerned me. I had no medical training, but even so, it seemed clear to me that I couldn’t put him in my backpack and take him out the way I came. He would not survive the journey. On the side of the pothole, opposite the mud, I noticed a half dozen pieces of desiccated feces, white and flaky. How long had this poor creature been trapped?

His neck went limp. The simple act of licking his paw drained him. I looked up. The thin strip of sky I saw was cloudless and blue. I had checked the weather report that morning before entering the canyon. No chance of rain, it said. No danger from flooding, or from predators, or cave-ins, or collapses. Time was now the dog’s only enemy. He needed water, and he needed food, and for some reason, I chose this day to enter this canyon and find him, so it was up to me.

Once again, long buried memories flooded back.

I am hiding in my bedroom, wishing someone would come find me and ask me what’s wrong, but knowing they won’t. Part of me doesn’t want anyone to find me because I feel profoundly ashamed. I am utterly humiliated, and I know of all people, my mother will not be able to help me if I tell her what’s going on. She can’t even help herself. And what would I tell her? That I’m obviously screwed up in some way. That there’s something about me that everyone simply likes to hate. I have nowhere safe to go. What good would sharing any of that do me? So I just learn to keep it all inside. And I learn how to hide . . . everything.

Kneeling beside the dog, I placed my hand on his head and stroked it, curling my finger against his cheek. His stare was blank, focused on infinity. I couldn’t say for certain if he could hear me, and I knew he wouldn’t understand my words, but if he could still understand anything, I thought, it would be touch. I leaned in close, stroked his head and said, “You’re not alone anymore.” I think what I really meant was
we’re
not alone anymore.