PART 2: What the Pines Were Hiding
“Dot, you are not going out there,” Rudy said, rounding the counter with the spatula still in his hand. “It’s thirty below. You’re seventy-one.”
“Then you’d better keep the coffee hot for when I get back.”
I pulled Ed’s old navy parka off the hook, the one with the fur-trimmed hood I’d never had the heart to give away. I wound my cream wool scarf twice around my neck, filled a plastic container with biscuits, and went out to the truck.
The dog wouldn’t climb in. She ran ahead of my headlights instead, limping down the middle of Sheridan Street and out onto the fire tower road. I crept along behind her at fifteen miles an hour with my heart in my throat.
A mile past the last house, the plowed lane ended. She turned off the road into the trees, so I parked and followed her on foot.
The snow came up past my knees. I fell twice. The second time I couldn’t get up for a long minute. I lay there staring at the gray sky through the branches, thinking how foolish this would sound in my obituary. Both times the dog came back and stood over me, panting, until I was on my feet again.
We went down a slope toward Shagawa Creek. I could hear water moving under the ice.
That’s when I saw the biscuits. They lay scattered along the creek bank, dozens of them. Some were half-chewed, some frozen whole, some still in my wax paper. A trail of my own breakfasts, leading the way.
At the end of it stood a crooked lean-to of dead branches and a ragged green tarp, sagging beneath a foot of snow.
Beneath it, curled on his side, lay an old man. He wore a stained olive army jacket and a knit cap crusted with ice. I fell to my knees beside him and laid both hands on his shoulder.
“Sir? Sir, can you hear me?”
Frost had turned his beard white. His lips were blue. A gray wool blanket had been dragged over his legs. Later I learned the dog had pulled it from his pack herself, one corner at a time.
I pressed my hand to his chest. For one terrible second I felt nothing. Then it rose. Barely.
The dog lay down against him and pressed the whole length of her body into his side, resting her bloody neck on his hip. She had done this before. Many times, I realized. Every night of that storm.
The snow around the shelter was trampled in a wide circle, and there were other tracks. Coyote. Three of them, maybe four. Spots of blood had frozen pink where she’d fought them off.
“Oh, sweetheart,” I whispered to her. “Oh, you good, good girl.”
I pulled out my phone. One bar. Then none.
I crawled back up the bank on my hands and knees until I found two bars beside a birch tree. My fingers were so cold I could barely press the screen, but I called 911.
“Shagawa Creek, off the fire tower road,” I told the dispatcher. “An old man. Hypothermia, maybe worse. I don’t know how long he’s been out here.”
“Ma’am, the roads are bad. It’s going to take a while. Can you keep him warm?”
“I’ll do what I can.”
I went back down. I took off Ed’s parka and spread it over him, then lay down on his other side in the snow. The dog was on one side of him and I was on the other, like two halves of a fire.
I kept talking so he’d stay awake. I told him about the diner. About Ed. About the biscuits his dog had carried through the woods for three weeks. I told him she had brought me here, that she’d come into town bleeding to find help.
“She’s a good dog,” I said. “What’s her name?”
His eyelids fluttered. “Duchess,” he breathed.
“That’s a fine name. And what’s yours?”
He didn’t answer. Slowly his eyes opened, pale blue and watery, and found my face. He looked at me for a long time, as though he were trying to see through fifty years of snow.
Something crossed his face. Not pain. Recognition.
His cracked lips moved.
“Birdie,” he whispered.
I stopped breathing.
Nobody had called me that in fifty-eight years.
Only one person on this earth ever had. And he’d been dead since 1967.
