Rose in a Storm (6 page)

W
HEN
R
OSE EMERGED FROM THE WOODS AND APPROACHED
the road in front of the farm, she found it completely covered in snow. Since she had left the farm, a vicious squall had set in, and it was more obvious once she was outside the cover of trees. The snow was now falling more heavily than she had ever seen it. It was already deep enough that it was brushing the fur on her belly.

She imagined the sheep and other animals beginning to panic, not because the snow was that deep, but because it was falling so thickly that it had become like a wall, surrounding everything. The farm animals had not seen such snow or wind before and Rose knew that nothing frightened animals more than what was new.

As she neared the farmhouse, she heard Sam shouting before she saw him through the blowing snow, up on the hill behind the farmhouse. She quickened her pace. As she got closer, she could sense his worry.

*   *   *

S
AM
’
S VOICE WAS
sharp and rising. “Rose! Rose, where are you?” He followed the call with a piercing whistle, his other signal.

Sam knew Rose made occasional forays off into the woods, and he had never thought much about it. But when he called her, he expected her to be there, and most often she was.

He saw her as she approached and figured out right away what was wrong.

The goats had indeed panicked as the snow thickened and the terrifying winds rose with a howl, like a great predator materializing out of the air itself, blowing one of the feeders right through part of their fencing. In their fear, they had crawled over it and through the gaping hole in the fence, then taken off up the hill.

Sam pointed to the cow pasture. He often communicated to Rose through pointing, which he knew she understood. Rose followed his arm with her eyes, took in what he was pointing to.

“Look,” he said. And she did.

It was in these moments that his feeling for Rose mushroomed inside of him, sometimes nearly overwhelmed him. He thought Rose could probably sense what he didn’t say: We’ll figure this out together.

The cows had panicked as well, but most of them ran toward the barn, which they could see. The sheep had all retreated into the pole barn, where they huddled together. A small group of beef cows, though, had separated from the rest of the herd by the snow, blinded by the sudden squall, and, alarmed by the shrieking wind, had run, breaking through one of the gates and heading up to the top of the hill to take shelter under a stand of trees.

Even though the trees were now bare and the site exposed
to the storm, this is where the cows always went during rain and thunderstorms if the gate was left open. It represented safety to them, shelter, a familiar place to go when they were confused. A place they knew was there, even though they couldn’t see very far in front of them.

Sam had to shout through the rising wind.

“Rose, we have to find the goats, get them in. Then we have to get the cows in,” he said, pointing up to the top of the hill. “Anybody left out in this will be in trouble.”

Sam expected the paths and pastures to soon be impassable. The winds were so fierce, and the temperature plummeting so sharply, he doubted that any farm animal would survive long out in the open. He wondered if the hardier outdoor animals like deer and rabbits would make it. Although Sam and the other farmers usually paid little attention to the weather forecasters and their overheated predictions, he thought this time they might have greatly underestimated the storm.

He saw Rose focus. She paused, then tore through the snow, under the gate and up the hill. She was used to unexpected crises.

Few of the farmers in the county had working dogs; as Sam had, they assumed they’d take too much time and trouble to train. And they cost money. So as Rose’s reputation had spread, Sam often got calls in the middle of the night from other farmers asking for Rose—cows in the road, stray dogs, sheep scattered in pastures, rioting goats.

“Rose, we’ve got a farm emergency,” Sam would say, smiling, and the two of them would roar off in Sam’s pickup to clear things up. Sam loved these journeys, when he got to show off Rose and help a pal out.

When Sam called for her in the night, opening the door of the truck, she’d bark and spin for joy, leaping onto the front
seat across from Sam. She was always ready to go. And she always delivered, getting cows back in the barns, rounding up stray or lost sheep.

Sam didn’t like to take money from the grateful farmers, but he didn’t want to insult them either. They had great pride, most of them. So he charged ten dollars per visit. He put the money in a basket in the living room, and whenever Rose’s “emergency pot” hit thirty dollars he would go to the basement, pull out a frozen steak, and grill a big chunk for Rose’s dinner.

Sam and the other farmers always marveled at Rose’s gift for problem solving, her ability to gauge a situation and respond to it. Her routine never varied. She’d get out of the truck, look around, adjust her map, then get to work. She was like a Texas Ranger, he used to tell the other farmers. One riot, one dog.

There was the night a stray dog chased Kay Crank’s sheep up into the hills around Hebron. Rose went up into the woods and brought them back. And there was the night Roland Hanks’s cows walked right through his single-strand homemade wire fence and onto Route 22, a busy state highway filled with speeding trucks and cars. That was dangerous, Sam recalled, as the farm’s animals were milling in the road—hard to see at night—and Rose couldn’t round them up without darting onto the road herself.

Hanks, joked Sam, would never stop talking about how Rose jumped out of the truck, ran the cows into the barn, chased off the hysterical and useless farm dogs, and restored order in minutes. Hanks offered to buy her on the spot, but Sam said she wasn’t for sale.

Sam felt vindicated, as many farmers liked to ridicule people who paid money for dogs.

*   *   *

T
ODAY
, the farm had its own emergency.

Rose lifted her nose, raised her eyes, tilted her ears, followed the tracks. She knew right away where the goats would be—up over the crest of the hill and out of sight, foraging for bark and brush, or hiding from the wind. She could almost
feel
where they were.

She looked at Sam, who was trying to clear some snow away from the goat pen, and then took off up the hill, through the snow, running and leaping, and plowing through where she had to. It took her a couple of minutes, but soon she crested the hill, reaching a point from which she could no longer see Sam below.

There, off into the woods on her left, were the three goats, nibbling on the lower branches of some pine trees. They baaed and stirred when they saw her, but Rose knew that goats, unlike sheep, were not flocking animals, nor did they care to be herded. And they neither liked nor feared dogs. Goats were wont to challenge a dog.

Rose could not manage them with her eyes the way she could the sheep, nor startle them easily like cows. They were smart and stubborn, and they didn’t mind fighting, either, quick to lower their heads and butt, or kick out with their sharp hooves.

Rose moved around the pine stand to get behind the goats and cut off any flight into the woods, where it might be impossible to push them back out. She had an innate sense of how animals would move, and was always ahead of them in sensing their possible directions. If they broke, Rose was usually waiting for them.

In her work, Rose was always mindful of Sam, always
knew where he was, and always tried to keep whatever animals she was working between her and him.

Watching her warily, the three goats kept nibbling, almost frantically, on the bark and twigs. Rose crept up behind them until she was a few feet away. She saw they were unnerved by the shrieking wind and by the snow blowing into their eyes, and she worried they might bolt. She sat down and watched, trying to work out how she might move them.

After a moment, she charged at the goat closest to her, the leader. He turned, then lowered his head quickly and butted her, cracking her on the side of the nose. She yelped, and leapt back.

He was faster than she had anticipated.

She paused again, took in the scene, and then moved to the left, shaking off the pain near her eye. She ran alongside his tail and nipped at his side, and as he spun, she bit his haunches. He spun twice, then lowered his head.

The spinning had confused him a bit, Rose saw. She did it again. Then again. He looked less certain now, less aggressive.

One of the other goats lowered her head to butt Rose, but waited, cautious about engaging her. Rose gave her the eye, a strong warning look. The third kept eating, watching her nervously. Goats did not act in unison, but Rose knew that these were very attached to one another, and they hated to be alone. They would stay close.

If she could get one to move, the others should follow. She kept an eye on all of them and didn’t allow herself to be surrounded. Goats had little patience and short attention spans. That was their weakness.

Rose had lots of patience, and she never quit.

She backed up, lowered her head, and began barking and
growling. Every few seconds, when the male began to nibble on the bark, she would charge at him and bite his shoulder, then spin him again. He was tiring of this. He would rather be eating hay—anywhere—than trying to outmaneuver this determined creature. Rose grasped this. She had to wear him down. He would quit. She wouldn’t.

The other two were bleating loudly, anxious. She stopped, lowered her head, bared her teeth, barked more insistently. The male came out again to charge at her, but she was well prepared for him now, and he would not get close enough to butt her again. She sidestepped him and turned suddenly, going after the younger female, the most timid of the three.

That goat cried out, and Rose, making sure she was between her and the shed, leapt forward and bit her on the nose, drawing blood. It was a sensitive spot, and it moved sheep rapidly, but it stunned the younger goat, frightened her. The goat turned, complaining in a loud and shrill way, and then began running in retreat down the hill.

The other two lifted their heads in confusion, and Rose got behind them and lunged and barked and nipped. She had them. Rose kept at it for a few minutes, and, as she knew would happen, they eventually quit the struggle and tore off after their mate down the hill, toward the safety of Sam, whom they associated with food and the shed that was their shelter.

They bounded nimbly through the snow over the hilltop, faster than Rose could run through such deep drifts, down to the shed. Sam held the gate open and Rose made her way, steadily and laboriously, down the hill after them, to make sure they felt her silent pressure at their backs.

Sam closed the gate and, that done, looked up at the renegade cows. Without additional conversation or commands,
Rose veered off across the pasture and into the stand of trees where the cows were clustered, mooing and huddling together for warmth, trying unsuccessfully to get out of the wind and snow.

Rose could see that they needed to get down into the lower pasture as the wind was ferocious at the hilltop. She could already feel the warmth draining from her own body.

Rose went into a crouch and lay still, watching as Sam made his way through the storm to the lower cow pasture, where he shoveled for a few minutes to make sure the gate was clear. It had been forced open a few feet by the wind-spooked animals, and that was where these cows would have gotten out.

Rose pursued a different strategy with the cows. Though they were more pliant, cows were also more dangerous than goats, especially when they panicked. Cows could kill a dog with one kick, crack her skull, or trample her. She had been kicked a few times, and she remembered it well. Still, cows were also dumber and slower and much more predictable.

She lay low to the ground, creeping along slowly. One or two of the cows had noticed her and bellowed, but when she stopped moving, she lost their interest again. Rose waited until Sam had the gate cleared. When he waved his hand and called out to her, her ears tilted to pick up his voice cutting through the roaring wind and snow. “Rose, get the cows here.”

She moved up two or three feet, then stopped. The cows, sensing her movement, became more anxious now, stirring. She eased forward, then paused again. More bellowing, a bit more confusion. She darted to the left, above the cows, keeping them between her and Sam, as always.

But she suddenly realized the flaw in her plan: They might
run farther up the hill, or to the other side of the pasture since they could move through snow more easily than she could. If they did, it would be difficult to get them back across that distance.

Rose watched them carefully, reading them, studying them. She thought, in her own way, of a triangle. Sam was below, she was above. In her mind, she chose to put pressure on them to move down, while she made sure to flank them on the left and keep them from going off to the side.

She zigzagged down and to the left, like a sailboat tacking in the wind. The group moved up a bit, away from Sam, so she changed position, went into an outrun, swung away wide and farther up the hill.

They stopped moving, shifted back to the shelter of the stand. Rose crept slowly down the hill, Sam no longer visible in the snow. She waited some time, then padded forward again, as slowly and quietly as she could. Soon she was within a few feet of the cows, which did not know where she was or notice her. She could tell that by their silence.

Then she leapt forward, bursting out of the bushes above the cows, plowing through a string of icicles and sending them crashing to the ground. Landing right under one of the smaller cows, she jumped up and bit her on the underside, making enough noise and commotion in the process for the cows to think she was a pack.

The cows were duly frightened and confused. They bolted and bellowed in alarm. They fled the trees and started down the hill, Rose in close pursuit, barking, veering to the left and then back, giving the animals in the rear no opportunity to pause or turn around. She moved so rapidly, it was as if she really were a pack.