The Puppy in the Floodwater

The canal had left its banks by the time we arrived, and the road along it had become a second, slower river. Rain was still falling in sheets. A man stood at the flooded bank waving both arms and pointing out into the current. At first I saw only debris going past. Then I saw the bush, and what was clinging to it.

A puppy, no more than three months old, had been swept off the bank path when the canal rose, and somewhere in that brown rush he had caught himself on a half-submerged bush growing out of the bank. His front paws were hooked over a low branch, his chin rested on the wet wood, and the rest of him trailed in the current, pulled sideways by water that never stopped pushing. He was soaked through, his small coat plastered flat, his hind legs paddling weakly whenever a surge lifted him. Every few seconds the current tugged harder and one paw slipped, and he scrambled, splashing, crying in thin bursts, until the paw caught again.

He could not climb onto the bush. He could not let go. He could only hold, and holding was spending him at a rate I could watch. His head sank lower between surges. His eyes were half-closed against the rain. The cries grew further apart, and each one was thinner than the last, and the water kept rising around the branch he had staked his life on. In another hour the bush itself would be under.

Floodwater rescues are done with ropes or they are not done at all. My partner drove an anchor stake into the high ground behind the bank and clipped my safety line to it, and a second line to a tree further back. I wore the harness over my rain gear, checked both knots twice, and went down the bank on my heels, braced, letting the line take my weight as the mud gave under me. The current hit my legs like a moving wall, cold and full of grit.

I talked to him the whole way down, though I doubt he could hear much over the water. When I was close enough I stopped and set my feet, one against a root, one against a stone, and leaned out over the current with the line taut behind me. He was two arm’s lengths away. It might as well have been two metres. The water between us was the fastest part of the channel, and if I missed my hold on him, the current would take him past me in a second and there would be no second chance in that brown water.

So I did not reach until I was sure. I worked one hand along the bush itself, branch by branch, pulling myself closer by wood that bent and complained under my weight, until my fingers closed around the main stem beside his paws. Only then did I slide my other hand under his chest. He was colder than the water. His whole body trembled in one continuous shiver, and when my hand closed around him he made a sound I still hear — not quite a cry, more like a breath he had been holding since the flood took him.

The complication came as I lifted. I had him clear of the branch, held against my chest with one arm, when a surge came down the canal carrying a tangle of branches and a sheet of roofing. My partner shouted. I turned my back to it and braced, and the debris hit me across the shoulders and spun me half around, and for two terrible seconds the safety line was the only thing keeping us both out of the main current. The puppy slipped in my grip and I caught him lower, around the hips, his head against my collarbone, his paws scrabbling once against my jacket before they went still. We hung there in the push of the water until the surge passed, and then I climbed the bank the way I had come down, hand over hand on the line, with him folded inside my arm.

On high ground he lay in the towel completely flat, too weak to shake the water off, breathing in quick, shallow pulls. We rubbed him warm through the towel, a little at a time, and he coughed up canal water and trembled and then, slowly, began to shiver properly — hard, angry shivering, the kind that means a body is fighting back. At the clinic the vet dried and warmed him and checked him over: chest clear, no broken bones, only exhaustion, cold, and paws worn from scrabbling at bark. He slept for most of a day. By the second day he was eating warm food and complaining, hoarsely, at the kennel door.

The man who had waved us down came to the shelter that week. The puppy had been his neighbour’s, washed off a yard path in the first rise, and the neighbour asked only that he go somewhere on higher ground. He did. A family on the hill above the canal took him in.

We named him Cuon — the Vietnamese word for swept away. It seemed honest: the floodwater tried to keep him, and lost.

I think about that canal bank sometimes, whenever rain drums hard and the drains start to sing. I think about a pair of small paws hooked over a branch, and the water rising by finger-widths, and how holding on is a kind of strength that runs out like a clock. And someone happened to be standing on that bank in the rain. And someone happened to stop his car instead of driving through the flood, and point, and wave, and stay.