The Puppy Beside the Hillside Road

The storm had passed in the night, but the hillside above the road was still giving up its water, and every ditch along the bend ran brown. We were nearly past it when my partner braked for a fresh scar of earth slumped across the roadside ditch. Only when the vehicle stopped did we hear it, under the dripping of the trees: a whimpering so weak it seemed to start and give up and start again.

We set the cones out first and stopped what little traffic the morning had, because a rescue on a blind bend is a hazard before it is a kindness. Then we went down into the ditch on foot, testing the slumped earth with each step. The small landslide had come off the bank in the wettest hour and settled in the ditch. Under it, at the ditch bottom, we found him. A Cavalier puppy, only a few months old, most of his small body buried in wet landslide mud. His head was free, turned sideways on the surface, and one front paw was free beside it, paddling feebly at nothing. The rest of him was simply gone into the mud.

His eyes were half-closed, filmed with grit. His free paw scrabbled once at the mud before his face, moved almost nothing, and rested, and that resting told us the most. The mud around his head was scored with the marks of hours of scrabbling, each shallower than the last. He had spent the night breathing against the weight of a hillside with one paw and a voice, and both were nearly finished.

We dug from the ditch side, with hands and small tools; anything larger near a body that small becomes a danger of its own. One of us worked at his side, taking the mud away in handfuls and passing it back. The other knelt uphill of him and held a wide board braced between him and the bank, a shield against further slippage, talking to him the whole time in a steady, boring voice. Earth that has moved once in a night like that is only waiting for an excuse.

The slope above the ditch was so saturated that it wept. Every hole we opened around him filled, slowly and then faster, with liquid mud sliding back off the bank, undoing our work as fast as we made it. Twice we cleared the mud from along his ribs and twice we watched it creep back over our work, tide-like and patient. Digging alone was not going to win that argument.

So we stopped digging and built first. We drove boards edge-first into the bank above our working hole to shore it, a rough wooden wall, and behind the boards we packed a low dam of tarp and sandbags across the ditch, catching the seeping mud above it and turning it aside down the ditch line. It took twenty minutes of wet, unglamorous building while one of us stayed at his head, keeping his face clear. Then we dug again, inside our shored wall, and this time the holes stayed holes. The mud came away from his ribs and stayed away. His buried side emerged a handful at a time, the second front leg, the small barrel of him, the hind legs tucked and stiff, until we slid both hands under him and lifted him out whole, whimpering, filthy from nose to tail.

He lay in my arms completely limp, too spent even to hold his head up, his one free paw resting against my wrist as if checking that the world had become solid. In the back of the rescue van we cleaned him with warm water and towels and wrapped him in dry blankets over a warmed pad. His shivering, when it came, came hard and honest. He drank a little warm water from a bottle cap, paused, and drank again, and we counted that a small victory. The vet at the clinic an hour later checked him slowly and completely: no broken bones, bruising along one side, cold and dehydration and exhaustion, nothing the night had done that rest would not undo. He slept in the warmed crate before the examination was even finished.

We did not have to wonder where he belonged for long. Before we had left the bend, a man came down the hillside road on foot from a house below it, calling into every ditch, his voice hoarse with hours of it. He had been searching since before dawn, since the storm took his garden fence and the puppy with it. The reunion beside the van needed no explaining: a limp, mud-streaked puppy lifting his head at a voice, and a grown man sitting down in the wet road to receive him.

We named him Truot — the Vietnamese word for sliding. It seemed honest: the landslide mud tried to keep him, and lost.

I think about that hillside road sometimes, when rain has passed and the ditches still run brown. I think about how much of a small life can disappear into a ditch in one wet hour, leaving only a head, a paw and a voice above the mud. And someone happened to be driving that bend slowly in the grey morning. And someone happened to brake for a scar of fresh earth, and to sit a moment in the quiet vehicle, long enough to hear a sound that had almost finished being made. He sleeps in a dry house now, below that hill.