The Beagle in the Empty Yard

We found him because the yard was too quiet. We had come into the derelict area at noon, in the worst of the drought heat, checking the abandoned buildings after a report of a dog crying there the evening before. By noon there was no crying. The concrete yard behind the empty houses lay white and shimmering under the sun, weeds standing dead in its cracks, and in the middle of it, where there was no shade at all, a small shape lay flat on the hot ground.

He was a Beagle puppy, perhaps four months old, tricolour under a coat of pale dust, and he was lying completely flat on the concrete with his legs folded under him and his chin resting on his front paws. His long ears spread on the ground beside his head. His eyes were half-closed and filmed against the glare. His mouth was dry, his nose was dry, and his sides rose and fell in quick, shallow pulls that seemed to cost him more each time. When our shadows crossed him he opened his eyes a fraction and tried, once, to lift his head. It barely left his paws.

Against the far wall stood the thin shade of a broken awning, and beyond it an empty, tipped-over water bowl. He knew where both were, most likely. He simply could no longer reach them. Dehydration takes the legs first, then the will to use them, and a puppy who lies down in open sun at the start of a drought day can be beyond standing by noon. His coat was hot to the touch. A fine trembling ran through him in waves and stopped, and ran again. He made no sound when we knelt beside him. He only watched us with those half-closed eyes, too weak for fear, too weak for hope.

We did not lift him straight off that concrete. My partner held the tarp above him on two poles, making shade where there had been none, and we let him lie in it while his body understood that the sun had stopped. Then I laid a damp towel, never cold, along his back and sides to draw the heat out gently. His breathing stayed fast, but the trembling eased. I touched a few drops of water to his mouth with my fingertip, and his tongue moved, dry and slow, and I gave him a few drops more, and then we waited, because a body that empty must be refilled patiently, or not at all.

When his swallowing was steady we slid the towel under him, lifted him flat, and carried him to the shade against the wall. There we worked in earnest, a little water at a time, long pauses between, the damp towel re-wetted as it warmed. Slowly his eyes cleared and his breathing deepened. He licked water from my fingers with real intent, and then he whined, one thin complaining note, and it was the best sound I had heard all day, because complaining takes energy he had not had an hour before.

The complication came just as we were preparing to move him to the vehicle. His breathing, which had been steadying, shallowed again, and his head sank sideways and his eyes went dull and unfocused. The vet on the phone did not hesitate. We laid him flat in the shade, loosened nothing because there was nothing to loosen, raised his hindquarters slightly on the folded towel, and kept the damp cloth moving along his belly and the insides of his ears while my partner fanned him steadily. We gave no more water until his swallowing was checked and sure again. For several minutes he lay between one state and the other, breathing thinly, while the concrete shimmered a few feet away in the sun. Then his eyes focused, found my face, and his tail moved once against the towel. We carried him to the vehicle wrapped loosely in the damp cloth, and nobody hurried.

At the clinic the vet checked him slowly. No wounds, no broken bones. Severe dehydration and heat exhaustion, his temperature high, his gums dry, his small body emptied out by sun and concrete. They cooled him by careful degrees, gave him fluids into a vein, and kept him in a quiet, dim pen. He slept through the afternoon and the night. By morning he was drinking on his own, unsteadily but with determination, and by the second day he had found his voice, a proper Beagle voice many sizes too large for him, and used it to demand breakfast.

He stayed at the shelter two weeks, putting on weight and confidence. In the end he went to a family with a shaded garden and two children, in a house where a water bowl would never be allowed to stand empty in the sun.

We named him Nen — the Vietnamese word for concrete. It seemed honest: the empty yard tried to keep him, and lost.

I think about that abandoned yard sometimes, when a drought settles in and the sun stands over the empty places at noon and the concrete holds the heat like a grudge. I think about how close it was, and how quiet it had gone, and how a small dog can lie in plain sight in the middle of an open yard and still be invisible to a whole neighbourhood. And someone happened to be passing that derelict street the evening before, and happened to hear him while he still had a voice. And someone happened to come back at noon the next day and search the quiet instead of trusting it.