The Puppy in the Hillside

The rain had stopped an hour before the call came, and that is when hillsides let go. A farmer walking the track above his field heard a sound coming out of the wet slope itself, a small, worn scraping that stopped and started, and went closer, expecting a bird trapped in the bramble.

He was a French bulldog puppy, perhaps four months old, broad in the chest the way his kind are, with a flat face made for breathing hard in the best of weather. He had been out on the hillside after the rain, following his nose, when the soaked earth above the track gave way and slid down over him. The slide had taken his rear half completely: wet earth covered him to the middle of his back, packed and heavy, and only his front legs and his head were free.

That was how we found him: half a dog, in a slope still deciding whether it was finished. His front paws scraped weakly at the loose earth in front of him, an inch of movement, a rest, another inch, and gained nothing, because a dog pulls himself out with the half of him that was buried. His head lay low, chin nearly in the mud. His eyes were half-closed, filmed with exhaustion and grit. Now and then his whole free half shuddered in a long trembling wave, and the scraping stopped while it passed through him, and started again, slower.

You do not dig into a wet slope from below, and you do not pull a buried dog. First we made the hill safe to argue with. Two of us climbed above the slide with wide boards and drove stakes into the firm ground well back from the break, and laid the boards flat across the loosened earth to spread our weight and hold the slope, the way you shore a trench wall. Only when the ground above him stopped weeping trickles of mud did anybody go near him at all.

Then we dug by hand, from the sides, a little at a time. I lay on a board at his level with my head close to his and talked in the low, steady voice that promises nothing sudden, while my partner worked the earth away from his left side with cupped hands, never a tool, never a handful too big. The earth came away in cold, heavy slabs. Under it his coat was plastered flat and dark. He did not fight us. A puppy with anything left objects to strangers. He only lay and let our hands work around him, and once his paw scraped weakly against my wrist, the way it had scraped at the hill.

The complication came when we had freed him to the ribs. The loosened slope above the boards shifted with a soft, wet sigh, and a small second slide spilled down over the shoring and covered his front paws completely, burying the only part of him that had been free. His head came up with a startled effort, then sank again, and the scraping sound was gone. Everything stopped. We did not dig. We re-shored first: another board, two more stakes driven deep into the firm ground above the break, the slope pinned and quiet again, while I kept one hand flat on the warm earth over his buried paws so he would know the world had not forgotten where he was. Only then did we clear the new earth away from around him, handful by handful, until his paws were free and moving weakly again, and go back to the slow work at his sides.

After that it was only patience. The earth released him the way deep mud releases things, reluctantly, a fraction at a time. My partner freed the last of it from around his hips while I slid both hands under his chest, and we lifted him clear together, all of him, heavy with wet earth, and laid him on a dry blanket on the boards. He lay completely flat and trembling, too weak to stand, his breathing quick and shallow in that flat face. He only turned his head, slowly, rested his chin against my boot, and closed his eyes the rest of the way.

At the clinic the vet checked him thoroughly: no broken bones, nothing crushed, only deep bruising where the earth had held him, grit in his ears and eyes, and exhaustion all the way through him. They cleaned him gently, warmed him, gave him fluids a little at a time, and kept him two days. By the second morning he was standing, stiff and indignant, demanding his breakfast in a voice that filled the room. He went home to the farmer family whose hillside it was, and they moved his kennel to the flat ground by the house, far from any slope.

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

I think about that hillside sometimes, after rain, when the slopes sit heavy and quiet and pretend they have never moved. I think about how a whole hill can sigh in the night and take half a small dog into itself, and how the other half, the scraping half, can refuse to stop long after stopping would be easier. And someone happened to be walking that track when the rain eased. And someone happened to hear a small sound coming out of the ground itself, and to stop, and look, and understand that the hill was not finished with what it had taken.