The Puppy in the Rising Water

The rain was still falling when the call came, hard enough that the street outside the station sounded like a river. A woman reported a small white dog in trouble on a flooded sidewalk two blocks away, near the open drain by the corner. I grabbed the kit, a towel, and the small carrier, and we went out into weather that soaked us before we reached the end of our own street.

The sidewalk had disappeared under brown water ankle deep and rising, fed by a street that could no longer drain fast enough. The open drain channel ran along the curb, its cover washed aside in the storm, and in the open hole of it, I saw him. A Bichon puppy, small and white somewhere under the soaking, had slipped or been washed into the drain opening and could not get out. His body was down in the channel, braced against the concrete sides, and only his head and shoulders were above the water. His curly coat, meant to be a bright white cloud, was plastered flat and grey with street water, and it dragged at him with its own wet weight every time he tried to climb.

He had clearly tried for a long time. His front paws had scrabbled at the slick edge of the opening until they could only slip and splash, and now they barely moved at all. He held his chin up out of the water by the last of his strength, his nose tilted to the sky, his eyes half-closed against the rain. Every few seconds a small surge ran down the channel and washed over his shoulders, and each time he shuddered and sank a little lower before catching himself again. The water was rising, steadily, and the distance between the surface and his chin was a measurement nobody wanted to watch for long.

There was no technique to this rescue, only speed made careful. I knelt in the water at the edge of the opening, and I spoke to him first, low and steady, because a drowning-tired animal can still panic at hands. He did not panic. He turned his eyes toward my voice with an effort you could see, and that quiet trust frightened me more than struggling would have. Up close his whole small body was trembling under the water, in the deep, unbroken shivering of the truly cold, and his paws, when they touched my wrist, were icy and limp.

I slid both hands down into the channel on either side of him, slow through the murky water, until I could feel the shape of him: chest, ribs, the soaked weight of him. My partner braced behind me against the current and kept one hand ready with the towel. On a count, I lifted, not up and out in one pull, because his legs were folded awkwardly under him against the drain wall, but up a little, turn a little, free one leg, then the other, easing him along the space the way you free something fragile from a narrow jar.

The complication came with his back leg. Halfway up, it caught on something below the waterline, a broken edge of concrete or the rim of the displaced cover, and he made a thin, exhausted cry and went rigid in my hands. The water chose that moment to surge again, over my wrists, and for a few seconds I simply held him exactly where he was, neither up nor down, while my partner reached past me, felt blindly along his leg, and worked the caught paw free a fraction at a time. When it came loose, it came suddenly, and he came up into my arms in a rush of brown water, limp and coughing, and I folded him straight into the towel against my chest.

He lay there completely flat, too weak to shake himself, breathing in quick shallow pulls while the rain hammered the towel over both of us. We got him into the carrier on a dry blanket, rubbed him gently through the towel, and drove with the heater full on, while his shivering changed from the deep constant tremble of a body giving up to the ordinary shivering of a body fighting back. That change is the moment in this work you learn to wait for.

At the clinic the vet dried him, warmed him, and checked him over as he slept the sleep of the utterly spent. He had swallowed some street water and was cold and dehydrated, his paw pads worn from scrabbling at concrete, but his lungs were clear and nothing was broken. He stayed at the shelter for two days, eating small warm meals, his white coat slowly washed back into something like a cloud. By the third day he was standing at the front of his kennel, barking at the rain through the window, entirely himself again.

We named him Dang — the Vietnamese word for rising. It seemed honest: the flooded drain tried to keep him, and lost.

I think about that flooded sidewalk sometimes, whenever heavy rain starts drumming on roofs and the gutters run fast and brown. I think about a small white dog holding his chin above rising water on a street people were hurrying along with their heads down, close enough to help and too hurried to see. And someone happened to be looking down into that drain that day. And someone happened to stop in the rain, kneel in the water, and reach in. He is dry and loud now, and the drain has its cover back. But I still slow down at that corner when it rains.