The Puppy Under the Hillside

The rain had stopped two days before, but the hillside had not finished falling. A bank of earth above the old burrows at the hill’s edge had slipped in the night, and when the family below came out in the morning, the slope wore a new scar and one of their litter was gone. The Dalmatian puppy, white with his first true spots, three months old and incurably curious, had been seen at dusk nosing around the mouth of the old burrow. The burrow’s entrance was now under two metres of slid earth, sealed as completely as if it had never been there.

We found him the way you find anything buried: by listening. The whole team worked along the scar on our knees and then flat on our bellies, ears close to the cold earth, knocking softly, calling, waiting. For a long time there was nothing but the drip of water out of the slope. Then, low on the scar, a sound came up through the earth — a cry so faint and muffled it seemed to come from inside my own head. He was alive in there. The slide had not filled the whole burrow; somewhere under the hill a pocket of the old tunnel still held its shape, and in it a puppy lay in total darkness, in air that would not last.

His crying came in weak, spaced efforts, each one thinner than the last, with long silences between that frightened us more than the sound did. A puppy with strength cries constantly. This one was rationing himself — or running out. When we dug the first careful hole toward the sound, the air that rose was stale and warm, and we understood he was lying flat down there in the dust, spending the last of himself an inch of voice at a time.

We dug by hand, in shifts. No spades near the pocket, no boots on the scar. First we opened a narrow air shaft — a hole no wider than my forearm, worked down with a hand auger and then fingers, angling toward the sound until it broke through into the pocket’s roof. A thread of fresh air went down. From below came a change in the crying, a small, startled quickening, and I put my mouth to the shaft and talked into the dark, steady and unhurried, so that whatever else the dark contained, it now contained a voice. Then we widened the dig beside the shaft, a little at a time, carrying the earth away in buckets, shoring as we went, feeling for the roof of the old tunnel with fingertips before trusting anything.

The complication came midway, when the opening we had made was nearly wide enough for an arm and a light. The dig face above it — wet earth that had seemed settled — sheared without warning and slid, a soft ton of it, and sealed the opening completely, snuffing our lamplight and our view in one slow second. It had not gone onto him; the pocket’s roof held, and through the air shaft, mercifully still open, his crying came up thin and terrified but unbroken. Nobody shouted. Nobody snatched at the fallen earth. We cleared it again by handfuls from above, lying full-length, passing the soil back hand to hand, while I went back to the air shaft and talked into it without stopping — the same low, boring litany — so that down in the dark he would know the world had not finished with him. The light went back in a crack at a time.

After that it was only patience. We widened the hole enough for my shoulders, and I went in headfirst on a line, into the smell of dust and old rain, and found him by touch before the lamp found him: a small body lying flat on the tunnel floor, coated head to tail in grey dust so that his spots showed only where his own trembling had shaken it loose. His eyes were half-closed and filmed. His paw moved once against my hand, weakly, the way his voice had moved. I worked my arms under him and drew him back out into the daylight an inch at a time, and he did not struggle at all. He pressed his muzzle into the crook of my elbow, the way puppies press into their mothers, and held on while I backed us both into the light.

The vet checked him at the house while the family crowded the doorway: no broken bones, nothing crushed, only dust in his lungs that coughing would clear over days, dehydration, and exhaustion to the bottom of him. He was wrapped, given fluids a little at a time, and slept the clock around in a box by the stove, coughing up grey in his sleep. Within the week his spots stood black and clean again, and he was digging — the family reported it with mixed feelings — in the garden, which was fenced, and shallow, and watched.

We named him Dom — the Vietnamese word for spots. It seemed honest: the collapsed burrow tried to keep him, and lost.

I think about that hillside sometimes, when the rain has been long and the banks along the road stand heavy and dark with water. I think about how quietly the earth can close over a small life, and how a grave is only a burrow whose air runs out before the digging reaches it. And someone happened to be walking that slope at first light, checking the fences after the rain. And someone happened to count the puppies at the gate, and count again, and go looking instead of hoping.