The Adventures of Zoe, the Wonder Dog
Chapter 8
By Carrie Jacobson
The story so far:
When James Dunning lost his job, it meant losing his home and his dog, Zoe, too. He and his wife moved in with her mother, who’s allergic to dogs. James took Zoe – an old and mostly blind lhasa apso – to the shelter in Shohola, Pa., and left her there, in the night, too sad and humiliated to face the shelter workers in the daylight.
Kaja, a large red dog who’s been on her own for a while, found Zoe and freed her. They’re tracking east, through the woods, on a mission to find James.
Meanwhile, in their home in Barryville, on the bank of the Delaware, Ashton and Samantha Morrone, 7 and 9 years old respectively, are on vacation from school. Sam has just finished reading “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” and she and Ashton are building a fort that’s also a raft.
The day has been hot and long, and Zoe’s hungry. Kaja has been on her own for a while now, roaming the woods, and she knows how to pace herself, but Zoe doesn’t, and she is hungry and tired and thirsty, and the pads of her feet feel raw and sore.
She can smell the scent of water in the air, and knows by now that it’s the river. They will cross it, Kaja tells her, but not until tomorrow. Now, she will leave Zoe in the woods and go and get food.
Zoe settles under some ferns and brush a few yards back from the edge of the road. Kaja comes up close, licks one of Zoe’s ears, and then, she’s gone. In her dark vision, for a few moments, Zoe can see the color of Kaja’s coat, but soon enough, that’s gone. She can still smell the big dog’s scent all around her. On the ground. On the bushes. On her. She can smell Kaja’s scent, and she believes that the big dog will come back.
Zoe looks around, but through her dim eyes, in the day’s long dusk, this place is much like any other place. The sky is still brighter than the ground, and the trees make dark streaks up and down. There’s the hot smell of the road, and the cars on it, and farther off, the smells of people, living and cooking and going about their lives. There’s the bif smell of the river, and the cool scents of earth and dew and pine needles.
She senses movement to one side, and turns her head to look, but she can’t see anything. The movement was not big, she thinks. It was something small, if it was anything.
She hears a noise then, high overhead. A rapping kind of hammering. It sounds like it’s coming from one of the trees. Then, higher still, there’s a shriek, a thin, sharp, keening sort of noise that seems to be moving on the air. Zoe holds herself absolutely still and listens hard. She hears the beating of bird wings above her, and the scrabble of something small, climbing a tree nearby. Then, she hears something moving behind her, and this, whatever it is, sounds big. She can hear this thing, whatever it is, and she can feel it moving, too.
Her heart pounds. It is banging in her chest, and she is scared, and trembling, and alone, and she wonders for the first time whether Kaja is coming back.
The thing moves closer behind her then, scratching at the ground and sniffing at the air. She can smell it now, and it smells bad, worse than the coyote, darker, more like garbage, more like something rotten, and she presses her little body into the cool earth and closes her eyes and thinks, I’m just a little dog who used to live in a house with rugs and beds and chairs and a bowl of water and a man who’d rub my head and take me out when I needed to go out, and I’m just a little dog, here alone in the woods, with a thing behind me that sounds big and smells bad, and I am just a little dog, and I’m alone and scared –
And then, something wells up in her, some thing from her ancestors, from a thousand years ago, from the time that lhasa apsos guarded Buddhist temples in Tibet. The thing starts deep in her chest, and rises, hot and hard and tough, grabbing at her soul, and welling up deep in her throat, gathering into a growl made of rocks and blades and strength and the courage of centuries, a growl so tough and strong that it pulls her to her feet and she jumps up and spins around and barks, ferociously! Again and again! She charges the thing, runs right at it, this thing she can smell and hear but cannot see –
And it runs away!
Whatever it is, she hears it running off! It crashes through the bushes, breaks sticks under its big feet, shakes the ground as it run, and Zoe feels the power course through her tired little body, and she knows she’s done it, chased the big thing off! She stomps, stiff-legged, a few more times, and barks and growls just to feel the power of it, and then she circles, around and around, under the ferns and the bushes, and curls up there, on the sweet-smelling earth, to wait for her friend to return.
Carrie can be reached at carrie@zestoforange.com
Tags: Carrie Jacobson
