Want to see this painting of Zoe the Wonder Dog, in real life? Visit the Wallkill River School Gallery, on Route 17K  in Montgomery, during September. Carrie Jacobson, who’s writing the tale of Zoe the Wonder Dog, is showing her paintings, with the marvelously talented George Hayes of Warwick. The show is on now; the artists’ reception is Saturday, Sept. 12, from 5-7 p.m., and all are invited! Check  out the Wallkill River School website, to the right on this page, for more information.

By Carrie Jacobson

Chapter 12

The story so far: Zoe, a little, blind lhasa apso, was left at the Pike County shelter when her owner lost his job and had to move in with his wife’s mother, who’s allergic to dogs. He left her at the shelter in the middle of the night, and Kaja, a big red dog, came and took her away. They have made their way through the woods, and crossed the Delaware on a rickety bridge. In Barryville, at the very edge of the river, Samantha and Ashton Morrone are building a fort that’s also a raft. The Morrones own a small hotel on the bank of the river. The kids have brought the dogs inside and begged to keep them both. Angie, their mom, would like agree. Pete, their dad, has said no. The dogs can  stay for the night, but that’s all.

That night, the dogs sleep in a little hallway at the front  of the house. Kaja can’t remember the last time she slept inside a real building. In the winter, she found an abandoned shed where she stayed on a series of frigid, snowing nights. It was half falling down, and missing most of its roof, but it was shelter from the wind. Kaja would curl into a tight ball, her nose deep in her thick, red coat. She was grateful for the shelter. If she’d had something like this, though, she’d have stayed all winter.

Zoe snuggles into Kaja’s warm side, and the big dog’s smooth breathing lulls her. She loves the smell of this dog’s red fur, and she loves how strong and muscled her body is beneath. Kaja is warm, too, and little Zoe is tired and drained and cold, and the warmth feels fine on this cool September night.

In the morning, Angie comes downstairs first. She looks through window of the hallway door, sees the dogs sleeping together there on the cool floor. The big dog is looking at her, a question in her eyes. The little dog is fast asleep, and as Angie watches, the big dog puts her head down again and snuggles around her friend.

Angie puts the coffee on and starts a pan of oatmeal. It’s September, and it’s cold enough this morning for oatmeal. Another fall, another year, another summer vanished into a poorly remembered patch of rain and heat and sun. This year, she’d promised herself in the spring, this year I will spend my days outdoors. I’ll sit on the deck in the long summer twilights, and I’ll pay attention to the birds and the woods and the river. I’ll live outside, like I did when I was  a kid, like my kids do now, and I will savor each moment of sun and heat, each single drop of summer.

But somehow, all those promises had drained away in the bustle of work and visitors that is summer in a hotel in the Catskills. Now the air has the bite of fall, the kids start school next week, and their hotel has its first vacancies since May. Summer is over, and somehow, Angie is surprised. And a little sad, too.

“Pete,” she says when he comes downstairs, “I want to keep the dogs.”

“Oh, Ange, we can’t keep them, honey. I mean, I’d like to keep them, too, but we just can’t. You know that.”

“No, I don’t know that. I don’t know when having a hotel meant you couldn’t have a life. Couldn’t have a dog.”

“Two dogs,” he said.

“But you and I both had dogs growing up. I think it’s important for the kids.”

“Angie, you know that you would end up taking care of any dog we had. The kids won’t do it, not after the first couple weeks, you know that.”

“Yes,” she said, “I do know that. And you know what? That’s fine. I guess I say it’s for the kids, but really, I miss having a dog. I really do. And look at them,” she says, pointing through the window. “Look at them.”

Pete looks. He sees two dirty, scruffy dogs. One is old and blind. The other looks like she could bite your leg off, and might, given half a chance. He looks at the dogs and he sees veterinarian bills, and grooming bills, and arguments with the state health department. He sees cars full of dog hair and rugs full of muddy footprints. He sees poop in the yard and vacations either changed by bringing a dog or made more expensive by leaving it. And then he looks at his wife’s face and sees a kind of longing he hasn’t seen since before the children were born.

“One,” he says. “I’ll agree to keep one.”

“But Pete, look at them! We can’t split them up.”

“Honey, it’s just too much. If we didn’t have the hotel, I’d say keep them both and get five more. But we just can’t. You know that.”

She does.

But she also knows that these dogs need to be together. So after Pete leaves for work, and before the kids wake up, she feeds the dogs, using most  of the small bag of food she bought last night, and tossing in some left-over turkey, too. She pets them both, buries her nose deep in the coat of the big red dog, picks the little blind dog up and hugs her close, and then opens the side door.

“Go on,” she says, and finds tears stinging her eyes, spilling over onto her face. “Go on, you two. Wherever you’re headed, I know you’re going together. Go on, now, and be safe.”

And she wipes her tears and smiles, watching the two friends trot away, following the river south.

Carrie can be reached at carrie@zestoforange.com

Goldenrod is blooming on the roadsides and the hillsides, promising autumn. See Carrie’s paintings at the Wallkill River School Gallery in Montgomery, Route 17K, Sept. 1-30. You’re invited to the reception, too, Sept. 12, from 5-7 p.m. See www.wallkillriverschool.com for information, hours and directions.

By Carrie Jacobson

Chapter 11

The story so far: Zoe, a little, blind lhasa apso, was left at the Pike County shelter when her owner lost his job and had to move in with his wife’s mother, who’s allergic to dogs. He left her at the shelter in the middle of the night, and Kaja, a big red dog, came and took her away. They have made their way through the woods, and crossed the Delaware on a rickety bridge. In Barryville, at the very edge of the river, Samantha and Ashton Morrone are building a fort that’s also a raft. The dogs and the kids have just seen each other.

At the sink in the kitchen of their house/hotel in Barryville, Angie Morrone looks out the back window and sees Samantha gesturing at something in the bushes. Angie can just see something red there, the color of a fox. Sam would know better than to approach a fox, Angie thinks. She would, wouldn’t she?

Angie goes out onto the deck. Over the sound of the river, she hears the kids now, and they’re calling, “Come here, come here!” As she watches, the red animal edges out of the bushes, and Angie sees that it’s the color of a fox, but bigger. It’s a dog, a big red dog, and it looks dirty but friendly. She watches as Samantha holds out her hand, palm down, and lets the big dog sniff her.

Then she watches as Sam opens a box in the fort she and Ashton have been building, and pulls something out. It looks like a cookie or a cracker. Sam offers it to the dog, who takes it, gingerly.
Then Angie sees the second dog come out of the bushes. This one sort of bumps into the big dog, and then into Samantha, and even from here, Angie can tell that this one has some vision issues.

Angie walks down the steps of the deck, and down the bank toward the kids and the dogs. Samantha starts in, right away.

“Mom, can we keep them, can we keep them, please? Please? Please? I’ll wash the dishes for the rest of my life. Please?”

Ashton starts in pleading, too.

“Sam, introduce me,” Angie says.

“This is Foxy,” Sam tells her, pointing to Kaja, “and this is Peanut,” she says, patting Zoe. Angie sees the cataracts in Zoe’s eyes then. “Peanut doesn’t see too well,” Samantha says.

Angie would love for the kids to have a dog. One dog. She’d really love it if they had a big dog. She grew up with big dogs, big strong dogs who could run and play all day with them. She’s missed dogs in her life here in Barryville. But Pete isn’t nuts about dogs, and they’re running a hotel here, and that means you don’t always get to do whatever you want in your home. She’ll have to talk to Pete about it when he gets back. She finds she’s already working on how to present it so he’ll say yes.

It’s been years since Kaja has been inside a house, but as soon as she’s inside, she remembers. She smells food and cooking, and her mouth begins watering. It’s been so long since she’s eaten anything but small animals and garbage, but the woman is cooking meat, and it smells so good, she can hardly stand it.

There are the smells of people, too, these people and a man, and other people, lots of them, but their smells are lighter, less true. The woman runs water into a bowl, and Kaja drinks then, savoring this, clear, clean taste, cool from a tap. She drinks deeply, and then settles to the floor, under a table, where she can see everything, but stay out of the way, too. She watches as the kids fuss with Zoe, trying to figure out just what she can see.

In a moment, Kaja is asleep. But when the door opens and closes, and a loud man’s voice hollers, “I’m home!” she wakes up.

The mother goes to the hallway, and there is soft talking. Then the man’s voice rises, and the kids, who have been brushing Zoe with an old hairbrush, look at each other.

“No,” he says. “No dogs. This is a hotel we’re running here. We’ll have the health department all over us, Angie.” The kids keep looking at each other. Sam bites her lip.

“Tonight,” Pete says. “They can stay here tonight, but that’s it. Tomorrow they go.”

Carrie can be reached at carrie@zestoforange.com

By Carrie Jacobson

Chapter 10

The story so far: Zoe, a mostly blind lhasa apso, and Kaja, a big red German shepherd/chow, have crossed a bridge over the Delaware to Barryville, on their way to find James Dunning, Zoe’s owner.

Meanwhile, Samantha and Ashton Morrone, a brother and sister who live in Barryville, are finishing a project in their yard on the banks of the river.

The sun is low in the sky and Ashton and Samantha are working on the raft. Right now, it’s more like a raft than a fort, and Ashton’s glad about that, because the raft part is the part that really excites him. Anyone can have a fort, but no one that he knows has ever had a raft.

Oh, sure, the people go by on the river all the time in their rafts and canoes and kayaks, but they don’t count. This raft, he and Samantha made it with their own hands, and their dad has always told them that anything they make with their own hands is five times as good as anything they buy in a store. Even vegetables, Dad says, though as far as Ash can tell, carrots and broccoli both taste bad, and it doesn’t matter whether they come from the garden or the store or the farmer’s market.

The raft is pretty big. Most of it is two doors that washed down the river in the last flood, and then there are logs and branches and pieces of wood. They’ve nailed some of the wood together, and used rope to lash other pieces on. The raft is probably about 10 feet by 6 feet, big enough for both of them to lie down at the same time. They’ve put put a couple logs upright, to sit on, and these they’ve fastened with angle irons that they found in the barn. There’s a crate, too, that they found along the river, and they’ve nailed this into the raft, lined it with a black plastic garbage bad and found a piece of wood to cover it.

On the bank of the Delaware, below their house, they’ve hidden the raft – made it a fort – with walls of reeds and brush. Over the top is a large piece of a blue tarp, another remnant from the river. As the sun drops, Samantha is working to fasten uprights to the log seats and the box. She figures if she can do this, they can use the tarp out on the river, for shade, and also for a sail.

Samantha can hear their mother singing with the radio, in the kitchen of their house. Mosquitoes are coming out now, and it’s starting to get dark. Ashton is up in the barn looking for more nails.

Samantha hears something in the brush. She stops moving and stays still. Very still. She’s hardly breathing, she’s so still.

The noise comes again, closer this time. A scratching, a rustling. Maybe there’s a growl, but maybe not. Maybe it’s nothing. Her mother is singing some silly song from a century ago, when she was a kid, and Ash is looking for nails, and the river is making its regular noises, and this is probably not a bear. But she stays still, anyways.

And then, with a little more rustling, a dog appears. It’s a big dog, a big red dog, with big ears and huge brown eyes. Its long hair is matted in places, and there are brambles and seeds in the red coat, but it’s a pretty dog, such a pretty dog – and Samantha falls in love at that very first moment.

She watches the big red dog, and then she sees there’s another dog, a little dog with a coat of brown and tan and black and white, and the little dog is nosing close to the big dog, following the big dog out of the bushes – and then the little dog runs headlong into a tree, and falls, and tumbles down the slope until she rolls into a pine tree and that stops her. She gets up and shakes herself off, and the big dog walks down the slope – keeping an eye on Sam – and sniffs the little dog, everywhere, and pushes with her nose until the little dog is headed downriver.

“Come here!” Sam calls to them. “Come here, dogs, come here!”

The red dog looks at her, then looks away, but Sam keeps calling. Then she gets an idea. She and Ashton have been hiding food down here for when they take their trip, and Sam crosses the raft, and opens the plastic bag inside the crate, and pulls out a sugar cookie. She breaks it in half and waves it toward the dogs.

“Come here, doggies, come here! Cookies! Cookies”

The big dog looks down the river again, and then turns back toward Sam. The big dog sniffs the air, once, twice, and then nudges the little dog around, and the two of them walk toward the girl.

But what Sam doesn’t know is that the dogs aren’t the only ones watching her.

Carrie can be reached at carrie@zestoforange.com

Eighty percent of the onions grown in New York state come from the Black Dirt Region. Its 26,000 acres were a flood plain whose soil was enriched by the decay of vegetation over the centuries. In time, immigrants from Poland and other eastern European countries drained the swampy soil and reclaimed it for agriculture.

Plants grow in this soil even in the winter. I made this painting in December; it will be one of the paintings in the show I’m having with George Hayes in September at the Wallkill River School Gallery, Route 17K, Montgomery. For price information, to get on my mailing list, or to find out more about the show, please email me at carriebjacobson@gmail.com

Chapter 9

By Carrie Jacobson

The story so far:

Zoe, an elderly, blind lhasa apso, was left at the Pike County Humane Society by her owner, James Dunning, who has lost his job and been forced to move in with his wife’s mother, who is allergic to dogs of all kinds.

Distraught, sad, embarrassed, James left Zoe at the shelter in the middle of the night. Before dawn, she was freed by Kaja, a big red dog who’s been living on her own for a few months. Zoe and Kaja have set out to make their way back to Middletown, to try to find James.

The sun wakes Zoe, and she opens her eyes to find that Kaja is gone. Zoe stands, and stretches. The sun is up, she can tell that much, but the morning is damp and cool, and she curls around herself and goes back to sleep again.

When Kaja nudges her awake, the sun has come up and the day has warmed, and Zoe finds she’s hungry. They walk out of the woods and stand at the edge of the road until there are no cars coming. Then they cross, and Kaja leads Zoe up the road, and then down a driveway and around the back of a little house to a trash can that’s been turned over.

This is a first for Zoe. All of this is a first for her. She’s been a pet, all these years. Even her first family, even though they hit her and kicked her, they gave her dog food – when they remembered.

Now, she’s eaten a rodent that Kaja killed, and now, she’s eating trash.

And it’s not so bad.

They find water in a bucket, then, and drink, then trot through back yards until they come to a small grove of trees and thick grass. They curl up and sleep for a while. When they wake, they walk along the edge of the road, heading away from the afternoon sun.

Zoe can smell the river, and it frightens her. It smells like water, and like mud. It smells like fish, and like the wind, and somehow, it smells like cars, too. And it is noisy. The water sounds fast and strong and deep, and the noise scares Zoe, makes her tremble.

They get closer to the river, and the noise gets louder. And now, Zoe can hear people shouting, and laughing. She can’t see them, can’t see the rafts and canoes they’re riding in, but she can hear them, calling to each other, crying out in glee, and rushing downstream with the current.

Kaja stops then, and sniffs at the wind. She listens, head cocked, one ear up. She looks down the road and up the road, and then she nudges Zoe onto the pavement. She steps in front of Zoe and walks down the roadway.

And then, she steps onto the bridge.

It’s an awful bridge, made of slats of wood so thin and so loose that it seems impossible they could hold a dog, let alone a car. But Kaja has seen it, she’s seen cars go across this bridge. The bridge hasn’t fallen down, the slats haven’t fallen in, the cars haven’t fallen through.

Kaja looks over the edge, and sees the river, far, far below, and she feels her legs shake. The little dog can’t see, Kaja knows this, and she thinks that maybe, for once, that’s a good thing.

She sets a paw on the bridge. The wood feels somehow soft, somehow warm. She pushes the little dog to the middle of the span, and walks beside her. This way, the little dog can’t fall off, and Kaja doesn’t have to look at the river.

They are about halfway across when Kaja feels a thrumming in the pads of her feet. She looks up. There’s a car, inching onto the far edge of the bridge.

She makes Zoe stop, and then she runs at the car, barking as loud as she can, barking and barking, baring her teeth – and the car stops.

The driver sees her, and then sees the little dog beyond her on the bridge, and stops the car.

Kaja trots back to Zoe, nudges her up and along, and they trot up to the front of the car, then go around it and then finally, trot off of the bridge and onto the solid soil of Barryville.

Carrie can be reached at carrie@zestoforange.com

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