Chicken Soup for the Pet Lover's Soul (23 page)

Dust filled the air. I was face down on the ground, not knowing how I got there. People were screaming for medics. My helmet was split open by shrapnel and would no longer fit on my head. Beau’s long black tail wagged near me in the confusion. He was crouched by his handler, waiting for orders. But it was no use; the young soldier had given his last command.

I pulled Beau gently away and stroked the fur on his back. Sticky liquid covered my hand and ran down the side of his body. A tiny piece of shrapnel had penetrated his back just below the spine. Again he seemed not to notice, and tried to pull away to be with his handler. “He didn’t make it,” I said, kneeling and holding him against my chest. “He just didn’t make it.”

Each GI is issued a large cloth bandage in an olive-drab pouch attached to his web gear. The rule is to use your buddy’s bandage for him and save yours for yourself. Beau didn’t have a bandage, so I wrapped him with mine.

They took the dog away with the other wounded. I never saw Beau again.

September 18, 1967. After eleven months and twenty-nine days in Vietnam, I was going home. Malaria had reduced me from 165 pounds to 130 pounds. I looked and felt like a corpse in combat boots. My heart was filled with death—the smell, the look, the wrenching finality of it.

I was standing in line to get my eyes checked. We all had clipboards with forms to fill out. The guy in front of me asked if he could use my pen. He’d been a dog handler, he said. Now he was going home to his family’s farm in Iowa. “It’s a beautiful place,” he said. “I never thought I’d live to see it again.”

I told him about the scout dog I’d befriended and what had happened to him and his handler. The soldier’s next words took my breath away.

“You mean Beau!” he exclaimed, suddenly animated and smiling.

“Yeah, how’d you know?”

“They gave him to me after my dog got killed.”

For a moment I was happy. Then two miserable thoughts popped into my brain. First, I’d have to ask him what had happened to Beau. Second, this handler was on his way home, leaving that loyal mutt to stay here till his luck ran out.

“So,” I said, looking at the toe of my jungle boot as I crushed out an imaginary cigarette, “what happened to that dog?”

The young soldier lowered his voice the way people do when they have bad news. “He’s gone.”

I was so sick of death I wanted to throw up. I wanted to just sit down on the floor and cry. I guess this guy noticed my clenched fists and the wetness in my eyes. He lowered his voice and looked around nervously.

“He’s not dead, man,” he said. “He’s
gone.
I got my company commander to fill out a death certificate for him and I sent him back to my parents’ house. He’s been there for two weeks. Beau is back in Iowa.”

What that skinny farm kid and his commanding officer did certainly didn’t mean much compared with the global impact made by the war in Vietnam, but for me, it represents what was really in all our hearts. Of all the decisions made in ’Nam, that’s the one I can live with best.

Joe Kirkup

The Deer and the Nursing Home

The deer had been struck and killed by a car. A passing motorist on the narrow mountain road saw a slight movement and stopped. Huddled beside the dead deer was a fawn with the umbilical cord still attached. “I don’t suppose you have a chance,” the motorist told the tiny creature as he tied off the cord, “but at least I’ll take you where it’s warm.”

The nearest place was the powerhouse of New Jersey’s Glen Gardner Center for Geriatrics, a state institution. Maintenance men there quickly produced rags to make a bed behind the boiler for the fawn. Then they took a rubber glove, pricked pinholes in a finger, diluted some milk and offered it to the fawn, who drank eagerly.

With the men taking turns feeding the fawn, the little deer’s wobbly legs and curiosity soon grew strong enough to bring it out from its bed behind the boiler. On their breaks, the men petted and played with the baby. “If it’s a female, we’ll call her Jane Doe,” they laughed. But it was a male, so they taught him to answer to “Frankie,” short for Frank Buck.

Frankie became especially attached to one of the men, an electrician named Jean. On nice days, Frankie stepped outside with his new friend, enjoying the fresh air and scratches behind the ears. Sometimes other deer came out of the woods to graze. When Frankie caught their scent, his head came up.

“You’d better tie him or we’ll lose him,” someone commented.

Jean shook his head. “He’ll know when it’s time to go,” he said.

Frankie began following Jean on his rounds, and the slight, white-haired man followed by the delicate golden fawn soon became a familiar sight.

One day a resident, noticing Frankie waiting by a door for Jean, invited the deer in. Glen Gardner housed old people who had been in state mental hospitals and needed special care. When Frankie was discovered inside, the staff rushed to put him outside. But when they saw how eagerly one resident after another reached out to touch him, they let him stay. When Frankie appeared, smiles spread and people who seldom spoke asked the deer’s name.

Discovering a line in front of the payroll clerk’s window one day, Frankie companionably joined it. When his turn came, the clerk peered out at him. “Well, Frankie,” she said, “I wouldn’t mind giving you a paycheck. You’re our best social worker!”

The deer had the run of Glen Gardner until late fall, when the superintendent noticed he was growing antlers. Fearful he might accidentally injure a resident, the supervisor decreed banishment. Frankie continued to frequent the grounds, but as the months passed he explored farther afield. When he was a year old, the evening came when he didn’t return to the powerhouse; now he was on his own.

Still, every morning he was there to greet Jean, exploring the pocket for the treat Jean always brought, and in the afternoon he would reappear. Residents who had refused to go outside before would join him on the front lawn to scratch his ears. George, a solitary resident with a speech defect who didn’t seem to care if people understood him or not, taught Frankie to respond to his voice, and they often walked together.

When Frankie was two years old—a sleek creature with six-point antlers and a shiny coat—he failed to show up one April morning. Nor did he answer anyone’s calls. It was late the next day before Jean and George found him lying on a sheltered patch of ground. His right front leg was shattered, jagged splinters of bone jutted through the skin.

“Oh, you old donkey,” Jean whispered. “What happened?” The deer’s eyes were clouded with pain, but he knew Jean’s voice and tried to lick his hand.

“There’s no way to set a break like that without an operation,” said the veterinarian who examined Frankie. They would have to haul Frankie out of the woods on an improvised litter and drive him to Round Valley Veterinary Hospital, five miles away.

On the day of Frankie’s surgery, the surgeon, Dr. Gregory Zolton, told Jean, “You’ll have to stay with me while I operate. I’ll need help.” Jean’s stomach did a flip-flop, but he swallowed hard and nodded. During the two-hour procedure, Dr. Zolton took bone from Frankie’s shoulder to make a graft between the broken bones and then screwed a steel plate across it.

“He said a leg that wasn’t strong enough to run on wasn’t any good to a deer,” recalls Jean.

After the surgery, they took Frankie to an unused horse stable on Glen Gardner’s grounds, and Jean sat in the straw beside the recovering deer. He stroked Frankie’s head and held him whenever the deer tried to struggle to his feet. Finally, as the sun was coming up, Jean took his own stiff bones home, cleaned up and went to work.

By the seventh day, Jean called Dr. Zolton to say it was impossible to hold Frankie still for his antibiotic injections. The surgeon laughed. “If he’s that lively, he doesn’t need antibiotics.” But he warned that Frankie must be kept inside for eight weeks. If he ran on the leg before it knitted, it would shatter.

“Whenever anyone went to visit him, Frankie showed how eager he was to get out,” recalls Jean. “He’d stand there with his nose pressed against a crack in the door. He smelled spring coming.”

When word had come that Frankie had survived the operation, the residents’ council at Glen Gardner had called a meeting. Mary, the president, told the group, “There’s no operation without a big bill. Now, Frankie’s our deer, right?” The residents all nodded. “So we’ve got to pay his bill.” They decided to take up a collection and hold a bake sale.

The day Dr. Zolton’s bill arrived, Mary called a meeting. The others watched silently as she opened the envelope. “Oh, dear,” she murmured bleakly, “we owe $392.” They had managed to collect only $135. Not until she shifted her bifocals did she notice the handwriting, which read: “Paid in Full—Gregory Zolton, D.V.M.”

When Frankie’s confinement was over, Frankie’s friends gathered by the stable door. It was mid-June and grass was knee-deep in the meadow. The buck’s wound was beautifully healed—but would the leg hold?

Jean opened the barn door. “Come on, Frankie,” he said softly. “You can go now.” Frankie took a step and looked up at Jean.

“It’s all right,” Jean urged him. “You’re free.” Suddenly Frankie understood. He exploded into a run, flying over the field like a greyhound, his hooves barely touching the ground.

“He’s so glad to be out,” Mary said wistfully, “I don’t think we’ll ever see him again.”

At the edge of the woods, Frankie swerved. He was coming back! Near the stable he wheeled again. Six times he crossed the meadow. Then, flanks heaving, tongue lolling, he pulled up beside them. Frankie had tested his leg to its limits. It was perfect. “Good!” said George distinctly. Everyone cheered.

Soon Frankie was again waiting for Jean by the electric shop every morning. In the fall Jean put a yellow collar around Frankie’s neck to warn off hunters. The mountain was a nature preserve, with no hunting allowed, but poachers frequently sneaked in.

One day a pickup truck filled with hunters drove up to the powerhouse. When the tailgate was lowered, Frankie jumped down. The hunters had read about him and, spotting the yellow collar, figured it must be Frankie.

Every hunting season, George and the other people at Glen Gardner debate whether to lock Frankie in the stable for his own safety—and their peace of mind. But each fall, the vote always goes against it. Frankie symbolizes the philosophy of Glen Gardner, which is to provide care but not to undermine independence.

“A deer and a person, they each have their dignity,” Jean says. “You mustn’t take their choices away.”

So Frank Buck, the wonderful deer of Glen Gardner, remains free. He runs risks, of course, but life is risk, and Frankie knows he has friends he can count on.

Jo Coudert

Turkeys

Something about my mother attracts ornithologists. It all started years ago when a couple of them discovered she had a rare species of woodpecker coming to her bird feeder. They came in the house and sat around the window, exclaiming and taking pictures with big fancy cameras. But long after the red cockaded woodpeckers had gone to roost, the ornithologists were still there. There always seemed to be three or four of them wandering around our place and staying for supper.

In those days, during the 1950s, the big concern of ornithologists in our area was the wild turkey. They were rare, and the pure-strain wild turkeys had begun to interbreed with farmers’ domestic stock. The species was being degraded. It was extinction by dilution, and to the ornithologists it was just as tragic as the more dramatic demise of the passenger pigeon or the Carolina parakeet.

One ornithologist had devised a formula to compute the ratio of domestic to pure-strain wild turkey in an individual bird by comparing the angle of flight at takeoff and the rate of acceleration. And in those sad days, the turkeys were flying low and slow.

It was during that time, the spring when I was six years old, that I caught the measles. I had a high fever, and my mother was worried about me. She kept the house quiet and dark and crept around silently, trying different methods of cooling me down.

Even the ornithologists stayed away—but not out of fear of the measles or respect for a household with sickness. The fact was, they had discovered a wild turkey nest. According to the formula, the hen was pure-strain wild— not a taint of the sluggish domestic bird in her blood—and the ornithologists were camping in the woods, protecting her nest from predators and taking pictures.

One night our phone rang. It was one of the ornithologists. “Does your little girl still have measles?” he asked.

“Yes,” said my mother. “She’s very sick. Her temperature is 102.”

“I’ll be right over,” said the ornithologist.

In five minutes a whole carload of them arrived. They marched solemnly into the house, carrying a cardboard box. “A hundred and two, did you say? Where is she?” they asked my mother.

They crept into my room and set the box down on the bed. I was barely conscious, and when I opened my eyes, their worried faces hovering over me seemed to float out of the darkness like giant, glowing eggs. They snatched the covers off me and felt me all over. They consulted in whispers.

“Feels just right, I’d say.”

“A hundred two—can’t miss if we tuck them up close and she lies still.”

I closed my eyes then, and after a while the ornithologists drifted away, their pale faces bobbing up and down on the black wave of fever.