The Dog Who Healed A Family

Jane had a careful speech planned when she arrived at her office the next morning, but the kind executive looked so pleased with himself that the words went out of her head. “What have you named her?” he asked, beaming. She said the first thing that came to mind: “Elizabeth.”

“Sweet Elizabeth,” he said. “Wonderful!”

Sweet Elizabeth, indeed. Jane was tempted to tell him that Sweet Elizabeth had dined on her best sweater and spent the night in the bathroom, where she had pulled the towels off the racks and unraveled the toilet paper to make a nest for herself. Instead, she began to describe the rabbit’s crush on Robert the cat, and soon half the office had gathered around, listening and laughing. It was the first time anyone had paid the least bit of attention to her, and Jane began to wonder whether she wasn’t being too hasty about getting rid of Elizabeth. She did go to the pet shop on her lunch hour, however, just to sound them out. Their no-return policy was firm. The best they would do was sell Jane a wooden cage painted to look like a country cottage to keep the rabbit in.

“Don’t get the wrong idea,” she told Elizabeth that evening as she settled her into it. “It’s just temporary until I find a home for you.”

In the night it wasn’t the sound of the rabbit butting off the roof of the cottage that awakened Jane. She slept through that. It was the crash of the ficus tree going over when Sweet Elizabeth, having nibbled away the tasty lower leaves, went after the higher ones. The next day Jane bought a latch for the cottage. That night Elizabeth worked it loose and ate the begonias on the windowsill. The following day Jane bought a lock. That night Elizabeth gnawed a new front door in her cottage.

It was not hunger or boredom that fueled Elizabeth’s determination to get loose; it was her passion for Robert. The minute Jane let her out, she hopped to him and flung herself down between his paws. He, of course, boxed her soundly for her impertinence, but her adoration wore him down, and one day he pretended to be asleep when she lay down near enough to touch him with one tiny white paw. Soon, as though absentmindedly, he was including her in his washups, with particular attention paid to the floppy ear where it had dusted along the floor.

All of this made marvelous stories for Jane to tell in the office, and she discovered it wasn’t so hard to make friends after all. She even began to gain something of a reputation for wit when she described how Robert, finding that Elizabeth did not understand games involving catnip mice, invented a new one for the two of them.

Since Elizabeth followed him about as tenaciously as a pesky kid sister, he could easily lure her out onto Jane’s tiny terrace. Then he dashed back inside and hid behind a wastebasket. Slowly Elizabeth would hop to the doorway and peer cautiously about. Not seeing the cat anywhere, she’d jump down the single step, whereupon Robert would pounce, rolling them both over and over across the living room rug until Elizabeth kicked free with her strong hind legs. Punch-drunk from the tumbling about, she’d stagger to her feet, shake herself so that her tipsy ear whirled about her head, then scramble off and happily follow the cat outside again.

This game was not all that Elizabeth learned from Robert. He taught her something far more important, at least from Jane’s point of view. Out on the terrace were flower boxes that were much more to Robert’s liking than his indoor litter box. Time after time, while Robert scratched in the dirt, Elizabeth watched, her head cocked, her ear swinging gently. She was not a swift thinker, but one day light dawned. Robert stepped out of the flower box and she climbed in, which is how Elizabeth, with a little help from her friend, came to be housebroken.

With that problematic matter taken care of and all the plants eaten to nubbins anyway, Jane gave up trying to confine Elizabeth to her cottage and let her stay free. She met Jane at the door in the evening, just as Robert did, and sat up to have her head patted. She learned her name; she learned what “no” meant if said loudly and accompanied by a finger shaken under her nose; she learned what time meals were served and that food arrived at the apartment in paper bags. When Jane came home with groceries and set a bag even momentarily on the floor, Elizabeth’s strong teeth quickly ripped a hole in it. That is, unless she smelled carrots, in which case she tugged the bag onto its side and scrambled into it. If Jane got to the carrots before Elizabeth did and put them away on the bottom shelf of the refrigerator, the rabbit bided her time until Jane opened the door again, then she stood up on her hind legs and yanked the carrots back out. It got so that Jane never dared slam the refrigerator door without first making sure Elizabeth’s head was not inside it.

But then dinner would be over, the food put away, and Jane settled down to read in her easy chair. First Robert would come, big and purring and kneading with his paws to make a satisfactory spot for himself in her lap. Then Elizabeth would amble over, sit up on her haunches, her little paws folded primly on her chest, and study the situation to decide where there was room for her. With a flying leap, she’d land on top of Robert, throw herself over and push with her hind legs until she’d managed to wedge herself in between the cat and Jane. Soon the twitching of her nose would slow, then cease, and she would be asleep.

At such times, it was easy for Jane to let her hand stray over the soft fur, to call her Sweet Elizabeth, to forgive her all her many transgressions—the sock chewed into fragments, the gnawed handle on a pocketbook, the magazine torn into scraps. But one day Elizabeth went too far; she chewed the heels off Jane’s best pair of shoes. Jane decided she had to go. And she had a prospective family to adopt her: a young couple with three small children. She invited the parents, along with two other couples, to dinner.

All that rolling around on the rug with Robert had turned the white rabbit rather gray, and, wanting Elizabeth to look her most beguiling, Jane decided to give her a bath. She filled a dishpan with warm water and plopped Elizabeth into it. The rabbit sprang out. Jane hustled her back in and this time got a firm grip on her ears. Elizabeth kicked and Jane let go. On the third try, Jane got her thoroughly soaped on the back but Elizabeth’s powerful hind legs would not let her near her stomach. Persuading herself that no one would look at the rabbit’s underside, Jane rinsed her off as best she could and tried to dry her with a towel. Wet, the rabbit’s silky fur matted into intricate knots. Jane brushed; Elizabeth licked. Jane combed; Elizabeth licked. Hours later, Elizabeth’s fur was still sticking out in every direction and it was obvious that a soggy mass on her stomach was never going to dry. Afraid Elizabeth would get pneumonia, Jane decided to cut out the worst of the knots. With manicure scissors, she began carefully to snip. To her horror, a hole suddenly appeared. Elizabeth’s skin was as thin as tissue paper and the scissors had cut right through it. Jane rushed to get Mercurochrome and dab it on the spot. In the rabbit’s wet fur, the Mercurochrome spread like ink on blotting paper. Now Jane had a damp rabbit with a dirty-gray stomach dyed red.

The sight of her sitting up at the door to greet each new arrival sent Jane’s guests into gales of laughter, which Elizabeth seemed to enjoy. She hopped busily about to have her ears scratched. Jane was keeping a wary eye on her, of course, and saw the moment Elizabeth spotted the stuffed celery on the hors d’oeuvres tray. But Jane wasn’t quite quick enough. Elizabeth leaped and landed in the middle of the tray. Even that simply occasioned more laughter, and there were cries of protest when Jane banished Elizabeth to her cottage.

After dinner, Jane yielded and released her. Quite as though Elizabeth had used the time in her cottage to think up what she might do to entertain the party, she hopped into the exact center of the living room floor and gazed seriously around the circle of faces. When silence had fallen and she had everyone’s full attention, she leaped straight into the air, whirled like a dervish and crash-landed in a sprawl of legs and flying ears. The applause was prolonged. Peeping shyly from behind her ear, Elizabeth accepted it, looking quite pleased with herself.

The children’s father adored her, and when in the course of the evening he saw that Elizabeth went to the terrace door and scratched to be let out, he couldn’t wait to take her home. “She’s housebroken,” he reminded his wife, who was hesitating, “and the kids’ll love her.” Elizabeth, returning, climbed into his lap, and it was settled: Elizabeth was to go to her new family. Until the end of the evening. “What have you spilled on yourself?” the man’s wife asked. The edge of his suit jacket, from lapel to bottom button, was white. Elizabeth had nibbled it down to the backing.

“You rat,” Jane scolded her when the guests had gone. “I found a good home for you, and you blew it.” Elizabeth shook her head remorsefully, beating herself with her floppy ear, and wandered away. After Jane had cleaned up the kitchen and was ready for bed, she went looking for Elizabeth to put her in her cottage. She hunted high, low and in between. Where was she? Beginning to be frantic, she went through the apartment a second time. She even looked over the terrace railing, wondering for one wild moment if Elizabeth had been so contrite she’d thrown herself off. Only because there was nowhere else to search did Jane open the refrigerator door. There Elizabeth was, on the bottom shelf, having a late-night snack of carrot sticks and parsley.

For quite a while after that, nothing untoward happened, and Elizabeth, Robert and Jane settled into a peaceful and loving coexistence. When Jane watched Elizabeth sunbathing on the terrace beside Robert or sitting on her haunches to wash her face with her dainty paws or jumping into her lap to be petted, she found herself wondering how she could have imagined giving Elizabeth up. Until the day she did a thorough housecleaning and moved the couch. The rug had been grazed down to the backing.

“She’s eating me out of house and home. Literally,” Jane wailed to a college friend over lunch. “I’m going to have to turn her in to the ASPCA.”

“Don’t do that. I’ll take her,” Jane’s friend replied, surprising her because Jane knew she did not approve of pets in the house. “She can live in our garage. Evan’s ten now. It’ll be good for him to have the responsibility of caring for an animal.”

Jane’s bluff had been called. Could she really envision life without Sweet Elizabeth? She was silent. Her friend said, “Come on. We’ll go get her right now.”

Elizabeth met them at the door, sitting up as usual to have her ears scratched. “Oh, she’s cute,” said the friend, but so perfunctorily that Jane knew she had missed the point of Elizabeth. “Never mind,” Jane whispered into Elizabeth’s soft fur, “it’ll be all right. She’ll come to love you, just as I did, and you’ll be happy in the country.” Elizabeth shook her head slowly. Was there reproach in her eyes? Jane gave one last kiss to that foolish ear.

Robert was restless that evening, going often out on the terrace. “Oh, Robbie,” Jane told him, “I’m so sorry. She was your friend, too, and I didn’t think of that.” As Jane hugged him, the old emptiness returned, the emptiness of the time before Sweet Elizabeth when Jane used to imagine that everyone else’s phone was ringing, that everyone else had friends to be with and places to go. A little white rabbit who gave Jane the courage to reach out had made a surprising difference in her life.

It was weeks before she slammed the refrigerator door without a second thought, stopped expecting an innocent white face to come peeking around the terrace door, gave up listening for the thump of those heavy back feet. For a long time she didn’t trust herself even to inquire about Elizabeth. Then one day she was driving to Boston and, on impulse, decided to stop off in Connecticut to see her. No one was home, but the garage door was open. It was some time before Jane’s eyes got accustomed to the dark and she could distinguish the white blur that was Elizabeth. The little rabbit was huddled in a corner of her cottage, shaking with cold. The straw on the floor was soaking wet. The draft from the open door was bitter. Her food and water bowls were empty. Jane spoke her name and Elizabeth crept into her arms. Wrapping her in a sweater, Jane canceled her trip to Boston and headed back home.

She called her college friend the next day and told her she’d missed Elizabeth so much that she’d kidnapped her. That was all right, her friend said; what with the basketball season and all, her son hadn’t had much time for the rabbit. That left Jane with just one other phone call to make—the one canceling the order for a new rug. Then she settled back to watch Elizabeth and Robert rolling across the floor together.

Frankie Buck

On a narrow road twisting along beside a mountain stream lay a deer, struck and killed by a car.

A motorist happening along the infrequently traveled road swerved to avoid the deer’s body. As the driver swung out, he noticed a slight movement and stopped. There, huddled beside the dead doe, was a fawn, a baby who must have been born as its mother died, for the umbilical cord was 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 can take you where it’s warm.”

The nearest place was the power plant of a state geriatric institution on a wooded mountaintop overlooking the town of Glen Gardner, New Jersey. Maintenance men there quickly gathered rags to make a bed for the fawn behind the boiler. When the fawn tried to suck the fingers reaching out to pet it, the men realized it was hungry and took a rubber glove, pricked pinholes in one finger, diluted some of the evaporated milk they used for their coffee and offered it to the fawn, who drank eagerly.

The talk soon turned to what to name the deer. Jean Gares, a small, spare man who was the electrician at the institution, had a suggestion. “If it’s a female, we can call her Jane Doe,” he proposed. “If it’s a male, Frank Buck.” The others laughed and agreed.

With the maintenance men taking turns feeding it around the clock, the little deer’s wobbly legs—and its curiosity—soon grew strong enough to bring it out from behind the boiler. The men on their coffee breaks petted and played with the creature, and as soon as they were certain that Frank Buck was the name that fit, they shortened it to Frankie and taught him to answer to it. The only one who didn’t call him Frankie, oddly enough, was Jean Gares. He, his voice rough with affection, addressed him as “you little dumb donkey,” as in “Come on and eat this oatmeal, you little dumb donkey. I cooked it specially for you.”

When Jean came to work at six each morning, always in his right-hand pocket was a special treat, an apple or a carrot, even sometimes a bit of chocolate, which Frankie quickly learned to nuzzle for. On nice days the two of them stepped outside, and Jean rested his hand on Frankie’s head and stroked his fur as they enjoyed the morning air together.

At the far end of the field in front of the power plant, deer often came out of the woods to graze in the meadow. When Frankie caught their scent, his head came up and his nose twitched. “We’d better tie him up or we’re going to lose him,” one of the men commented. Jean shook his head. “He’ll know when it’s time to go,” he said. “And when it is time, that’s the right thing for him to do.”

The first morning Frankie ventured away from the power plant, it wasn’t to join the deer in the meadow but to follow Jean. The two-story white stucco buildings at Glen Gardner were originally built at the turn of the century as a tuberculosis sanitarium and are scattered at various levels about the mountaintop. Cement walks and flights of steps connect them, and Jean was crossing on his rounds from one building to another one morning when he heard the tapping of small hooves behind him. “Go on home, you dumb donkey,” he told Frankie sternly. “You’ll fall and hurt yourself.” But Frankie quickly got the hang of the steps, and from then on the slight, white-haired man in a plaid flannel shirt followed by a delicate golden fawn was a familiar early morning sight.

One day, one of the residents, noticing Frankie waiting by the door of a building for Jean to reappear, opened the door and invited him in. Glen Gardner houses vulnerable old people who have been in state mental hospitals and need special care. When Frankie was discovered inside, the staff rushed to banish him. But then they saw how eagerly one resident after another reached out to touch him.

“They were contact-hungry,” says staff member Ruby Durant. “We were supplying marvelous care, but people need to touch and be touched as well.” When the deer came by, heads lifted, smiles spread and old people who seldom spoke asked the deer’s name. “The whole wing lit up,” remembers Ruby. “When we saw that and realized how gentle Frankie was, we welcomed him.”

His coming each day was something for the residents to look forward to. When they heard the quick tap-tap of Frankie’s hooves in the corridor, they reached for the crust, the bit of lettuce or the piece of apple they had saved from their own meals to give him. “He bowed to you when you gave him something,” says one of the residents. “That would be,” she qualifies solemnly, “if he was in the mood.” She goes on to describe how she offered Frankie a banana one day, and after she had peeled it for him, “I expected him to swallow the whole thing, but he started at the top and took little nibbles of it to the bottom, just like you or me.”

As accustomed as the staff became to Frankie’s presence, nevertheless, when a nurse ran for the elevator one day and found it already occupied by Frankie and a bent, very old lady whom she knew to have a severe heart condition, she was startled. “Pauline,” she said nervously, “aren’t you afraid Frankie will be frightened and jump around when the elevator moves?”

“He wants to go to the first floor,” Pauline said firmly.

“How do you know?”

“I know. Push the button.”

The nurse pushed the button. The elevator started down. Frankie turned and faced front. When the doors opened, he strolled out.

“See?” said Pauline triumphantly.

Discovering a line of employees in front of the bursar’s window one day, Frankie companionably joined the people waiting to be paid. When his turn at the window 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. But who’s going to take you to the bank to cash it?”

Frankie had the run of Glen Gardner until late fall, when superintendent Irene Salayi noticed that antlers were sprouting on his head. Fearful he might accidentally injure a resident, she decreed banishment. Frankie continued to frequent the grounds, but as the months passed he began exploring farther afield. An evening came when he did not return to the power plant. He was a year old and on his own.

Every morning, though, he was on hand to greet Jean and explore his pocket for the treat he knew would be there. In the afternoon he would reappear, and residents would join him on the broad front lawn and pet him while he munched a hard roll or an apple. A longtime resident named George, a solitary man with a speech defect who didn’t seem to care whether people understood what he said or not, taught Frankie to respond to his voice, and the two of them often went for walks together.

When Frankie was two years old—a sleek creature with six-point antlers and a shiny coat shading from tawny to deepest mahogany—there was an April snowstorm. About ten inches covered the ground when Jean Gares came to work on the Friday before Easter, but that didn’t seem enough to account for the fact that for the first time Frankie wasn’t waiting for him. Jean sought out George after he’d made his rounds and George led the way to a pair of Norway spruces where Frankie usually sheltered when the weather was bad. But Frankie wasn’t there or in any other of his usual haunts, nor did he answer to George’s whistle. Jean worried desperately about Frankie during the hunting season, as did everyone at Glen Gardner, but the hunting season was long over. What could have happened to him?

Jean tried to persuade himself that the deep snow had kept Frankie away, but he didn’t sleep well that night, and by Saturday afternoon he decided to go back to Glen Gardner and search for him. He got George, and the two of them set out through the woods. It was late in the day before they found the deer. Frankie was lying on a patch of ground where a steam pipe running underneath had thawed the snow. His right front leg was shattered. Jagged splinters of bone jutted through the skin. Dried blood was black around the wound. Jean dropped to his knees beside him. “Oh, you dumb donkey,” he whispered, “what happened? Were dogs chasing you? Did you step in a woodchuck hole?” Frankie’s eyes were dim with pain, but he knew Jean’s voice and tried to lick his hand.

Word that Frankie was hurt flicked like lightning through the center, and residents and staff waited anxiously while Jean made call after call in search of a veterinarian who would come to the mountain on a holiday weekend. Finally one agreed to come, but not until the next day, and by then Frankie was gone from the thawed spot. George tracked him through the snow, and when the vet arrived, he guided Jean and the grumbling young man to a thicket in the woods.

For the vet it was enough just to glimpse Frankie’s splintered leg. He reached in his bag for a hypodermic needle to put the deer out of his misery. “No,” said Jean, catching his arm. “No. We’ve got to try to save him.”

“There’s no way to set a break like that without an operation,” the vet said, “and this is a big animal, a wild animal. I don’t have the facilities for something like this.”

He knew of only one place that might. Exacting a promise from the vet to wait, Jean rushed to the main building to telephone. Soon he was back with an improvised sled; the Round Valley Veterinary Hospital fifteen miles away had agreed at least to examine Frankie if the deer was brought there. Cradling Frankie’s head in his lap, Jean spoke to him quietly until the tranquilizing injection the vet gave him took hold. When the deer drifted into unconsciousness, the three men lifted him onto the sled, hauled him out of the woods and loaded him into Jean’s pickup truck.

X-rays at the hospital showed a break so severe that a stainless-steel plate would be needed to repair it. “You’ll have to stand by while I operate,” Dr. Gregory Zolton told Jean. “I’ll need help to move him.” Jean’s stomach did a flip-flop, but he swallowed hard and nodded.

Jean forgot his fear that he might faint as he watched Dr. Zolton work through the three hours of the operation. “It was beautiful,” he remembers, his sweetly lined face lighting up. “So skillful the way he cleaned away the pieces of bone and ripped flesh and skin, then opened Frankie’s shoulder and took bone from there to make a bridge between the broken ends and screwed the steel plate in place. I couldn’t believe the care he took, but he said a leg that wasn’t strong enough to run and jump on wasn’t any use to a deer.”

After stitching up the incision, Dr. Zolton had orders for Jean. “I want you to stay with him until he’s completely out of the anesthetic to make sure he doesn’t hurt himself. Also, you’ve got to give him an antibiotic injection twice a day for the next seven days. I’ll show you how.”

There was an unused stable on the Glen Gardner grounds. Jean took Frankie there and settled him in a stall, and all night long Jean sat in the straw beside him. “Oh, you dumb donkey,” he murmured whenever Frankie stirred, “you got yourself in such a lot of trouble, but it’s going to be all right. Lie still. Lie still.” And he stroked Frankie’s head and held him in his arms when Frankie tried to struggle to his feet. With the soothing, known voice in his ear, Frankie each time fell back asleep, until finally, as the sun was coming up, he came fully awake. Jean gave him water and a little food, and only when he was sure Frankie was not frightened did he take his own stiff bones home to bed.