Susan Conant - Creature Discomforts

I hope that readers who share my love for the novels of Margery Allingham will take pleasure in recognizing in this story a small tribute to my favorite mystery writer. Dog lovers will certainly find countless unbridled tributes to my own dogs, Frostfield Firestars Kobuk, C.G.C., and Frostfield Perfect Crime, C.D., C.G.C., Th.D., and to all dogs everywhere.

For help with some of the background of this story, I am grateful to Jill Hunter; and to the members of Malamute-L, a discussion group for fanciers of the Alaskan malamute, and PSG, the Poodle Support Group. Thanks, too, to Deborah Dwyer, Roseann Mandell, and Geoff Stern; to Jean Berman, Dorothy Donohue, Roo Grubis, Margherita Walker, Anya Wittenborg, and Corinne Zipps; to my wonderful agent, Deborah Schneider; and to my editor, the incomparable Kate Miciak.

Steve Rubin, please note that the bichon frise in this story is named Molly. You see? I did put your dog in a book.

I CAME TO MY SENSES between a rock and a hard place. The rock was a boulder hurled millennia ago in thankless rage by a reluctantly northbound glacier. Still, it was a rock of ages: cleft for me. My bruised body fit so neatly into its riven side, a deep, narrow fissure, that the rock might almost have been cleft to measure. Too sick to move, I remained hidden in the rock. Only my head protruded. I rested face up in what proved to be a puddle of rainwater and blood in a shallow depression in the hard place, a ridge prettily embellished with lacy lichen in a deceptively soft shade of pastel green. Around the boulder and into its cleft grew stunted blueberry bushes that bore, here and there, clusters of tiny wild berries and dried-up bits of what had once been fruit, single berries mummified, perhaps even petrified.

In retrospect, it feels peculiar to owe my life to a boulder and its surrounding cushion of lowbush blueberries, but the giant rock is undoubtedly what broke my fall, and without the masses of wild shrubbery to absorb the impact, the body-on-boulder slam would almost certainly have killed me. As it was, I lay unconscious for what I now estimate to be an hour. During that lost time, I half-roused for seconds or even minutes. In moments of forgotten semiconsciousness, I must have slipped my body feet-first into that opening in the rock, acting as my own kindly undertaker. In dog training, we happily recognize anticipation as a sign of learning. A dog who comes before he is called has figured out what to expect next. In my case, however, the Great Handler did not call me to my final reward.

Im tempted to romanticize my return to consciousness. Its difficult to control the corny urge to drop allegorical hints about spiritual renaissance: Naked came I, slithering out of a dark passageway into water and blood, double-cured of sin, enlightened, born again. My actual revivification was disgustingly different from the kind of rebirth that wouldve put me permanently in the ribbons in the My-Souls-Better-Than-Yours class. The first thing I did was to roll painfully over, gag, and then pollute the water and blood in the would-be-symbolic baptismal font with what looked, even from my perspective, like copious ropes of saliva cascading from the jowly mouth of some drooly giant-breed dog. In my own ears, I sounded like an allergic dog in the throes of whats known as reverse sneezing. The phrase even crossed my mind. Oddly enough, it was comforting to diagnose myself with a canine malady.

The nausea and choking began to subside. What took their place was a global sensation compounded of pain, cold, and terror. A sensible person would have assumed that the acute fear was an adaptive response to my real plight. The pain began to differentiate. The burning of torn skin was worse on my knees and my right hand than it was elsewhere. My scratched face stung. Stabs and throbbing radiated from my right elbow down to my fingers and up to my shoulder. An object dug mercilessly into my abdomen. A foreign object? One of my own ribs? My head hurt less than the bad elbow but, without my consent, had moved someplace it didnt belongto the middle of my stomach and ten feet away, both at the same time. But pain wasnt going to kill me. Died of exposure, I thought. Exposure meant hypothermia, a life-threatening drop in the bodys core temperature.

Instead of rolling over, sitting upoffering a paw, perhaps?and seeking heat, I took satisfaction in the word itself: hypothermia. How delightfully polysyllabic! Counting the syllables seemed like a grand idea. Hypo- made two. By the time I reached the end, Id not only lost the subtotal, but forgotten the word I was playing with.