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“Towels, please,” he begs.
“Are you hurt?”
“Not me,” he gasps. “Davey, come on, I’ll explain when I see you,” he screams again, knocking me out of my stupor. I toss my bag onto the counter, retrieve a stack of towels from the closet, grab Carter’s keys, and race to the garage. My heart seizes at the sight of Carter covered in blood racing across the parking garage carrying… a dog.
“Is any of that yours?” I ask.
Carter shakes his head. I open the back of the Bronco and spread towels across the seat as Carter lays the limp dog down. I’m certain it’s dead. He wraps another towel around it.
“Are you sure it’s even alive?”
He nods frantically and scowls at me. “She is,” he pants and pushes me toward the driver’s seat. “Drive! The emergency vet is just around the corner from DG. They know we’re coming.”
I’ve never had a dog. I’ve never had a pet of any kind. I didn’t even know there was such a thing as an emergency vet. I head toward Denver General Hospital as Carter barks the directions at me from the backseat, in between soft prayers and telling the dog to just hang on.
The car is still moving when he opens the back door and jumps out. I hit the brakes and hop out to help him pull the lifeless dog out of the back. It isn’t moving, isn’t crying in pain, and I can’t see any signs it’s still breathing.
Oh Carter, I think. This is not going to end well.
A pair of scrub-clad people race out the door to meet us and take the dog from Carter, and I hear him explain how he found her. The towels in the back seat are soaked in blood. Poor thing. There is no way it is going to survive this. Carter seems to have forgotten I even exist as he makes his way through the doors into the emergency room. I park the Bronco in the nearly full lot and seek out the waiting room.
Carter sits slumped over with his head buried between his knees on a bench along the wall. If the sight of the lifeless dog in his arms hadn’t been gut-wrenching enough, this one nearly brings me to my knees. When he looks up, tears streaming down his face, I barely make it across the room myself.
He falls into my arms as I sit next to him, and I just hold on. It’s all I can do. It’s the first time since seeing him in the garage that I take in what Carter is wearing. Then I create my best guess scenario of what happened. He’s wearing running clothes, so he must have found the dog along the trail somewhere. The blood was so fresh and it was still bleeding. Someone hit the dog and left the scene? Or maybe Carter saw it and took her.
“People fucking suck,” he sniffles against my chest, leading me to go with my first assumption. In which case, yes, they fucking do. He doesn’t say anything else. Just leans into me and I just hold on. Almost an hour goes by before the vet comes out to speak to us. His expression doesn’t inspire a great deal of hope.
“That is one lucky lady,” he says, although his grim expression doesn’t match the statement.
Carter exhales and sits up.
“Those injuries are fresh, but she has been out there on her own, or otherwise mistreated long before today. There is no chip.”
“Is she going to make it?”
“She has a long road ahead of her, but if she can make it through the next twenty-four hours….”
Carter exhales again and wills himself to stand up. “Whatever it takes, do it.”
The vet sweeps his eyes across the two of us, both now wearing a lot of the dog’s blood. He nods. “She’ll need to stay here tonight. Actually, probably a few nights.”
“Can I see her one more time before we go?” Carter asks.
I follow Carter and the vet to the back. The dog has been cleaned up, which actually made it look worse. The long row of stitches along the hind end are exposed and its position on the table accentuates just how dramatically underweight it is. There is nothing more than skin pulled taut against ribs. Even its face appears to be skeleton-like. The dog’s deep, red-colored fur is so short it has me wondering how it survived the cold. It has long floppy ears that look silky soft, even in its current condition, and despite not being much of an animal person, I want to reach out and touch them.
Carter beats me to it. He floats the ears across his fingers, then bends to kiss its head. “I’ve got ya, girl. We’ve got this. You just hang on for me, okay?”
“What kind of dog is it?” I look at the vet.
“Definitely a hound, with those ears and feet…” the vet begins.
“She is a Coonhound,” Carter says with a scowl to me, as he lifts his head from her. “Coonhound, hunting dog. I had friends back east who had them.”
The vet nods. “They are a lot more common back there and in the South. I went to vet school in Virginia. Hunters frequently lose them or, unfortunately, let them go if they don’t hunt well.”
Coonhound? As in raccoons? People hunt raccoons? I’m thoroughly confused now. I look back at the dog, at the long legs and soft ears. I bet it’s, she is, pretty with some weight on her. Her breathing is slow and even now. It’s the first evidence I’ve seen so far of there being life in her at all.
Carter wipes his hands across his face and takes in the now dried blood covering his arms and hands. “Call me if anything changes during the night. I mean it, anytime and I’ll be back in the morning first thing.”
