Useless

USELESS

07/17/26

by Wade Douglass

The river was wrong, and Boss was gone; I knew both to be true before I'd finished my first cup of coffee. I was on the porch at first light, the way I am most mornings, waiting for the hot coffee to jump-start my joints. Sarah was inside at the stove fixin’ breakfast. The first thing I noticed was the gate to Boss’ pen was open, and our boar hog was missing. Getting out of his pen was not so unusual, since Boss is a contrary sort. But to not hang around the food trough for morning feed was distinctly unusual. My eyes were drawn to the creek running along the eastern fence line. The sky above the Absarokas was clear as glass. No rain here in a week. But the water in the creek was high and running fast.

“A river-borne flood is comin’” I told Sarah as soon as I entered the house.

Sarah’s smile disappeared. “How bad is it going to be?”

“Don’t know. I heard of one or two. Never saw a bad one before.”

“When will it get here?”

“Don’t know.”

“And you named the dog, Useless,” she muttered.

Sarah had a fondness for the old critter that I guess I didn’t have. She would feed him from her hand when she thought I wasn't looking. Useless was nearly twenty years old and spent most days sleeping. He peered up at Sarah and me over the folds of his blanket when he heard his name. He was grey around the muzzle, and his eyes were rheumy. The old hound had a weather-bitten patch along his flank where his fur had gone thin and ragged. His hindquarters had gone stiff.

“You move the sheep to the high pasture?” Sarah asked?

“Yesterday.”

You take the dogs and get Boss back in his pen. And fix his latch proper this time.” She admonished. I will secure the household.

I called out Rook, Shepherd, and young Dice to come with me, and started for the door.

Take Useless with you, too.” Sarah directed, in that particular tone of voice that brooks no argument.

I had not worked the animal in five years. I started calling him Useless when I could see his working days were over. The name stuck, as unfortunate names do.

"He can barely make the fence line," I complained.

"Come on,” I groused. The old sheep dog got to his feet slowly, one leg at a time, and followed me out the door.

I found the boar hog forty yards into the scrub timber below the lower meadow, wedged against the base of an old cottonwood where the bank had undercut the roots over many seasons.

Boss had run headlong into the tangle of tree roots, and could not back himself out of it. Three hundred and fifty pounds of black pig standing chest-deep in soft ground, working himself deeper with every movement, grunting with a fury.

The three younger dogs kept their distance, distracting Boss from my attempts to lasso the hog.

Useless was nowhere to be seen.

I felt it before I heard it. The deep, heavy, relentless rumble of a great volume of water committed to a single direction. Rook and Shepherd and Dice looked back at me for the space of a heartbeat. Then all three ran.

I grabbed the rope and got my left arm around the largest exposed root I could reach — a taproot the width of my thigh, running horizontal before it dove into the earth — and I pressed myself against the base of the trunk and held on as the water arrived. Everything that had been on the ground — the soft earth, the scrub grass, the leaf matter — disappeared, replaced by brown water that was knee-deep immediately and rising fast. It hit my legs hard and tried to take me. I locked my elbow around that root and felt my boots lift from the ground and swing downstream. I held on. The water kept rising.

Beneath me, the earth was eroding away with the current. I could feel it in the root — a slow, reluctant movement. The whole base of the cottonwood was beginning to go. I pulled myself higher on the root system, right hand clawing at bark, left arm burning from elbow to shoulder, and that was when the ground beneath the hog gave way.

One moment the pig was there. The next, the earth under the hollow where he stood folded inward and down, and the hog and five square yards of riverbank went down into the dark water without a sound. The rope I had looped around the animal went down with him. The tail end of the rope was still in my right hand. The rest of the rope went down with the pig, but several coils were snagged in the root tangle at the sinkhole's lip. The loose end of the rope floated on the surface of the black water at the edge of the hole eighteen inches below the rim. I tried to reach the floating end and loop it around the taproot; I would have a second anchor, something to haul against with my legs rather than hanging by one arm.

I reached. The shift in my weight swung my lower body downstream. I grabbed the bark again.

I could not do it. Six inches beyond possible, and every time I unweighted my right hand, the water took my legs. The rope was beyond my reach. I pressed my forehead against the bark and took stock. Left arm: failing. Right hand: grip but no purchase. Rope: unreachable. Tree: moving and losing its root structure. Water: still rising. The inventory of a man running out of options in the correct order. The cottonwood gave another long groan above me. A small shadow passed over me. I looked up. Useless was making his way down the inside face of the sinkhole along the exposed root lattice — one foot placed, then the next, then the next, testing each placement before committing his weight, moving with slow, deliberate care."Go back," I said. "Get out of here, old dog. There's no need for the both of us to end up in this muddy grave."

He did not go back. He went lower. He entered the water — I heard the splash, felt the tremor of his weight shift through the root system — and then I understood what he was doing. He had the tail end of the rope in his teeth. He was working it upward through the root tangle, nudging it with his nose when his teeth could not find the right angle, threading it through the gaps in the exposed lattice with a patience that had no business existing in those circumstances. His hindquarters were in the current. He braced against it and kept working, steady and unhurried.

The rope end appeared at the root above my right hand. I grabbed it and held it. I looped the rope around the taproot — one wrap, two, a half hitch that my half-numb fingers nearly lost twice — and pulled against it. The root held. I moved my right knee onto a lateral root and pushed with my leg while I pulled with both arms. I ascended eight inches. Then another eight. I found a foothold with my left boot on a root the width of my wrist, pushed hard against it, and came up a foot. Then I was at the broad fork in the root system above the waterline, solid timber beneath me, both arms around the trunk. I breathed. The flood ran below me. The cottonwood held, for now.

I looked down. Useless was in the water at the lip of the sinkhole. Paddling. Keeping his head up, working his legs, but the roots he had used to descend were slick now, and the angle was steep. I could tell the dog’s hindquarters were spent. He tried to get his forepaws onto the first root. Scrabbled, slid back. Tried again on the second attempt and went briefly under and came back up, shaking water from his eyes. Useless looked up at me.

I reached down from the fork as far as I could go. My fingertips were twelve inches above the surface of the water.

He paddled toward the root below my hand and tried to jump. But fell back into the water. He looked at me again. Neither of us could reach the other. The geometry of it was plain. I could not descend without going back into the current, and he could not climb up to me. Then the second surge came. It arrived from the north without warning, harder than the first, a fresh pulse of water off the high country. The surface of the water in the sinkhole dropped two feet in an instant as the volume rushed through the opening, and Useless went down with it. His eyes were on mine when he went under. The black water closed where he had been, and the sinkhole had him. The cottonwood tore free of the earth and went in behind him. I held the trunk and rode it sideways until it grounded against the bank. I crawled off onto solid ground

My walk home was longer than it had ever been.

The lower meadow was unrecognizable. The flood had flattened the grass in long sweeping arcs, strewn debris along every fence line, and carved a ragged new channel at the southeastern corner where the water had found soft ground and used it. I found my hat on a fence post, dark with mud but intact. I put it on, stood holding the brim for a moment, then walked on. I thought about what to tell Sarah.

Rook and Shepherd and Dice were waiting at the meadow gate, dry already, looking up at me with the expectant attention of dogs ready for what comes next. I opened the gate. Three dogs came through around my legs. I counted them, and the count settled in my chest in a way I did not understand.

Sarah was on the porch. She saw me come up the rise. She counted the dogs before I reached the steps. She was very still by the time I got there.

“Boss?” She asked.

“Gone”

“The dog?”

“Gone.”

She nodded once. Her hands were closed on the porch railing, her knuckles white. Sarah’s eyes reddened and brimmed with tears. That was all the grief she showed me, which was enough. We stood together as the afternoon cooled and the shadows came down off the mountains and filled the valley, and the day ran out of light and came to the edge of evening. I was about to go inside when Sarah said my name.

The way she said it made me turn.

She was looking toward the lower meadow. Her eyes were fixed on something at the far edge of the field, some shape catching the last gray light — a movement low to the ground, slow and listing to the left, coming up the rise.

I was off the porch before I knew I had moved.

I crossed the yard and went through the gate and down the rise with the best pace I could muster, and the shape resolved itself as I came close — a grey muzzle, a silt-black coat, heavily favoring a left foreleg, and one ear missing its white tip. Useless raised his head when I was twenty yards out and found me with those clouded eyes, and his tail moved once, and he stood his ground in the wet meadow grass and waited.

I dropped to one knee. I got both hands on either side of his head, in the mud and the silt and the wreckage of the afternoon, and I held it, and he pushed his nose against my chest and breathed. I thought his trembling was less as I held him, but then I realized it was me trembling, and not Useless.

How he came through — I learned from a man who knew the creek bed's geology — the limestone beneath the tributary is riddled with passages that the flood fills and empties with the seasons, channels worn smooth over centuries by water doing what water does. A dog the size of Useless, carried into the sinkhole by the current, would have been buoyed through those passages in the dark rather than drowned. Three hundred yards south, where the limestone meets a drainage culvert beneath the lower fence line, there was an exit. Small. Low to the ground. Enough. He had ridden an underground river for a quarter of a mile and walked home in the dark.

Sarah came down the rise behind me. I had not heard her follow. She knelt in the wet grass without a word, the good towel from the linen chest in her hands — the guest towel, which she had gone inside to retrieve while I was still halfway down the meadow — and she began, in the last of the light, to clean the silt from his ears. He closed his eyes and let her.

I kept my hands where they were, on either side of that grey and muddy head. I looked at him for a long time. I had been calling him Useless for five years. Said it so many times the word had stopped being a name and turned into a verdict, the way words do when you repeat them long enough without examining them.

The stars came out. The mountains settled into their dark shapes against the sky. Below us, the valley lay still and rearranged, the flood already retreating into memory, as floods do, leaving behind a changed land. I felt something in my chest that was too large for a name, so I gave it none and let it be what it was. I only hope that when the passage of time comes to disassemble my memories, the Good Lord will allow the memory of this day to remain intact