The Dog & The Stag

He got out of the car with the dog running to the full reach of the leash heading towards the line of dogwood trees that was spilling its white fluffy cotton balls like a blizzard all over the parking lot. He barely got the door locked as the dog tried to pull him into the forest, but he pulled the dog back with a quick flash of annoying anger. He was hoping this walk through the park would give the dog some exercise and tire him out because he had been so annoying and hyper at home.

The dog was his roommate’s dog and he was taking care of him while his roommate was gone for work, and he usually liked the walks and dog companionship, but today he was tired and groggy and he wasn’t in the mood for the dog’s long suffering sniffing of plants and trees and the pulling to get close to something and the quick darting if the dog saw a cat or a squirrel.

The park was at the confluence of the Willamette and the Columbia forming a peninsula. The park was a forest with cement paths and dirt paths winding through dogwood trees and a small sliver of a black sand beach. The park was perfect for a dog to run off excess energy and at this time of day on a week day there weren’t that many people around. The sun was soon going to set behind the hills on the west side of the Willamette that was behind the fields of Sauvie Island.

He was so tired. He hadn’t been sleeping well the last few weeks and he was usually up lying in bed with worry and stress. Life had suddenly felt like it was accidently stuck in fast forward and he couldn’t do anything to slow the pace back down to normal speed. If he weren’t careful, he’d be dead from old age in a manner of weeks. The seasons were changing faster and he could barely tell holidays apart anymore. He felt like he should do the exact same thing every New Years Eve, so he could remember what he did.

The dog, Digger, kept darting into the underbrush after some rodent or another and it was pissing him off as he yanked the leash back towards him. The dog was going crazy with all the new smells and all the bushes and trees to smell. He now knew that he didn’t have the patience or tolerance for this walk, but the dog would maybe just chill when they got back home.

The air was sticky and hot. The back of his neck started to get itchy and he wished he had worn shorts instead of pants, but he knew that the air would get colder in half an hour or so when the sun goes to the coast. Shafts of light slanted through the trees and lit the floating cotton balls. The cotton balls would swirl around him and Digger as they passed by.

He decided to take a small dirt path towards the water and the black sand beach. Almost immediately after stepping off the main path he went face first into a spider web, which got into his mouth. As he tried to pull the web off his face and out of his hair the dog lurched for some animal and the leash was yanked out of his hand and the dog darted into a massive wall of blackberry vines.

He couldn’t find a way to follow the dog through the vines, so he tried running around the pile of thorny vines to cut the dog off on the other side, but the dog was nowhere to be seen. He stood there as quietly as possible to try to hear the dog, but he couldn’t hear anything but the buzzing of insects and the lapping of the river on the shore.

Panic and anxiety gripped him as he crashed through the underbrush trying to find any sign of the dog. He started muttering curses and self-hateful put downs at himself for losing his roommate’s dog, but he kept going in hopes that the dog would get bored and come back to him. The forest was eerily quiet and the air started cooling off as the sun started heading towards the hills and the shadows became much longer and darker.

The river smelled like rot and dead fish. Thorns kept snagging at his clothes and his face kept finding spider webs. The air was filled with the floating cotton balls and flying insects. He felt like he was covered in bugs and kept scratching himself and wiping the sweat off his forearms.

He found the dog’s collar and leash snagged on some young saplings under a stand of cottonwoods. This brought the panic level to a higher level because now the dog was without any ID. He became frantically yelling the dog’s name and whistling and grabbing plants and trees and shaking them trying to make enough noise for the dog to find him.

He heard a bark in the far distance and it sounded like it was coming from the shore, so he followed a small dirt path towards the river. The sun was setting and the air was really beginning to cool off and the shadows were getting much darker. The sky was almost purple. He heard the sound of something big flying above him, and the giant wings flapping filled him with icy fear.

He tried jumping over a fallen tree and snagged his foot on a broken branch and he flipped over and slid down a steep path and landed on the bottom of a small ravine that was damp. In front of him was the sun almost completely behind the hills. The tree covered hill turn from green to dark blue and he couldn’t discern the individual trees and the hill became one solid shape.

He decided to just lie there. He didn’t feel any pain, but he was so tired. He didn’t care where the dog was anymore. He just wanted to lie on his back and watch the sky turn colors and maybe slow time down to a standstill.

As he was lying there, he couldn’t help feeling old and broken. He was in his late thirties and almost every body part was sore and he felt that today was the exact halfway point in his life. He had lost a lot of friends and some of his family and as he got older his world kept getting smaller and smaller. He didn’t have the urge to be adventurous anymore and would love to just sit on a porch and watch the world happen.

It felt like his body was slowly melting into the wet sand and that soon plants would grow out him and he would turn into moss. He just didn’t care anymore. He felt like he had ran his race and now he was destined to watch others run their races. He decided that he would become part of the park and the important thing to do was to help the forest around him eat by supplying himself as food. He would become a cottonwood or a stand of blackberry vines.

He wasn’t suicidal. He didn’t want to die for the reasons he had wanted to kill himself before. He just felt old and used up and that no one would want anything to do with him as he got older and crankier. He didn’t mind living now days. He had a taste for good food, seeing things and spending time with people he loved. It just seemed like he had done all he was supposed to do and it was just time to move on and get out of people’s way.

Then he remembered her. She was suddenly in his thoughts smiling and bending forward laughing and tucking hair behind her ear. The only regret he had about her was that they didn’t meet twenty years before. He felt cheated on time with her.

She was somewhere in the city answering emails, going through stacks of files and wearing a green dress. He smiled when he thought of the green dress and how she did a little sashay dance for him before taking off for work early this morning. She told him that she had to work late and that they wouldn’t see each other until tomorrow night and he almost felt a lump in his throat because he knew he would miss her.

Even with that reminder of the good things in his life he just didn’t have the energy to sit up. He felt like his head had 700 pounds of sand in it. He felt like his legs were underground and he was already decomposing into the soil.

He was glad that nature had beaten him between the dog running off and tripping and falling in the middle of a stretch of forest along the river. He didn’t want to be beaten by man or by disease. He didn’t want to die being hit by a car or shot by a mental case that had stock piled assault weapons. He didn’t want to lie in a hospital bed for months being pumped full of painkillers and waiting to not regain conscious again. He wanted to die here.

The sky was dark and he saw a few stars twinkling in the bluish grey sky. A mist started spilling down the hills and a little mist had formed around him as he continued to lie still. He heard an owl somewhere and a boat cruised by making the lapping louder and faster. He felt the heartbeat of the Earth and his own heart tried to match the rhythm. The night birds began their songs and he saw bats flit between the tall trees that looked down on him with complete apathy. He suddenly felt strange and alone.

A crashing of branches and underbrush approached him from behind. It sounded too loud to be his dog or even a person. Fear gripped him, but he didn’t know what would be crashing through the forest at twilight that would be that big. He tried to squirm deeper into the wet sand in hopes to become more invisible.

A giant stag walked into his vision and stood there staring at him. He was taller than a tall man and had antlers that were longer than his own arm span. Moss and morning glory vines hung from his antlers and his fur was covered in moss and small ferns grew right out of him. He stood there and the mist swirled around the giant animal that was very interested in the man that lay in the mud.

The air almost felt freezing and he was chilled with fear. The giant deer took a few steps closer to him and bent his massive head down and sniffed at his torso. Steam came out of the deer’s nostrils into the swirling cold mist. Time did feel frozen. This was a dream or a hallucination. He hadn’t slept in weeks, he was tired and depressed, he had suffered hallucinations before from lack of sleep, but this was so vivid and real. He felt the warm air blow out of the stag’s nostrils on his body as he continued to smell him.

He heard a voice in his head that sounded older than time itself and he was filled with warmth and he knew that he would be all right. He wasn’t done yet. His race wasn’t even halfway through. He had so much left to do. He thought he had performed all his miracles, but he hadn’t even started. Was the stag telling him all this? He stared into the stag’s eyes and they looked strangely human.

Suddenly the stag’s head shot up and it looked out towards the forest. It sniffed the air and it leapt out of the ravine and he could hear it crashing through the forest. The cold returned, but the mist started thinning out and the sky became clear again.

Digger came rushing down to his side and started wildly sniffing and licking his face. He was so happy to see the dog again and he put his arm around the dog’s body and felt the warm fur against his cheek.

He got up and got the collar back on and got the leash fashioned and he led the dog back towards the car.

He wanted to stop by somewhere and give a girl in a green dress a kiss. He had a lot longer here than he thought and he had a lot more to accomplish. He didn’t know if the weird moss and fern covered stag had told him or if he just needed some perspective, but he knew that he had some things he needed to do.