Rescuing Riley, Saving Myself by Zachary Anderegg Read Free Book Online

dashed against the rocks or, surviving that, he would have drowned while treading water in the pothole.
    Someone put him there.
    I couldn’t stop thinking about who would do such a thing. Why would they do it?
    It made no sense. I could imagine—not that this made sense exactly—how someone, for whatever twisted reason, might be cruel to an animal as a kind of hands-on experience, where there’s some kind of pleasure derived from the animal’s tortured reaction. In Elizabethan England, they used to bait bears by chaining a bear to a stake and then worrying it with dogs as a kind of public spectacle, and people would cheer, the way (I assume) they cheer today at dog fights or cock fights. In the Roman Colosseum, thousands of years ago, spectacles of pure cruelty were near-daily invents.
    But there was no element of spectacle to the dog in the canyon, nobody there to savor the animal’s suffering. There were no witnesses. In fact, you could hardly find a place less likely to ever have witnesses. Whoever had done it did so hoping not to be caught. No one could derive pleasure from the dog’s reaction, except conceptually. How long would it take to kill a dog by starving it? However long it was, there was no immediate return, no instant gratification.
    I could even explain finding a dog in that condition as a result of neglect, somebody who, for example, leaves a dog in a house and never goes back and somehow manages to banish from his or her thoughts any recollection of leaving behind a pet without food—but neglect is a passive kind of cruelty. It’s a crime of omission, a lack of action. The dog in the canyon had not been passively neglected.
    Someone had gone to a great deal of trouble to put it there. Someone used ropes and climbing gear, as I had, to reach the pothole where I found the dog. The dog was probably lowered by rope over the difficult sections, all an enormous effort to get a dog down there. Someone had quite intentionally, with planning and malice aforethought and with considerable exertion, brought the dog deep into the canyon and left it there to die.
    I am fourteen. I am in my room, sitting on my mattress on the floor. My mother is in the living room, but she is beyond reach, inaccessible, the last person I could possibly turn to. I am absolutely alone, and nothing is going to change, and I think that all I really want is for the pain I feel to stop, and the only way I can imagine it stopping is if I was dead. I, too, have been left to die. At the age of fourteen, the idea of being dead has considerable appeal. I would not do it to spite anyone or hurt anyone, only to end the misery. Sometimes it feels as if I have no other way out.

3
    B ack in Page, teenagers on bicycles loitered in front of the convenience stores, their curfews approaching, probably talking about how boring their lives were, because that’s what teenagers everywhere think—especially on a Sunday when nothing is open, and even more so when it’s summer, which seems to last forever when you’re a teenager. Old people at the other end of their lives clogged the streets with their lumbering RVs, which I found frustrating because I needed to reach the fire station as soon as possible. I didn’t know where else to ask for help—going to the police station seemed too extreme. It seemed reasonable to expect that in an area with so much surrounding wilderness, there could have been some kind of volunteer search-and-rescue organization or unit to get advice from, if not actual assistance. I wasn’t sure how much assistance I could expect from the fire department, given that I was only rescuing a dog, but you see stories all the time about heroic firemen rescuing cats from trees. I hoped I’d be able to persuade them, though it seemed unlikely they’d care as much as I did.
    The fire station, a nondescript brick and glass building with three large bays in the front for fire engines, was next to the police station on Coppermine Road,