Free Rose in a Storm by Jon Katz Page A

blood and a sharp yelp. Then she jumped back and circled again, moving sideways, staring at the fox, confusing him further.
    The fox was clever, had chosen his approach well. He could not have guessed that Rose would come in from the far side. The wild dog could see the fox, but he could not get at him, even though he made a fearful amount of noise.
    The fox listened to the roaring, and turned as Winston pecked at his tail from the rear. Rose growled and lowered her head to charge again.
    The fox backed up, looked around, calculated. Rose sensed that he was much like her, that he moved in the same deliberate ways.
    This barn was different from his usual hunts, a solitary stalking of rabbit, cat, or mouse. This challenger—this dog—was a strange animal, and she behaved erratically, and seemed determined. Rose waited. There was no need to fight. She could almost see the fox make up its mind. Finally, slowly, deliberately, the fox turned, darted up onto a hay bale, then out through the broken window and into the dark.
    Winston huffed and clucked and the hen ran back to the other side of the coop with the others. The rooster strutted proudly in a circle around the floor of the barn.
    The wild dog quieted, and Rose stuck her head out into the night to make sure the fox was really gone, and that there were no others. The tracks were already being covered over with fresh-blown snow, but she could hear him making his way through the drifts and over the fence. She looked at the hen, who had a wound on one of her thighs, which was bleeding slightly. She saw that Winston was not injured, and that she had escaped intact herself.
    She jumped back down off the raised platform and onto the barn floor, where the wild dog was lying on the ground, panting. He was exhausted from his efforts to get to the fox. She touched her nose to his and he walked over to the straw and curled up, falling asleep immediately.
    Rose made her way back to the farmhouse, through the snow. When she was back inside, she ambled up the stairs to check on Sam. He was still asleep.
    Sam had no idea what Rose did at night. When she found something wrong—a predator, a sick sheep, a fence blown open—she barked or growled to awaken him. Otherwise, her night rounds were her own business, her secret.
    Sometimes, in the morning, when he got up, he looked at her, and asked, “So, how was the night, girl? Everything quiet?” But he knew that some parts of her life were hers alone, and he would never know about them. That there were things that went on in her world all the time that he would never see or grasp.
    On this night, she was watching her world turn white, a wall of wind and snow coming between her windows and the barn animals. She was feeling the storm rage, filling up theworld around her. Cold crept in around the window frame, as did some powdery snow blown in by the wind.
    Rose sighed, shook herself off, and lay down. Sam was exhausted from his previous day trudging between the barn and pastures, dragging water and hay, checking generators, clearing gates, chipping ice, knocking snow off rooftops, kicking, shoveling, and cursing at the massive storm. His deep sleep revealed that he was stiff and drained.
    At night, in the dark, sitting by a window, pictures often came streaming through her mind. When Sam was asleep, and there was no work to do, the sounds of the farm and the world beyond seeped into her consciousness. Ewes breathing. Cows snorting. Cats hunting. Bats flying.
    Tonight—wind and snow, wind and snow. She had never witnessed so bleak and foreboding a landscape, and it stirred something in her, and in her memory. In the very darkest hours of the night, she closed her eyes, thought of warmth, of green hills rolling out of sight, of sheep stretched almost to the horizon and grass bent in the wind as far as the eye could see.
    R OSE OPENED her eyes. She heard a thump from the rear of the house and rushed to a window at the back. She saw a long chunk