Free Rose in a Storm by Jon Katz Page B

of drainpipe blow off the roof and fly out toward the pasture and into the dark. She growled.
    Storms had always frightened her, especially thunder and lightning. So did gunshots and sudden noises. They were inexplicable, and she had no sense of how to respond to them. She ran back to check on Sam, who was still asleep.
    She sniffed his leg, touched his knee with her nose. Shewent into the kitchen, gulped down some water, ate some food, and stuck her head out of the dog door.
    Although the snow was already coming up to the ground-floor windows, Sam had built a dormer to shield the back door—and the dog door—from snow and rain. Rose could still open it, but if she went out, she would quickly run into a wall of snow and drifts.
    She could hear the sheep calling out to their lambs and to one another, though it was muffled by the storm. She could barely see the barn. In seconds, her nose was covered in snow. She drew her head back inside and lay down. She closed her eyes.
    There was a continuous sound now, a roaring of air, and a shifting of snow on the roof, and none of it was especially familiar to her. It was difficult for her to lie still for too long.
    Rose thought she heard a movement outside and ran to the window again, but this time saw only some snow sliding off the barn roof, slowly, hitting the ground with a thud.
    She moved around upstairs, from window to window, looking out, seeing little, hearing the wind, watching the snow, feeling the cold. She listened for further sounds from the barns and the pastures, but she heard nothing, not even the complaining of the goats.
    Sam moved in his sleep, rolled over. She hopped up on his bed, sniffed his hand, and he mumbled something to her. She returned to the window.
    The storm made her even more alert, hypersensitive to sound and movement. She did not panic, but she was keenly tuned to danger, and a sense of that suffused her being—her body, which was tense, even rigid, and her mind, which was spinning. A storm outside, a storm inside.
    *   *   *
    A T LONG LAST day came, although not the sun. The storm was blowing harder than ever, the farmhouse groaning in the wind and thick new snow still falling.
    Sam came downstairs, made coffee, and then stood for a long time looking out the windows. He told Rose they would stay inside, but he lasted only a few minutes before pulling on his boots and reaching for his heavy gloves and hooded jacket.
    Rose rushed out the door ahead of him, watching him for instructions and commands, surveying the farm and the animals.
    He threw hay to the cows, hauled some on a sled out to the sheep. Every movement was difficult in this snow. He chipped at the ice in the troughs where the deicers had either broken or simply could not keep up.
    Then he called Rose back to the house with him. She was so encrusted in snow she looked like an all-white dog. He shook off his own coat before taking it off.
    He told Rose to stay while he sat at the kitchen table, both of them anxious but unable to do more. He said neither of them should go out in the storm right now, that they would be in for the day if it kept up like this.
    Rose edged toward the back door several times, and each time he called her back, the last time a bit sharply. No more work today.
    With no work to do, Rose drifted. She went from room to room, window to window. In the bedroom, Rose found a trunk, and when she put her nose to it she smelled Katie, whined, and wagged her tail. Rose was a quiet dog, barking sometimes when working, rarely whining. Once in a greatwhile, she howled at the full moon, or at the sound of a siren on a distant road. Otherwise, she rarely made much noise.
    She went downstairs, drank some more water, ate some more food. It was difficult to be still; when she was moving, her senses took over, and drowned out the pictures in her head.
    She lay down outside Sam’s room.
    An hour later, Sam could be still no longer and was back outside, Rose alongside, trying to