The Dog Who Healed A Family

“She’s eating me out of house and home. Literally,” Jane wailed to a college friend over lunch. “I’m going to have to turn her in to the ASPCA.”

“Don’t do that. I’ll take her,” Jane’s friend replied, surprising her because Jane knew she did not approve of pets in the house. “She can live in our garage. Evan’s ten now. It’ll be good for him to have the responsibility of caring for an animal.”

Jane’s bluff had been called. Could she really envision life without Sweet Elizabeth? She was silent. Her friend said, “Come on. We’ll go get her right now.”

Elizabeth met them at the door, sitting up as usual to have her ears scratched. “Oh, she’s cute,” said the friend, but so perfunctorily that Jane knew she had missed the point of Elizabeth. “Never mind,” Jane whispered into Elizabeth’s soft fur, “it’ll be all right. She’ll come to love you, just as I did, and you’ll be happy in the country.” Elizabeth shook her head slowly. Was there reproach in her eyes? Jane gave one last kiss to that foolish ear.

Robert was restless that evening, going often out on the terrace. “Oh, Robbie,” Jane told him, “I’m so sorry. She was your friend, too, and I didn’t think of that.” As Jane hugged him, the old emptiness returned, the emptiness of the time before Sweet Elizabeth when Jane used to imagine that everyone else’s phone was ringing, that everyone else had friends to be with and places to go. A little white rabbit who gave Jane the courage to reach out had made a surprising difference in her life.

It was weeks before she slammed the refrigerator door without a second thought, stopped expecting an innocent white face to come peeking around the terrace door, gave up listening for the thump of those heavy back feet. For a long time she didn’t trust herself even to inquire about Elizabeth. Then one day she was driving to Boston and, on impulse, decided to stop off in Connecticut to see her. No one was home, but the garage door was open. It was some time before Jane’s eyes got accustomed to the dark and she could distinguish the white blur that was Elizabeth. The little rabbit was huddled in a corner of her cottage, shaking with cold. The straw on the floor was soaking wet. The draft from the open door was bitter. Her food and water bowls were empty. Jane spoke her name and Elizabeth crept into her arms. Wrapping her in a sweater, Jane canceled her trip to Boston and headed back home.

She called her college friend the next day and told her she’d missed Elizabeth so much that she’d kidnapped her. That was all right, her friend said; what with the basketball season and all, her son hadn’t had much time for the rabbit. That left Jane with just one other phone call to make—the one canceling the order for a new rug. Then she settled back to watch Elizabeth and Robert rolling across the floor together.

Frankie Buck

On a narrow road twisting along beside a mountain stream lay a deer, struck and killed by a car.

A motorist happening along the infrequently traveled road swerved to avoid the deer’s body. As the driver swung out, he noticed a slight movement and stopped. There, huddled beside the dead doe, was a fawn, a baby who must have been born as its mother died, for the umbilical cord was still attached. “I don’t suppose you have a chance,” the motorist told the tiny creature as he tied off the cord, “but at least I can take you where it’s warm.”

The nearest place was the power plant of a state geriatric institution on a wooded mountaintop overlooking the town of Glen Gardner, New Jersey. Maintenance men there quickly gathered rags to make a bed for the fawn behind the boiler. When the fawn tried to suck the fingers reaching out to pet it, the men realized it was hungry and took a rubber glove, pricked pinholes in one finger, diluted some of the evaporated milk they used for their coffee and offered it to the fawn, who drank eagerly.

The talk soon turned to what to name the deer. Jean Gares, a small, spare man who was the electrician at the institution, had a suggestion. “If it’s a female, we can call her Jane Doe,” he proposed. “If it’s a male, Frank Buck.” The others laughed and agreed.

With the maintenance men taking turns feeding it around the clock, the little deer’s wobbly legs—and its curiosity—soon grew strong enough to bring it out from behind the boiler. The men on their coffee breaks petted and played with the creature, and as soon as they were certain that Frank Buck was the name that fit, they shortened it to Frankie and taught him to answer to it. The only one who didn’t call him Frankie, oddly enough, was Jean Gares. He, his voice rough with affection, addressed him as “you little dumb donkey,” as in “Come on and eat this oatmeal, you little dumb donkey. I cooked it specially for you.”

When Jean came to work at six each morning, always in his right-hand pocket was a special treat, an apple or a carrot, even sometimes a bit of chocolate, which Frankie quickly learned to nuzzle for. On nice days the two of them stepped outside, and Jean rested his hand on Frankie’s head and stroked his fur as they enjoyed the morning air together.

At the far end of the field in front of the power plant, deer often came out of the woods to graze in the meadow. When Frankie caught their scent, his head came up and his nose twitched. “We’d better tie him up or we’re going to lose him,” one of the men commented. Jean shook his head. “He’ll know when it’s time to go,” he said. “And when it is time, that’s the right thing for him to do.”

The first morning Frankie ventured away from the power plant, it wasn’t to join the deer in the meadow but to follow Jean. The two-story white stucco buildings at Glen Gardner were originally built at the turn of the century as a tuberculosis sanitarium and are scattered at various levels about the mountaintop. Cement walks and flights of steps connect them, and Jean was crossing on his rounds from one building to another one morning when he heard the tapping of small hooves behind him. “Go on home, you dumb donkey,” he told Frankie sternly. “You’ll fall and hurt yourself.” But Frankie quickly got the hang of the steps, and from then on the slight, white-haired man in a plaid flannel shirt followed by a delicate golden fawn was a familiar early morning sight.

One day, one of the residents, noticing Frankie waiting by the door of a building for Jean to reappear, opened the door and invited him in. Glen Gardner houses vulnerable old people who have been in state mental hospitals and need special care. When Frankie was discovered inside, the staff rushed to banish him. But then they saw how eagerly one resident after another reached out to touch him.

“They were contact-hungry,” says staff member Ruby Durant. “We were supplying marvelous care, but people need to touch and be touched as well.” When the deer came by, heads lifted, smiles spread and old people who seldom spoke asked the deer’s name. “The whole wing lit up,” remembers Ruby. “When we saw that and realized how gentle Frankie was, we welcomed him.”

His coming each day was something for the residents to look forward to. When they heard the quick tap-tap of Frankie’s hooves in the corridor, they reached for the crust, the bit of lettuce or the piece of apple they had saved from their own meals to give him. “He bowed to you when you gave him something,” says one of the residents. “That would be,” she qualifies solemnly, “if he was in the mood.” She goes on to describe how she offered Frankie a banana one day, and after she had peeled it for him, “I expected him to swallow the whole thing, but he started at the top and took little nibbles of it to the bottom, just like you or me.”

As accustomed as the staff became to Frankie’s presence, nevertheless, when a nurse ran for the elevator one day and found it already occupied by Frankie and a bent, very old lady whom she knew to have a severe heart condition, she was startled. “Pauline,” she said nervously, “aren’t you afraid Frankie will be frightened and jump around when the elevator moves?”

“He wants to go to the first floor,” Pauline said firmly.

“How do you know?”

“I know. Push the button.”

The nurse pushed the button. The elevator started down. Frankie turned and faced front. When the doors opened, he strolled out.

“See?” said Pauline triumphantly.

Discovering a line of employees in front of the bursar’s window one day, Frankie companionably joined the people waiting to be paid. When his turn at the window came, the clerk peered out at him. “Well, Frankie,” she said, “I wouldn’t mind giving you a paycheck. You’re our best social worker. But who’s going to take you to the bank to cash it?”

Frankie had the run of Glen Gardner until late fall, when superintendent Irene Salayi noticed that antlers were sprouting on his head. Fearful he might accidentally injure a resident, she decreed banishment. Frankie continued to frequent the grounds, but as the months passed he began exploring farther afield. An evening came when he did not return to the power plant. He was a year old and on his own.

Every morning, though, he was on hand to greet Jean and explore his pocket for the treat he knew would be there. In the afternoon he would reappear, and residents would join him on the broad front lawn and pet him while he munched a hard roll or an apple. A longtime resident named George, a solitary man with a speech defect who didn’t seem to care whether people understood what he said or not, taught Frankie to respond to his voice, and the two of them often went for walks together.

When Frankie was two years old—a sleek creature with six-point antlers and a shiny coat shading from tawny to deepest mahogany—there was an April snowstorm. About ten inches covered the ground when Jean Gares came to work on the Friday before Easter, but that didn’t seem enough to account for the fact that for the first time Frankie wasn’t waiting for him. Jean sought out George after he’d made his rounds and George led the way to a pair of Norway spruces where Frankie usually sheltered when the weather was bad. But Frankie wasn’t there or in any other of his usual haunts, nor did he answer to George’s whistle. Jean worried desperately about Frankie during the hunting season, as did everyone at Glen Gardner, but the hunting season was long over. What could have happened to him?

Jean tried to persuade himself that the deep snow had kept Frankie away, but he didn’t sleep well that night, and by Saturday afternoon he decided to go back to Glen Gardner and search for him. He got George, and the two of them set out through the woods. It was late in the day before they found the deer. Frankie was lying on a patch of ground where a steam pipe running underneath had thawed the snow. His right front leg was shattered. Jagged splinters of bone jutted through the skin. Dried blood was black around the wound. Jean dropped to his knees beside him. “Oh, you dumb donkey,” he whispered, “what happened? Were dogs chasing you? Did you step in a woodchuck hole?” Frankie’s eyes were dim with pain, but he knew Jean’s voice and tried to lick his hand.

Word that Frankie was hurt flicked like lightning through the center, and residents and staff waited anxiously while Jean made call after call in search of a veterinarian who would come to the mountain on a holiday weekend. Finally one agreed to come, but not until the next day, and by then Frankie was gone from the thawed spot. George tracked him through the snow, and when the vet arrived, he guided Jean and the grumbling young man to a thicket in the woods.

For the vet it was enough just to glimpse Frankie’s splintered leg. He reached in his bag for a hypodermic needle to put the deer out of his misery. “No,” said Jean, catching his arm. “No. We’ve got to try to save him.”

“There’s no way to set a break like that without an operation,” the vet said, “and this is a big animal, a wild animal. I don’t have the facilities for something like this.”

He knew of only one place that might. Exacting a promise from the vet to wait, Jean rushed to the main building to telephone. Soon he was back with an improvised sled; the Round Valley Veterinary Hospital fifteen miles away had agreed at least to examine Frankie if the deer was brought there. Cradling Frankie’s head in his lap, Jean spoke to him quietly until the tranquilizing injection the vet gave him took hold. When the deer drifted into unconsciousness, the three men lifted him onto the sled, hauled him out of the woods and loaded him into Jean’s pickup truck.

X-rays at the hospital showed a break so severe that a stainless-steel plate would be needed to repair it. “You’ll have to stand by while I operate,” Dr. Gregory Zolton told Jean. “I’ll need help to move him.” Jean’s stomach did a flip-flop, but he swallowed hard and nodded.

Jean forgot his fear that he might faint as he watched Dr. Zolton work through the three hours of the operation. “It was beautiful,” he remembers, his sweetly lined face lighting up. “So skillful the way he cleaned away the pieces of bone and ripped flesh and skin, then opened Frankie’s shoulder and took bone from there to make a bridge between the broken ends and screwed the steel plate in place. I couldn’t believe the care he took, but he said a leg that wasn’t strong enough to run and jump on wasn’t any use to a deer.”

After stitching up the incision, Dr. Zolton had orders for Jean. “I want you to stay with him until he’s completely out of the anesthetic to make sure he doesn’t hurt himself. Also, you’ve got to give him an antibiotic injection twice a day for the next seven days. I’ll show you how.”

There was an unused stable on the Glen Gardner grounds. Jean took Frankie there and settled him in a stall, and all night long Jean sat in the straw beside him. “Oh, you dumb donkey,” he murmured whenever Frankie stirred, “you got yourself in such a lot of trouble, but it’s going to be all right. Lie still. Lie still.” And he stroked Frankie’s head and held him in his arms when Frankie tried to struggle to his feet. With the soothing, known voice in his ear, Frankie each time fell back asleep, until finally, as the sun was coming up, he came fully awake. Jean gave him water and a little food, and only when he was sure Frankie was not frightened did he take his own stiff bones home to bed.

When word came that Frankie had survived the operation, a meeting of the residents’ council at Glen Gardner was called. Ordinarily it met to consider recommendations and complaints it wished to make to the staff, but on this day Mary, who was its elected president, had something different on her mind. “You know as well as I do that there’s no operation without a big bill. Now, Frankie’s our deer, right?” The residents all nodded. “So it stands to reason we’ve got to pay his bill, right?” The nods came more slowly.

“How are we going to do that?” Kenneth, who had been a businessman, asked.

After considerable discussion, it was decided to hold a sale of cookies that they would bake in the residents’ kitchen. Also, they would take up a collection, with people contributing what they could from their meager earnings in the sheltered workshop or the small general store the patients ran on the premises. “But first, before we do any of that,” a resident named Marguerite said firmly, “we have to send Frankie a get-well basket.”

The residents’ council worked the rest of the day finding a basket, decorating it and making a card. The next day a sack of apples was purchased at the general store and each apple was polished until it shone. Mary, Marguerite and George were deputized to deliver the basket. Putting it in a plastic garbage bag so the apples wouldn’t roll down the hill if they slipped in the snow, the three of them set out. They arrived without mishap and quietly let themselves into the stable. Frankie was sleeping in the straw, but he roused when they knelt beside him. Mary read him the card, Marguerite gave him an apple to eat, George settled the basket where he could see it but not nibble it and the three of them returned to the main building to report that Frankie was doing fine and was well pleased with his present.

By the seventh day after the operation, Jean called Dr. Zolton to say it was impossible to catch Frankie and hold him still for the antibiotic injections. Dr. Zolton chuckled. “If he’s that lively,” he told Jean, “he doesn’t need antibiotics.” But he warned it was imperative that Frankie be kept inside for eight weeks, for if he ran on the leg before it knit, it would shatter again.

Concerned about what to feed him for that length of time, Jean watched from the windows of his own house in the woods and on the grounds of Glen Gardner to see what the deer were eating. As soon as the deer moved away from a spot, Jean rushed to the place and gathered the clover, alfalfa, honeysuckle vines, young apple leaves—whatever it was the deer had been feeding on. Often George helped him, and each day they filled a twenty-five-pound sack. Frankie polished off whatever they brought, plus whatever residents coming to visit him at the stable had scavenged from their own meals in the way of rolls, carrots, potatoes and fruit.

“We’d go to see him, and oh, he wanted to get out so bad,” remembers Marguerite, a roly-poly woman with white hair springing out in an aura around her head. “Always he’d be standing with his nose pressed against a crack in the door. He smelled spring coming, and he just pulled in that fresh air like it was something wonderful to drink.”

When the collection, mostly in pennies and nickels, had grown to $135, the council instructed Jean to call Dr. Zolton and ask for his bill so they could determine if they had enough money to pay it. The day the bill arrived, Mary called a council meeting. The others were silent, eyes upon her, as she opened it. Her glance went immediately to the total at the bottom of the page. Her face fell. “Oh, dear,” she murmured bleakly, “we owe three hundred and ninety-two dollars.” Not until she shifted her bifocals did she see the handwritten notation: “Paid in Full—Gregory Zolton, DVM.”

When the eight weeks of Frankie’s confinement were up, Mary, Marguerite, George, Jean and Dr. Zolton gathered by the stable door. It was mid-June, and the grass was knee-deep in the meadow. Jean opened the barn door. Frankie had his nose against the crack as usual. He peered out from the interior darkness. “Come on, Frankie,” Jean said softly. “You can go now.” But Frankie was so used to someone slipping in and quickly closing the door that he didn’t move. “It’s all right,” Jean urged quietly. “You’re free.” Frankie took a tentative step and looked at Jean. Jean stroked his head. “Go on, Frankie,” he said, and gave him a little push.

Suddenly Frankie understood. He exploded into a run, flying over the field as fleetly as a greyhound, his hooves barely touching the ground.

“Slow down, slow down,” muttered Dr. Zolton worriedly.

“He’s so glad to be out,” Mary said wistfully. “I don’t think we’ll ever see him again.”