Part 2: Drivers Thought the Dog Was About to Be Hit by the Train — Then a Man Ran Onto the Tracks and Saw Why It Wouldn’t Leave

Part 2

I should tell you about the tracks behind the elevators, because the place is half of why nobody understood.

The Norfolk Southern line runs behind a row of dead grain elevators on the north edge of Lima, down in a cut, below street level, with steep gravel embankments on both sides. From the road you look down at the rails. From the rails you cannot see the road. It is loud down there even when nothing is moving — wind funnels through the cut — and it is the kind of forgotten strip of a town where the only people who walk it are people the town has stopped looking at.

My name is Dale. I am forty-four years old. I run a small two-truck towing operation out of a lot off Metcalf, which is the only reason I happened to be standing there with a coffee at five o’clock on a Thursday.

Here is the small thing. The thing that should have told all of us, and told none of us.

The dog was not standing in the middle of the track the way a confused animal stands — turning, pacing, head up, looking for a way out. A scared dog on a track moves. It circles. It freezes and bolts and freezes again. Its whole body asks a question.

This dog was not asking a question.

He was standing over a single fixed spot, squared up to it, head down, the way a dog stands over a thing it has decided is its job. His body was not the body of an animal that wanted to get off the tracks and couldn’t figure out how.

It was the body of an animal that had decided it was not getting off the tracks at all.

And there was one more thing, which I only put together later. From up on the embankment, the angle was wrong. We were looking down and across. The dog’s body, low and square, was blocking our line of sight to the ground right in front of him.

Whatever he was standing over, the dog himself was hiding it from us.

I did not understand that in the moment. I’m not sure I’d have understood it before the train came if a stranger hadn’t done something the rest of us were too smart to do.

But it mattered. The way he was standing — squared up, head down, hiding the spot with his own body — every bit of it mattered.

Part 3

The crowd on the embankment kept growing, and the strange thing about a crowd is that the bigger it gets the less anyone does.

By a quarter past five there must have been fifteen people up on that gravel. A couple of teenagers. The woman with the granola bar. A man in a delivery uniform who’d pulled his van over. Me. And the more of us there were, the more it became somebody else’s problem — the more each of us stood there narrating the dog’s death instead of stopping it.

Somebody should do something.

Is anyone calling the railroad?

You can’t go down there, it’s a live track.

Maybe animal control —

We had a dozen reasons not to go down. All of them were good reasons. A live freight line is exactly the kind of place a sensible adult does not run onto for a stray dog. I had a daughter at home. I had a business. I had every ordinary, decent reason in the world to stand at the top of the embankment and feel terrible.

So that is what we did. We stood at the top and felt terrible and called the dog by names that were not his name.

And the dog kept his head down over that one spot, and the cut kept funneling its cold wind, and somewhere down the line, getting closer, a freight train kept doing the only thing a freight train does.

A man came out of the dollar store parking lot up the street. I noticed him because he was moving differently than the rest of us — not drifting over to gawk, but walking fast and straight, the way you walk when you have already decided something. He was maybe sixty, in a canvas work coat, gray stubble, the kind of weathered face this town wears on a lot of men who have worked outside their whole lives.

He looked down at the dog. He looked at the crossing gates, which were down. He looked at the rest of us standing there in a useful, helpless row.

And then he said, to no one in particular, “That dog ain’t standing there for nothing.”

And he went down the embankment.

Part 4

He went down sideways, half sliding on the gravel, one hand back for balance, and somebody yelled at him to stop and he did not stop.

He hit the bottom and crossed the first rail and walked up the track toward the dog with his hands a little out from his sides, talking low. I could not hear the words from up top. The dog lifted his head for the first time in ten minutes and looked at the man coming — and he did not run from him, and he did not run to him.

He took one step sideways. Just one. Like he was clearing room.

And that one step changed the angle.

For the first time, from the embankment, we could see the ground the dog had been standing over.

There was a man lying between the rails.

I will tell you exactly what it looked like, because I have seen it every time I have closed my eyes since. A man, lying on his side, down in the gravel and the railroad grime between the two rails, not moving. One leg was bent wrong underneath him. His coat was the same gray-brown as the ground, which is why not one of us, looking down from forty yards, had seen him — he was the same color as the track, and the dog had been standing in front of him.

The whole embankment made one sound at the same time. I cannot describe it. It was the sound fifteen people make when the story they have been telling themselves for ten minutes turns out to be the opposite of the truth.

The man in the canvas coat dropped to his knees beside the body. He shook a shoulder. He put his face down close. He looked up at us, and even from forty yards I could see what his face was doing, and he yelled three words up the embankment that broke the spell.

“He’s alive! Help!”

And then everything that should have happened in the first ten minutes happened in the next ninety seconds.

I went down that embankment. So did the delivery driver. So did one of the teenagers. The woman up top was on the phone screaming the location at a 911 dispatcher — behind the elevators, the tracks behind the elevators, there’s a man on the tracks and a train’s coming.

There were four of us down there by then. The man between the rails was a dead weight, fully out, his leg caught at an angle that told us he had fallen crossing the track and hit his head and not gotten back up. We could not lift him clean. We had to drag.

And the dog — the pit bull — moved with us. Right at the man’s shoulder. The whole time we dragged, the dog kept his body pressed to the man’s body, would not be shooed, would not give us room, stayed in contact like he had been in contact for who knows how long already.

We got him over the near rail. We got him onto the embankment slope. We got him up onto the flat gravel at the bottom of the cut, the four of us hauling and the dog scrambling alongside.

And then we heard the horn.

Not far. Not a warning from down the line. Close. The long flat blare of a freight coming through the cut, and then the freight itself, filling the whole bottom of the world with noise and wind and the smell of hot metal, blowing through the exact spot where the man had been lying.

The man on his radio at the railroad later put a number on it. The dispatcher’s call log put a number on it.

We had cleared the rails two minutes before the train came through.

Two minutes.

And here is the thing I keep coming back to, the thing that is almost too much to hold. When that train roared through, the dog did not cower. He did not bolt. He lay down in the gravel on top of his man, pressed flat against him, and rode out the noise with his body over the body, exactly where he had been standing for the last ten minutes and, I would learn, for a great deal longer than that.

Part 5

I thought, standing there shaking as the last car of that freight went by, that I understood what the dog had done. A loyal dog stayed with a fallen man. It is a thing dogs do. It is the oldest story there is.

But over the next days, as I learned the rest of it, I understood that I had it only half right, and the half I had wrong is the half that has changed how I think about that animal.

The man between the rails was named Errol. He was sixty-one years old, and he was homeless, and he had been living under the Shawnee Road bridge about a mile down the line for the better part of two years.

The dog was his. The dog had always been his.

The two of them lived under that bridge together. And the tracks behind the elevators were on the route Errol walked — every day, down the line and back, scavenging cans, getting to the day shelter, the small geography of a man with nowhere to be.

That Thursday afternoon, crossing the track the way he had crossed it a thousand times, Errol’s foot had caught, or his heart had stuttered, or his legs had simply done what tired legs do — we will never know exactly. He went down hard between the rails and hit his head on the steel and he did not get up.

And the dog had been right there. The way he was always right there.

Now here is the part that is not just loyalty.

A dog that only loves its person lies down beside the fallen person and stays. That dog dies with its person. It is faithful and it is doomed and it does no good.

This dog did more than stay.

He stood up over Errol, in the open, in the middle of the rails, at the one spot on that whole stretch of forgotten track where he could be seen from the road above. He put himself where the humans were. And he did the only two things a dog can do to make humans come — he stood his ground so they could not ignore him, and he barked.

People on the embankment told me afterward, once they understood, that the dog had been barking when they first arrived. Barking up at the road. They had taken it for a scared stray barking at a crowd. It was not that.

It was a call.

He could not lift Errol. He could not flag a train down. He could not run a mile to the bridge and back with help — there was no help under that bridge, there was only the two of them. So he did the one thing left. He made himself the most visible, most impossible-to-ignore thing on that track, standing over the body of his man, and he held that spot and screamed for the species that builds the things that were about to kill them both.

He was not refusing to leave the tracks because he was too dumb to save himself.

He was standing on the tracks on purpose, because the tracks were where he would be seen.

Part 6

Once I understood that, every wrong thing I had thought on that embankment came back and turned over.

I had thought: that dog is too stupid or too scared to move.

He was the only one of us thinking clearly. We were a crowd of fifteen humans with phones and trucks and the full use of language, and for ten minutes the smartest plan any of us came up with was to wave a granola bar and feel terrible. The dog, who had none of those things, had already executed the correct plan before we arrived. He had positioned himself for maximum visibility. He had begun signaling. He was running the rescue. We were the slow ones.

I had thought the way he stood — head down, squared up, blocking — was the posture of a confused animal frozen on a track.

It was the posture of a body deliberately placed between his person and the world’s line of sight, hiding Errol, yes — but only because the dog himself was the thing he wanted us to see first. Come for me, the posture said, and you will find him.

And the granola bar. The slapped thigh. The coaxing voices. We had spent ten minutes trying to get the dog to abandon the exact spot he was dying to keep us looking at. We had been begging him to undo the one thing that was going to save the man’s life. Every here, boy had been us asking him to give up.

He never gave up. He outlasted fifteen people who were smarter than him and equipped better than him and free to walk away, which he was not.

The man in the canvas coat — his name is Roy, and he is the one who went down the embankment when none of the rest of us would — said the thing to me later that I have not been able to put down.

He said, “The dog didn’t need us to be brave. He needed us to be late.”

And we almost were.

Part 7

Errol spent eleven days in the hospital in Lima. A skull fracture, a broken leg, hypothermia from the cold gravel. He came out of it. The doctors said the cold had actually bought him time, slowed everything down, and that the thing that had nearly killed him — lying still between two rails for what turned out to be close to forty minutes before the crowd even formed — was survived only because he was found at all.

He was found because of the dog.

The dog’s name is Track.

Errol named him that years ago, before any of this, because he was a stray pup Errol found walking the rail line, walking the track, and the name was just a description back then. It is not a description anymore.

There is a local outfit in Lima that works with people living rough — gets them documents, gets them into housing. They had been trying to reach Errol for over a year, the way they try to reach a lot of men who do not want to be reached. After the tracks, Errol let them.

There was one condition Errol had, the case worker told me, and he had it before they had even finished the sentence about housing.

The dog comes.

He said he would sleep under the bridge for the rest of his life before he would take a single night indoors that Track was not allowed into. He had stood on a train track for that dog, the case worker pointed out gently. The dog had stood on a train track for him.

They found him a place that takes dogs.

I have been by since. It is a small unit on the east side, nothing fancy, a door that locks and heat that works. Errol uses a cane now and he probably will from here on. He answered the door the day I came by, and behind his legs, pushing forward to see who it was, was a brown-and-white pit bull with his ribs no longer showing, because somebody feeds him every day now.

The dog did not remember me. There is no reason he should. But he leaned his whole weight against my shins the way a dog does when it has decided a stranger is all right, and Errol said, “He likes you,” like that was a thing worth saying about me, and I had to look at the ceiling for a second.

Part 8

I think about the embankment all the time. The granola bar. The thing I let myself believe for ten minutes.

I think about how close somebody should do something came to being the last thing fifteen of us ever said about a man and his dog.

Errol and Track sleep indoors now. I am told the dog still walks to the door and stands at it sometimes, head down, the way he stood on the rails, and that Errol has to call him back from it. I do not know what the dog thinks the door is. I do not think the dog thinks the door is anything. He just knows what standing-and-waiting is for.

It is for not leaving.

He never once tried to save himself. That was never the plan. A dog that wanted to live would have been off those rails in two seconds.

He wanted his man to live.

So he stood on the tracks, and he barked at a town that wasn’t looking, and he held the spot until somebody finally came down.

Follow this page for more stories about the ones who refuse to leave, and the ones who almost don’t come down in time.