Part 2: I Said “Go Find Someone” to Our German Shepherd at the Worst Moment of My Life — I Didn’t Tell Him Who, and I’m Still Stunned by Who He Brought Back

Part 2

I should tell you about Bandit, because the kind of dog he is matters very much for what happened next, and you cannot understand it if you think he was an ordinary pet.

He was not a trained service animal. He had not been to any program. He was a regular family German shepherd, bought as a pup from a small breeder in our hometown, raised by Glenn in the garage and the backyard and the truck cab, the way a certain kind of older man raises a certain kind of dog — by being around them constantly, expecting them to behave like a thinking creature, and not saying very much.

What Glenn had given him was simpler than training. He had given him attention. For eight years, Bandit had watched Glenn work, watched Glenn talk to people, watched Glenn read other men in the parking lot of the hardware store, the gas station, the diner. He had ridden in the passenger seat of Glenn’s truck on every errand. He had been studying our species, and especially Glenn’s reading of it, since he was twelve weeks old.

He knew what a person is. He knew what different kinds of people are. I cannot prove that, but I have lived with him for eight years and I am telling you he did.

Here is the small thing, the thing I clocked in the doorway and did not have time to fully think about.

When I said “go find someone,” Bandit did not bolt blindly into the dark.

He took two steps out of the RV onto the gravel, and he stopped. He lifted his head. He turned it — north, then south, then north again — and his ears worked, and his nose worked, and I understood, watching him, that he was not panicking and he was not guessing. He was deciding.

I had given him the worst instruction a person can give a dog. Find someone. I had not said who. I had not said where. I had given him a problem and no parameters, and a normal dog would have run in a straight line and barked at the night until he lost the scent of home.

Bandit did not do that. He stood on the gravel for maybe three seconds. He oriented. And then he chose a direction — north, up the highway, away from where we had come — and he went.

I did not understand yet why he chose north. I’m not sure I’d have understood it at all if a man named Davey had not, much later, told me the rest of it.

But it mattered. The way he chose mattered.

Part 3

I went back to Glenn.

I want to tell you what those thirty minutes were like, because they are the worst thirty minutes of my life and I do not want to make them prettier than they were.

I got down on the floor of the RV. I got Glenn’s head onto my thigh. I loosened his collar. I told him things. I am sure I told him a great deal that I will not write here. I told him about Becca. I told him about the day we got married, which I do not remember telling him about, but he told me later, in the hospital, that I did. I told him to stay with me. I told him not to leave me on a turnout in Wyoming alone.

He could not talk much. His eyes kept finding me and losing me and finding me. His hand on my forearm was the only part of him I was sure of.

And I sat there and listened for the door.

You learn things you did not know you knew about yourself in thirty minutes on a floor like that. I learned that I had assumed, my whole adult life, that I would go first. That Glenn would handle this. That when the time came I would not have to do anything, because Glenn would do everything, because Glenn had done everything for me since 1972. I sat on that floor with his head in my lap and I understood, with a clarity that knocked the breath out of me, that I had been wrong, and that he had been doing it all this time and the bill had come due and I was the one in the room.

I prayed. I do not pray normally. I prayed.

I listened to the RV’s clock tick. I listened to the wind. I listened, every thirty seconds, for the scrape of dog nails on gravel. I had no plan B. I do not believe in not having a plan B but I did not have one. The plan was the dog.

Twenty minutes in I let myself think the thought I had not let myself think — that Bandit was a dog, that he was beautiful and good and ours, but that he was a dog, and that I had asked an animal to do the work of an ambulance, and that I had been a stupid old woman to expect anything else.

I told Glenn I loved him.

He squeezed my forearm.

And then I heard a sound, far off, coming up the highway. Not nails on gravel. A different sound. The deep, slow whine of a downshifting truck engine, the kind that big rigs make when they’re coming off the road into a turnout.

Headlights swept the inside of the RV.

And a moment later there were footsteps on the gravel, fast, and a voice — a man’s voice, with a long Texas in it — calling, “Ma’am? Lady? Your dog there’s lit a fire under me, you got an emergency in there?”

I scrambled up off the floor. I opened the door.

And there on the gravel was Bandit, his sides heaving, his tongue purple with running, looking up at me with an expression I would later describe to my daughter as the face of a creature who has done exactly what was asked of him and is no longer responsible for the consequences.

And next to him, breathing hard from sprinting from his rig, was a man I had never seen in my life — a long-haul trucker, maybe fifty-five, in a Carhartt jacket and a feed-store cap, with a phone already in his hand and 911 already on it.

His name, I would learn, was Davey.

He looked at Bandit. He looked at me. He said into the phone, “Yeah, I got the lady. Tell ’em to come now.”

Part 4

I want to slow down here, because what Davey did in the next forty minutes was the difference between my life now and a different life I do not want to imagine.

He came in. He did not ask permission, he did not hesitate, he came up the steps of our RV with the calm of a man who had been in bad rooms before, and he went straight to Glenn on the floor.

I told him later — I had to know — what made him follow a dog at two in the morning, a stranger’s dog, from a rest area into the pitch black.

He told me this. He’d been parked at a turnout about a mile north, sleeping in his cab. He’d been on the road eighteen hours and he was bone-tired. And he’d been woken up by a German shepherd barking at his driver’s side door — not the frenzied bark of a stray, he said, but a steady, purposeful bark, the bark of a dog who had a job.

Davey had cracked the door, and the dog had reared up, put his paws on the running board, taken hold of Davey’s jacket sleeve in his teeth — not biting, gripping — and pulled. Twice. Then stepped back and looked south down the highway and barked once.

Davey said the part I will never get over. He said, “Ma’am, I drove an ambulance for nine years before I got my CDL. I know what that dog was. I have seen people do that, and I have never seen a dog do it. He came and got me on purpose. He didn’t pick the next car. He picked me.”

I asked him later — much later, after Glenn was out of the hospital — whether he meant that the way it sounded.

Davey took a long pause. And then he said, “Ma’am, I don’t have a way to prove it. But that turnout I was in had two other rigs and a station wagon. He went past every one of them, came past my cab on the passenger side first like he was looking in the window, and only barked on the driver’s side. He picked me. I would bet anything I own on it.”

I have thought about that a great deal since.

In our RV that night, Davey kept Glenn alive. He kept him talking. He kept his head turned to the side when he started to be sick. He told me — and I will love him for this for the rest of my life — that he had a wife named Pat and that she made him swear on his rig to never drive past someone who needed help, and that the dog had just made keeping that promise very easy.

The ambulance took forty-eight minutes to reach us. They came up from Rawlins. They put Glenn on a gurney and into the back of the rig, and they took him to a hospital in Casper because the cardiac unit at Rawlins was small and Casper was where he needed to be.

Bandit got into the ambulance. Nobody stopped him. The paramedic just looked at him, looked at Davey, and said, “Yeah, fine, get in.”

Davey followed in his truck. I rode up front with the paramedic.

And in the back of that ambulance, lying on the gurney with an IV in his arm and a mask on his face, my husband of fifty-one years lifted one hand off the blanket and put it on the head of a ninety-three-pound German shepherd, and he did not take it off for the next two hours.

Part 5

Glenn lived.

He had what the cardiologist in Casper called a major event and what Becca, when she flew out the next day, called a near miss, and the doctor told me, when we were alone, that the timing of help had been the whole game. Twenty minutes longer, he said, gently, and we would be having a different conversation. Forty, he said, and a much worse one.

The dog bought us those minutes. The dog and a trucker who had been an EMT in another life.

But here is the thing I cannot stop turning over, the thing my daughter Becca and I have talked about until late at night.

I gave Bandit the worst possible command. I want to say that plainly. “Go find someone” is not a command. It is a prayer with verbs. I did not tell him who. I did not tell him where. I did not say “find a person with a phone” or “find a man who knows what to do.” I said someone, and I pointed at the dark, and I asked an animal to fill in every blank in that sentence by himself.

And Bandit chose right.

He did not go south, the way we’d come, where there were no rest stops for thirty miles. He went north, where, I learned the next day on the map, the nearest rest area was — exactly the one mile up. I do not know how he knew. I have a theory. We had passed that rest area earlier in the day; he had been awake in the back, looking out the window, the way he always did. I think he remembered. I think he had clocked, hours earlier, that there were trucks parked there.

And once he got there, he did not bark at the first cab he came to. He picked. The way Davey told it, Bandit walked the line of vehicles, the way Glenn walked through a parking lot reading men. And he picked the rig of the man who had been an ambulance driver for nine years.

I have asked myself, since, what Bandit could possibly have read in Davey’s cab in the middle of the night that told him this one. I do not know. Maybe the smell of someone who’d handled medical equipment. Maybe nothing. Maybe a guess. But I will say this: my dog, given the worst instruction of his life by a panicking old woman, went to the right place and picked the right man.

I have told this story to a few people. Almost every one of them says, what a smart dog, and I do not disagree, but I think it misses the thing.

The thing is not that he was smart.

The thing is that he had been watching us, watching Glenn, watching the world, for eight years — being treated like a thinking creature by a man who expected him to be one. He had been paid attention to. He had been given the dignity of complicated tasks. And when the worst moment came, and the woman who had never been the one in charge of an emergency in her life pointed at the dark and asked for help, he did the only thing eight years of being taken seriously had prepared him to do.

He took her seriously.

He found someone. He found the right someone. He did the work.

Part 6

Once we got home — six weeks later than we’d planned, by airplane instead of by RV, the RV is still in Casper and Glenn says he is going to go get it before he dies, which I am holding him to — I started understanding the rest of it.

I have said it to Becca more than once. Bandit was not, in the end, the one who saved Glenn’s life. Bandit was the one who brought the one who saved Glenn’s life. He understood, somehow, that he could not do it himself. He could not give CPR. He could not call 911. He could not drive an RV. He understood the limit of his own usefulness, and instead of doing what most loyal dogs would have done — lay down beside Glenn on the floor and grieved with us — he went and got the missing piece.

A dog assessing his own insufficiency and outsourcing to a human. I cannot stop thinking about it.

And the man he brought back. Of all the men he could have chosen at that rest area at two in the morning. A retired ambulance driver. A man with calm hands and a 911 button and a wife at home who had made him swear to never drive past someone who needed help.

It is the kind of thing you tell people and they look at you politely because they think you are an old woman embellishing. I cannot make it sound smaller than it is. We are very lucky old people, and the luck came up the steps of our RV in a Carhartt jacket because a dog walked it there on purpose.

Davey and his wife Pat sent us a Christmas card that first year. We have sent them one every year since. Last year’s said, in Pat’s handwriting at the bottom, Tell Bandit Davey still talks about him.

He does. I asked.

Part 7

Bandit is twelve now, going on thirteen, and he is gray in the muzzle and slow on the stairs, and most days he sleeps in a square of sun in the living room and dreams with his feet moving. Glenn is seventy-seven. He has a stent. He takes pills in the morning out of a plastic box with the days of the week on it, and Bandit lies under the kitchen table while he does, and when Glenn drops a pill — which he does, his hands are not what they were — Bandit gets up and picks it up and gives it to him.

He was never trained to do that. He just decided, after Wyoming, that this was now his job.

We are not making any more six-week trips. We have promised our daughters this. But we go for short drives, the three of us, on weekends, and Glenn sometimes pulls into a rest area to walk around and let his legs work, and every single time, the second the RV slows to turn in, Bandit’s head comes up at the back window and his ears go forward and he looks at the rows of parked trucks.

He looks at them like a man scanning a room he’s been in before. Like he’s looking for someone.

I do not know if dogs remember the way we do.

I think this one might.

Part 8

People ask me, when I tell them this, what I would tell my younger self about that night in Wyoming, and I always give them the same answer, and it is not the answer they expect.

I do not say trust your dog. I trusted my dog.

I say: pay attention to the ones who pay attention to you. For eight years, my husband had treated a dog like a thinking creature, and a dog grew up into one. When I needed a thinking creature in a turnout at two in the morning, I had one in the room.

I gave the worst command of my life. Go find someone.

He decided who.

He brought back the right one.

I have stopped trying to explain it. I just say thank you, every night, into the fur at the back of his neck before bed, and I scratch the gray spot above his eyes, and Glenn watches from the couch and does not say anything, because Glenn has never needed to say very much.

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