I don’t remember running outside. I just remember being on the walking path screaming her name.
“Birdie! BIRDIE!”
The field behind the subdivision was empty. Tall brown grass, bending in the wind. Gray clouds pressing down low. Beyond the field, the canal, high and brown and fast with the fall irrigation runoff.
The canal.
Every parent in Willow Bend knows about the canal. Two summers ago, a teenager from another subdivision had gone in at a spot two miles down and nearly drowned. There’s a chain-link fence along part of it, but not all of it. Not near us.
I called 911 with my hands shaking so hard I dropped the phone in the grass twice.
The first deputy arrived in eight minutes. Then two more. Then a sergeant. Then a truck from Ada County Search and Rescue with volunteers in orange vests. Then a man with a bloodhound named Duchess.
By three o’clock, there were fifty people out there. Neighbors I’d only ever waved at, walking in lines through the field, arms spread wide, calling her name. The Hendersons from across the street. The Kowalskis with their teenage sons. The young couple from the end of the street who’d just moved in and whose names I didn’t even know yet.
Harold Dennison was out there too.
I saw him at the edge of the field in a rain jacket, with a flashlight, walking slow and steady along the fence line. He didn’t come near me. He didn’t say anything. He just walked and called her name, over and over, in a hoarse, cracked voice.
Duchess the bloodhound took Birdie’s scent from her pillowcase. She tracked it out the back gate and across the field to the canal trail. And then, at the edge of the canal, she lost it. She circled and circled and whined and sat down.
The man holding her leash looked at Deputy Hollis. Deputy Hollis looked at the water.
Nobody looked at me.
“No,” I said. “No. She knows not to go near the water. She knows.”
At 3:40, the rain started.
At 4:15, they called in the dive team.
At 4:30, a deputy walked me back to my driveway and told me to wait there in case Birdie came home on her own. I knew what that meant. It meant they didn’t want me watching while the divers went into the canal.
So I stood in my driveway in the rain, holding her purple stuffed rabbit against my chest, staring at the gray sky.
And at 4:52, Edgar came down out of the clouds with my daughter’s butterfly clip.
Sophia Rivers is an experienced News Content Editor with a sharp eye for detail and a passion for delivering accurate and engaging news stories. At TheArchivists, she specializes in curating, editing, and presenting news content that informs and resonates with a global audience.
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