Night Rescue

by Mike Prask

I’d long since stopped wondering where Daniel went when he disappeared from our room in the middle of the night, though it took a certain amount of grace on my part. That was when his thoughts on how to manage our farm were clearest. So he would wander, to the kitchen or the porch, to survey what he could see in the dark. But that same dark meant he’d have a tougher time enacting whatever plan he’d conceived in his half-sleep. He’d make a note on a scrap of paper or draw something rough on our kitchen whiteboard, but sometimes, the thinking, the quiet, were enough to make him feel accomplished.

One night, a noise woke me, apocalyptically loud. I found only empty comforter in my husband’s place next to me. I waited, tempted to call out to him, not awake enough to be fully afraid, when I heard the next volley of thunder from outside. It was softer, exerting less of itself, now that I was roused from sleep. 

I walked to the window, the drawstring from the shade dangling idle. It had been hot all week, and the humidity welcomed itself in through the open windows. It was late August, but the air, for three in the morning, was oppressive. It felt heavy like a coat your mother makes you wear before winter really hits, one that you shed as soon as you’re out of her sight. Outside I could see phantasms of lightning flicker across the horizon, at our property’s end. I jumped back when a lightning flash filled the window with white. In that moment, I saw the outline of a man – Daniel – walking around the corner of the barn. Dark again, I saw the beam of a flashlight bobbing in mid-air, headed towards the road out front. I took a quick look in on our still-sleeping daughter and went down to the front porch.

Daniel changed course and walked towards the house. I couldn’t tell if he’d seen me at the front door. Seeing the storm, I stayed in place and waited, as though the porch were a lifeboat and our yard was dark, treacherous ocean. As he got close, I expected him to be soaked all the way through, but he was dry, and I realized it wasn’t raining at all.

“One of the goats is out,” he said.

“Did you see where?” I asked.

He shook his head and turned back around to look out into the darkness, leaving the flashlight loose at his side.

“Want help?” I asked.

He sighed and bobbed his head back and forth before answering. “I think,” he said, “it makes sense for one of us to stay here, Elena.” He was too diplomatic to say that one would be me. “But,” he said with a sharp staccato on the ‘t’. He waved his index finger in the air a few times then jogged over to the barn. I watched him on the way back but couldn’t tell what he was carrying till he got close again.

He had two old walkie-talkies. He handed one to me, accidentally hitting its button and producing a little burp of feedback. They had been left behind by his Uncle Tim, willed along to us with everything else on Blue Bluff Farm. They were probably useful to Tim back when he had to coordinate the corralling of actual livestock. Even at the farm’s height, Tim wasn’t exactly dealing with things on a Lonesome Dove scale, but it didn’t mean getting everyone penned up where they needed to be wasn’t probably a pain in the ass. 

“You know how to use it, right?” he asked.

“Seriously?” I asked, turning it slowly in my hand, then holding it to my ear like a phone. “I’m good.”

“Stay here,” he said as he nodded. “You can keep an eye on the goat pen, keep an ear out if Fay wakes up.” He hadn’t said those words in that exact combination before, but it wasn’t too far off his normal template. If he was here, his assumption was I ought not be doing shit. If he wasn’t here, was at school or wherever, the things that got done in his absence were magic, not by the hands of his wife, whose Cesarean scars – two years on – were still a Civil War wound, in his regard.

When our daughter Fay was born, her delivery had been the worst of both worlds: a day and a half of stalled labor, the slow progress of which didn’t mean a lack of agony. When the doctors realized nothing was happening, we moved to emergency surgery, Fay arriving too quick at that point for any of us to be ready. The doctors weren’t sure they hadn’t sewn me back up without a couple scalpels still inside. And here we still were, Daniel withholding from me the benefit of the doubt of simple, gradual healing. 

“So basically you want me to do the shit I do all day when you’re gone?” I asked. I sounded more annoyed than I was, but the more I thought about it, the more those levels – theoretical annoyance versus actual annoyance – evened out. 

He paused for a moment, scanning my face in the near-dark. “That’s how I know you’re good at them. Who else would we trust?”

“Who else is there?” I asked, wondering why he assumed he had my inherent trust to find our goat. I wasn’t sure I was awake enough yet to argue my qualifications over his. I spent more time on the farm than him, save for the summers, when he wasn’t teaching school. But I wondered, if even when he was here, he was paying the right attention, the attention to see that whatever ravaging impact Fay’s delivery might have had on my body, I’d recovered enough to do the bulk of what was needed on Blue Bluff. 

“I’m going to look,” he said, “but?” He stopped to shake the walkie in his hand. “Constant communication.”

“Constant? Jesus,” I said, imagining the night air filled with the squawks of our normal inanities.

“I think he went over by the road,” he said. “I’m going to go back over there.”

He was halfway down the driveway, almost to the county road, where I could still see him when I first keyed the walkie.

“Which one is it?” I asked.

“Which what?”

“Goat. You said ‘he’ like you knew,” I said, with an ‘over’ as an addendum to honor strict radio protocols, not wanting to come off as an amateur.

I could see him shake his head in the shadows. “The middle one.” He was close enough for me to hear him say the words, a second before my radio picked them up like an echo. 

“What?” I asked, hearing a bleat across the lawn from his walkie-talkie, as though I’d hit the button on mine. I knew I hadn’t touched it.

“The middle-sized one,” he said as he kept walking. I was starting to hear only the radio transmissions and no longer his actual voice. “The one that always gets out.”

He wasn’t the only one to get out. The mother goat, Anabel, our first, had been run down by some asshole driver in the spring, just steps from where we were now. I didn’t think the rest of the brood, the four, had yet recovered. If we lost another one, I wasn’t sure what The Littles, the other three goats, would do.

“Go,” I said. “Find him. He’s halfway to the interstate by now.”

I kept the kitchen lights off, like it was a power outage or some other catastrophe. Daniel had spent too much time talking to me, so if Arthur – the missing goat – had trotted at a consistent pace, I wasn’t sure where their paths would converge again. I didn’t want to tell him where to look, but I felt my bad guesses were better than his good ones, and there was no good way to articulate that. I pushed the walkie button, not saying anything, but watched out the small kitchen window. His flashlight beam, which had bobbed along gently in the dark, stopped suddenly in place, and his voice came over the radio.

“Was that on purpose?” he asked. “Over.” I was grateful to hear him indulge my earlier joke. 

“It wasn’t, but while I’ve got you,” I said, “I’ve got an idea.” I explained that he should come back and get the truck, using it to continue the search. On reflection, I didn’t really think the missing goat had a chance of getting to the interstate, but there was plenty of road between here and there, and my idea allowed Daniel to cover more ground.

Soon, he was driving from one end of the county road to the other. He would go a little further each pass, U-turning the truck slow when he came to a stop, hoping the headlights would reveal Arthur’s hiding spot. In the silence, I felt like I was watching a submarine drift along, like a documentary about excavating the Titanic wreck.

He made two more loops, when I heard him call over the radio. “This doesn’t feel productive,” he said. 

I didn’t respond, instead moving to the front room with its big picture window, then out to the porch. He’d parked the truck in the middle of the road, just short of our driveway. I nodded slow in the dark, trying to think of what to say, when his voice came through again.

“If I can’t see him anywhere, that means he’s gotta be somewhere safe for the night, right?”

I sniffed. “Normally love your logic, honey. But don’t you think that’s kind of fucked up? You wouldn’t leave me or Fay out there, would you?”

“No, I wouldn’t,” he said. I felt like he had more to say but either thought it would make things worse or I’d miss the point.

“You’re talking like you’ve exhausted the possibilities. You’re just two headlights in a lot of dark,” I said. “What if every time you turn, he hides somewhere different, behind you, in the shadows?”

“If he loves us so much,” Daniel said, “what’s he hiding from?”

I played the question in my head a couple times, with and without that last word at the end. I thought of things I might be hiding but knew it didn’t mean the love wasn’t there.

“If you’re going to quit,” I said, “come back and switch places with me.”

I saw the reverse lights blink on the truck, and he pulled away again, going a quarter mile further up the road before pulling another U. Back again, another U, and then he turned down the road that cut through to town. He was keeping up the search, part out of spite, part out of mocking me overestimating Arthur’s range. I knew him; those darker feelings would burn off before too long, leaving something sincere but possibly still futile, searching and turning endless U’s.

Out front, the sky was a cottony purple over the treetops that crowned the bluff. The lightning had moved off, and the air had changed. The heaviness from earlier had been replaced by a cooler echo of itself. The damp air made me notice every movement of my arm hairs. I stepped back inside to get the kitchen flashlight then ventured back out onto the lawn, holding my breath. Rain was on its way, and I needed to find my missing goat before it arrived. There were places on our property, places closeby, that Daniel had left out of his search, in haste, in his impatience with trying to satisfy my concerns. His net had been cast too wide; I’d focus close in. I’d have better luck.

I walked to the property line. There was a stretch of fence that had fallen, possibly torn down by trespassers. I still knew where the boundary ran, and I followed that line in the handful of flashlight. I paused when the fenceline recommenced and shone the light into the fields beyond. I walked on, careful not to turn an ankle, careful not to miss the goat I currently cared most about, as I scanned back and forth in the dark.

I circled around behind the house, flashing my light, first under the porch, then down the cellar stairs. There was a row of pines that served as a natural border between our land and the ski resort behind us, and I walked slower, looking closer, below their branches. I anticipated – but did not see – the eerie black of two goat eyes reflecting back at me.

“She’s not there,” Daniel said over the walkie-talkie, his smooth tone disrupted at the end by an electric squawk. I looked up to see the truck glide slowly by on the road. I could see his silhouette at the wheel, even though it was a dark shape against more dark.

The chickens burbled in the shadows. We’d only had them a few weeks. I still wasn’t used to hearing them, surely not in the middle of the night. I wasn’t sure if they’d woken from the thunder or my  radio chatter with Daniel. My eyes trailed over to their coop and then to the sky overhead.

Daniel keyed back to me. “Can I ask you something?” I heard.

“Watch the road, buddy,” I said back.

“Should we call the place something else? Not Blue Bluff?”

It didn’t feel like my decision, but hearing his question, I inhaled soft and waited for the rain. Or for Fay to howl from upstairs, but all I heard was my own breathing. 

“Where are you now?” he asked after a beat.

“Close to the creek,” I said, as I felt the first raindrop hit my bare shoulder. 

I watched across the ridge of pines. The purple light that had enamored me earlier was fading to charcoal as the storm moved further along the periphery. There remained a low rumble of thunder but no lightning. The noise was just loud enough to drown out the clues I needed to find Arthur, to hear Daniel. I missed the high notes the chickens had provided just a moment earlier.

In the dark, I could see the oxbow curve that cut back before the creek bled out, off our property. I walked closer, not knowing why, until I heard the drunken bleats of a goat. From the edge, I looked down into the creekbed. Arthur was digging at the banks with his hooves, a task difficult under normal conditions, rendered even more futile by the steadying rain. 

I heard the whine of truck tires spinning on wet grass, then saw the wash of Daniel’s headlights, but couldn’t see exactly where he was – the machine shed blocked the view between us. It didn’t occur to me he might get stuck out there. Instead, I clambered down into the creek to see what I could do for Arthur. When I got to the bottom, my feet slipped from under me and I landed on the seat of my pajamas, eye to eye with the partner of my predicament. Arthur let out another short bleat, a thank you, I assumed. 

I got to my feet, the creek water only at the ankles of my rubber gardening boots for now, but the rain kept coming. I looked from one end of the creekbed, to the other, to the bend. I could hear Daniel’s voice keen over the radio but didn’t listen to what he was saying, focusing instead on our goat. I felt I’d watched him and his goat siblings canter in and out of the creekbed enough times to think it still a possibility, but he wasn’t getting much purchase up the initial slope of the bank. I realized he’d need my help. It seemed something was intent on coaxing our living things beyond the property line. But Arthur had stayed within our bounds, stayed home. And while he was still in danger – as the mud from the creek embraced, then released, the soles of my boots, the water deep enough, they say, for dumber goats to drown – he was home and would be safe.

I started to calculate his weight in my head, wondering where he topped out, wondering what my limit was, wondering what Daniel thought my limit was. I felt strangely calm, collecting rain on my clothes and hair, contemplating Arthur’s physics. I wondered if I’d be able to artificially generate the kind of car-lifting adrenaline rush you hear some mothers get when their children are imperiled. I wasn’t even sure immediately where I’d grab him, outside of the obvious starting points of each opposing end of him. I walked closer, putting one hand on top of his rump and the other on his head, between the nubby horns. His fur still felt coarsely dry. I wasn’t sure how it hadn’t absorbed more of the rain.

I heard another high whine from the same spot out in the yard, followed by repeated, sustained versions of the same sound. Daniel was definitely stuck now, exactly the kind of predicament he liked to suffer through too long before admitting it. I could imagine, without difficulty, him spinning tires, sinking incrementally lower into our lawn for another hour, maybe two. I’d seen his Sisyphus act plenty of times over the years and would recommend it to any audience. 

I gave Arthur’s head another pat then squatted down. I planted my hands underneath him, turning my head away from the crap dangles in his fur. Right before I pushed up with my arms and straightened my legs, I said to him, “Now’s not the time to take a big piss,” thinking that might be my best case scenario. 

He was light, I thought, as I lifted, but that wasn’t accurate. He was only lighter than I expected; the burning buzz in my head from the exertion was clouding my thoughts. I had his body up and over, onto the bank on his side, and I straightened fully upright before ducking back down as I realized all four of his legs still hung out into space over the creek, and I might catch a stray hoof. He kept still, though, and I pushed his hind two onto solid ground, and he took it the rest of the way, rising up unsteadily, then trotting a few feet to sit down in the grass. He vacated a space where I now had a clearer view of my husband, who stood there frozen as he watched us. I crawled out over the creekbed on my own, then rose to my feet in front of them. I wished I could have seen what either of them saw. 

“Where’d you two come from?” Daniel asked.

I looked over towards the bank of the creek and shrugged. “Here we are,” I said. He came over and hugged me, then kissed my forehead. “Can I ask you?” I said after a pause, a stroke at his cheeks, “In the truck? What was that bit about renaming the farm?”

“Oh,” he said. “That was a joke. But the thought kind of left me mid-thought.”

“What were you going to say we rename it?” I asked. “As a joke?”

“Lost Goat Farm,” he said. Arthur took that moment to trot away across the slicked lawn and relieve himself of his urine. 

I chuckled. “My beautiful boy,” I said, gesturing with one hand to him, somehow still pissing. “Does he look lost to you?”

Mike Prask is a fiction writer whose work has appeared in HAD and Rejection Letters. He lives and works in Highland Park, Illinois. He can also be found on Bluesky @mprask.bsky.social.