The Dog Who Healed A Family. Jo Coudert
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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