within a mile of home

There used to be a large vacant lot near my house in Colorado Springs. The older kids rode their BMX bikes there during the summer, riding in lazy loops over foot-high jumps, sometimes smoking the in the uneven shade of three stunted tress that grew in the far corner of the lot.
My friends and I usually kept to the street, patrolling culs-de-sac and the long dusty roads that butted up against the bluffs that formed one edge of our little neighborhood.
After school started one year, they put a fence up around the vacant lot, and while some of the big kids still snuck in whenever they could in the hours between school and nightfall, it became largely deserted. That gave us smaller kids - Myself, Mike Meyers, Jessie V., Christa - a chance to explore a little. We'd ride around the far side of the fence to where it ended abruptly about three feet from can only be described as a hatch. It didn't open for us, but we were scared of what we might have found if it had, and didn't try very hard. After the first couple of forays into the lot we just sort of ignored it, casting it sideways glances as we pushed our bikes over the rough ground.
The lot teemed with the sort of life found around that part of Colorado, which was really just an ridge of sandstone in the middle of the prairie, surrounded by small, grassy mesas and bluffs. We had rabbits and foxes aplenty, the occasional coyote, snakes. Hawks wheeled above, and it wasn't totally uncommon to see an eagle, a distant wing floating high and far away. The ground, anywhere it wasn't cultivated or landscaped, was covered in prairie grasses, yucca, and a fine smattering of tiny cacti that really hurt if you so much as touched one.
My friends and I would carefully wade through this sea of thick flora, using our bikes to check for any bits of nastiness that might be between us the blessedly bare dirt that made up the bike path, affectionately known as the jumps. Once we got there, we'd ride in circles for an hour or so, yelling over the wind to each other about something that we were gonna try, or some really cool thing we'd just done, or how lame the jumps were.

So went the fall of my ninth year.

One day late in the fall, I was out riding alone, bundled deep within an oversized coat and winter boots. It had snowed earlier in the week, and although it had melted off immediately the next morning, I had lived in Colorado long enough to know that once it snows once, snow is always in the air.
The vacant lot (and the jumps) had lost whatever appeal it had to us young kids, and generally we spent our time riding through puddles or playing with legos in my tree if we were going outside at all. But this afternoon, Mike was busy writing a report on the Brontosaurus and Jessie was staying after school for some reason, and none of us hung out with Christa alone because she was a couple of years older that us, and would sometime give us knowing looks that made us uncomfortable, especially it was just one of us.
So I rode alone, carving vast figure eights in the blacktop with my front tire, splashing through shallow puddles, trying to pop a wheelie. It all got kind of boring after a while, and when Mike told me for the fifth time that he still had a bunch to do on his Dinosaur report, I decided that I was going to go make up some awesome tricks on the jumps.
I taught myself how to a little mid-air tire wiggle thing, and I closed my eyes while going over the biggest bump (I was too scared to actually leave the ground), and was feeling kind of lame. The sun was starting to edge towards the horizon, and by hands hurt from gripping my handlebars too tightly, and the cold was starting to bite at my ears, and although I never actually did it, I had homework to do.
I started to walk my bike back through the grass, watching for snakes, prairie-dog holes, and cactus, and was almost to the hatch when I heard something that sounded uncannily like somebody crying. The lot's western edge was only about ten feet from a major road that bisected the neighborhood, with a deep concrete flash flood drainoff ravine in-between. We had all climbed down the steep, rough banks at some point or another, usually as a bet, but sometimes to scavenge a tennis ball or frisbee that had become mixed up in the gritty sediment that formed natural islands in the unnatural riverbed. So I was very aware of how hard it could be to get out of the ravine without some help or the right handholds or a good deal of inertia. I was very aware that some kid might be stuck.
The long grass and brambles were thick on the edge of the embankment, and so I left my bike propped up against a tree, and climbed/slid down into one of the easier parts of the ravine to access to see what I could find. The sound of crying had become almost inaudible by that point, but I could tell I was close. Walking quickly, I dodged low-hanging trees and tumbleweed bushes that had taken root in the sparse sandy soil. As I approached, I heard scampering, a startled noise, and then a weak sort of growl. The small dog held its ground for only a moment as I bent down in front of it, and then took off for the far end of the ravine, where a widely-spaced grating led into the sewers. I gave chase, trying not to scare the little brown dog more than I had to, trying to corner it before it went further than I could go to help it. As he neared the grating, it slowed, toenails scraping on the concrete, and stayed put, looking warily between the sewer and me, growling uncertainly, small tail tucked firmly between its legs. I approached as warily as I could, tried to pet it on its haunches, and got only a bitten hand for my trouble. I tried again, this time letting it sniff my hand, lick it, bit it again, but gently, and then I began to pet it on the head. The small dog looked at me uncertainly the whole time. It didn't have a collar, and it wasn't a dog I'd ever seen before, and as I sat patting in, the sun was starting to go down. Soon, it was going to be dark and cold, and my mom was almost certainly wondering where I was.
I managed to get the dog up into my arms on the first try before he started snapping at my hands and arms, and although he got me a couple of times, I held firm. He wiggled wildly, side to side, feet working like he was running already. I held him tighter, looked at the sides of the darkening ravine, tried to gauge my chances of scaling the wall without my hands. I made a test run, only making it halfway up the steep slope before having to slide back down. I tried again, running faster this time. I made it almost all the way up, but the struggling dog made it impossible for me to grab onto anything and haul myself the last foot or so. I gave it one more run, and this time I only got 3/4 of the way before having to slide down on my butt. I caught my breath, looked down the ravine in either direction, walked a little bit to see if there was any way that might have been more accessible (although I knew there wasn't), and tried running again.
This time I managed to get one of my knees up onto the top edge of the concrete embankment, but scraped the other badly in the process, tearing a large hole in both the knee of my pants and the flesh underneath. I was forced to reach out and grab at the ground with one of my hands so that I didn't fall backwards, and the dog took the opportunity to break free of my other arm, and go shooting off into the long grass towards a nearby row of homes.
I sat there for ten minutes, prodding at my wounded knee, getting chunks of gravel and dirt out of the worst parts of the abrasion, then limped all the way around the perimeter of drainage canal to where my bike was propped against its tree. I tried to ride it, but about halfway home I had to get off and hobble. I made it as far as Mike's house before giving in to the pain. Mrs. Meyers was more than happy to swaddle my knee in antiseptic and extra-large band-aids as I called my Mom. She was there two minutes later, declined the coffee Mrs. Meyers offered, proofread Mike's Brontosaurus report (which was all about how they actually didn't exist), and drove me and my bike back home. She made me grilled cheese as I told her about the dog I'd saved ("It was a Golden Retriever or something. Really big.") and how dark it was and how I bet there had been huge foxes in the sewer or something and how I thought I saw a couple of rattlesnakes and how I had to jump like ten feet straight up to grab onto the wall and how I really wanted a dog.
Two cats was apparently enough for my Mom, and not even reminding her that Dad also really wanted a dog and that Margo would probably love it would make her back down, and so for years I was left to idly wonder what would have happened if I hadn't lost my grip on the little dog from the ravine and instead had brought him home. Would we have adopted it, loved it as our own? Or would it have never found its owners who had been so desperately wondering where Spot had run off to? It was a topic on which I could never be satisfied, even to this day...
but here's how it plays out in my head:


The small dog scrambles from the arm of the boy that holds it, slipping into the tall grass and into the dark. He can smell home not far away, and he moves like a snake, avoiding the yucca and cactus as he runs wearily. He's confused, uncertain, glad to be in the grass rather than in that deep hard place near where the raccoons were. In his way, he is grateful to the stranger boy, who he bit because he was scared and didn't know what else to do. But now home is up ahead, under the fence, across the street, through the lines of yards, through the gate, and a scratch at the back door with thin forelegs, brown eyes peering into the warmth of the house, the light. The door slides open, large hands pick him up, and he is loved.

I miss my puppy.