Last winter was very cold. The whole village was snowed in, it was impossible to walk to the store, the car with bread did not go either, and the family and I sat on the vegetables and canned goods that we had managed to carry from the cellar before the snowstorms. My husband could not go to work, there was no communication because of the bad weather, too, we hoped only on the pension of my grandparents and that we would be able to get to the store sooner or later. We stayed home around the clock, but nine-year-old Sarah went out for a walk the first day after the storm cleared. My husband and I were knee-deep in snow, and she was neck-deep in it, but she was running around our place, then she got out of it, bypassing the nearby fields with the other kids. She enjoyed so much snow.
On one of the more or less calm days, when my husband cleared all the paths to the house and the cellar, Sarah came home without her jacket. It was freezing outside, and the child was wearing a sweater and carrying a pink package in her hands!
It turned out that she found a puppy in a big box behind the field, in the trash. He was very cold and could hardly breathe, so she decided to bring him home and warm him up. We didn’t have enough firewood ourselves, all warmed up by the stove, and she brought the dog too. I was very unhappy, but my husband wouldn’t let us leave the animal outside.
We tried to feed and water the dog, he reluctantly took treats, was very weak and only slept the whole time. Sara did not move away from the dog, she wrapped him in a plaid, but my grandmother said that he could not be saved. My daughter, of course, did not believe it, and frankly, neither did I.
The next morning my husband woke me up at dawn with the words:
– The dog isn’t breathing.
It would have been better to take her away before my daughter woke up, but I was afraid she would be offended, so we waited until Sarah was up and the three of us carried the puppy into the woods. The ground was too cold and hard to bury him, so we had to leave him in the snow.
It was very quiet at breakfast and lunch that day. Sarah was still worried for a long time, and in the evening she came into the big room where my husband and I slept, climbed into bed with us, and said she was glad she had found him and that at least he had spent the night warm.
Sometimes I regret that we allowed him to be brought to us, sometimes I reproach myself for still daring to doubt, and sometimes I heartily think of what would have happened if we had managed to save him. Sara would surely have begged us to keep him until spring, and then we would have taken him to town… And in part I wish we had.
