Rufus and the Whale

Rufus was having a marvelous day. His family had taken him far away from home to this little sandy forest surrounded by water, and he'd spent most of the three day's they'd been there playing in the surf with his brother Johnny. Now he was free, salty water clung to his shaggy yellow coat no matter how fast he ran across the beach.

Everything was perfect, the sand was warm, sea birds were landing for Rufus to chase away and bark at. There weren't any other people, Rufus had even lost track of Johnny after his mother called him in for lunch, but that was fine. Rufus couldn't run this fast when Johnny was with him, so he took advantage and ran as fast as he could for as long as he could. His back leg's lunged and pushed as if they had minds of their owns. It was all Rufus could do to keep his forelegs in rhythm. He was still young and he made mistakes sometimes; twice on his run Rufus tumbled forward in a heap of yelps and flying sand, but he didn't let that stop him.

Tongue lolling from his mouth, Rufus galloped all along the beach thinking he would soon find the end, or maybe somebody some food for him. He ran for almost an hour, by his estimate, before Rufus came across something that made him think he should probably stop running. It took a few moments to slow down, but by the time he did, Rufus was staring open mouthed at the thing he saw lying on the beach before him.

It looked like a very large pillow, or maybe a very long leather boot like the ones Mom kept in the closet so Rufus couldn't get to them. Rufus would have been happy to walk right up to it and give it a good sniff, but that was before he noticed it moving. Terror momentarily gripped Rufus; was the thing alive? He looked up and down it’s length, but Rufus didn’t see any arms or legs. It’s tail was moving, up and down, but it didn’t look like any tail that Rufus had ever seen. More like someone was holding two legs together and splaying it’s paddle feet to either side. On the other end, Rufus saw an eye, big and tired. It watched him as Rufus watched the thing back.

Unsure of what to do next, Rufus started a low growl as he inched towards the monstrous creature. At first, he crawled low to the ground, nearly dragging his belly in the sand, but as Rufus grew closer it started to become clear to him that the creature wasn’t going to move toward him. Rufus couldn’t tell if it knew he was there, maybe it couldn’t hear the growl, so he stood up straighter as he approached and began to whine instead. Still, even with Rufus’ best whine, the creature didn’t give any indication that it’d noticed him. The apprehension that filled Rufus’ heart morphed and molded, this time it became concern. Rufus began to sniff around the creature, searching for any obvious signs of trouble. The creature wasn’t moving any time soon, that was certain. Rufus was no physicist, but he’d tried to drag his fair share of fallen logs in the past, and he understood that this creature had most of it’s weight up on the dry sand. It wouldn’t be going anywhere any time soon unless it grew a few legs and walked away.

Rufus wasn’t the kind of dog to jump to conclusions; though he didn’t understand why, he thought it would be perfectly reasonable if something in the water would want to come out onto the sand. To the best of his knowledge, this was where all the sausages were.

Once he started to get closer Rufus stopped whining and began to sniff around the creature. He knew that the unnamed beast was watching him, it couldn’t do much else. Eventually, after thorough examination, Rufus concluded that the beast was not only not going to hurt him, but it probably couldn’t move much on it’s own anyway. Rufus decided that there wasn’t any reason for him to be afraid of the immobilized creature, so he padded right up to it’s eye to introduce himself.

“Hi!” he said in his best dog’s voice once he’d circled back round to the creatures eye. “My name is Rufus! What’s yours?” The big, ponderous eye followed Rufus as he circled it, wavering slightly at the wagging of his tail. There was a wide, rounded fault in the creature’s flesh just beneath the softball-sized eye that must have been the creatures mouth, but it did not part to give an answer. Only the eye gave any sign that the creature knew Rufus was there.

Confused, the dog sniffed around the creature’s head, or what must have been it’s head since that was where the eyes and mouth were. It didn’t look like the creature could turn it’s head, there was no neck. The smell, and the way it looked now that Rufus thought about it, was very similar to the small black fish Johnny kept in the big clear water bowl he kept by his bed. The fish would stick to the glass and smelled like cat food, so Rufus usually left them alone.

“Are you a fish?” he asked, head tilted to the left. The giant fish chose not to answer a second time. Rufus tried not to let it affect his feelings, but his tail did stop wagging. He couldn’t put a paw on it, but something was wrong here. The fish wouldn’t have just refused to answer Rufus, people were always coming up to him to say hello. Something was wrong here, and Rufus wasn’t going to back to Johnny until he figured out what.

There wasn’t much more for him to do in terms of investigation. Rufus walked all around the giant fish, closely examining the smooth, cloud colored skin. The smell was different depending on how close to the water Rufus got, the head smelled more like cat food that the cat had left out for too long, but the tail smelled much better. Fresh cat food with water and grass. There was also a thick rope wrapped around the tail, if it was a tail. It looked more like a long frisbee at the end of a single thick leg. Rufus was awestruck at the creature, he’d never seen anything like it. Well, except for the little fish back home.

Wait! That was what was wrong! Rufus rushed back up the beach to the creatures head, it was so big that the bound took a few seconds.

“You need to go in the water!” he barked into the fish’s eye. A heavy lid drooped down in a ponderous blink. That was all the confirmation Rufus needed. He ran a few seconds more back to the tail. The very end of the tail was sitting in the lapping surf, so the end of the rope was flapping about even further. It looked like a snake going on a rampage against a village of sand dollars, causing Rufus to start when he didn’t immediately recognize it. He lunged into the water and bit hid jaws down on the fraying rope like he’d done a million times before with Johnny. The rope toy back home was much smaller, just like Johnny was smaller than this fish, but Rufus had won their tugs-of-war enough times to be confident that this would be no problem. The waves were not coming in as closely as they had been when Rufus found the fish, so he had more space to back up as he pulled the rope with all of his strength.

The tail did not budge. Experimentally, Rufus yanked at the rope several times, but only succeeded in making the ends of the tail flap slightly. The rope was in a much worse condition than Johnny’s toy back home, only a few threads were attaching the fish to the bit in Rufus’ mouth. He dropped it and coughed out some of the salty water he’d swallowed. Walking forward with muzzle held down to bunch the remaining rope together, making a far superior jaw-hold, Rufus bit down again. This time he didn’t just pull. This time he pulled.

It was no use. Even with his whole body working at his best pull, he couldn’t make the tail move more than a little bit. That was going to cause a significant kink in the hose of Rufus’ thought process. Even as he pondered this, the thing’s enormous tail came up, higher than Rufus thought it could, and splashed back down in the quickly receding surf. Rufus barked and ran forward to join in the splashing, but the fish only made the one mighty effort. Rufus looked at the tail from a new angle, head cocked to the left this time. Rivulets of water washed down the animal’s back from where it had landed. The skin on this part of the fish’s body looked much nicer than the skin further up. By the great unmoving fish head the skin was drying out and beginning to change color in the sun.

Somehow, Rufus had to get this enormous beast back into the water, or who knows what might happen to it. Judging by the smell, Rufus was worried someone might come along and turn his new friend into cat food. He ran up to the fish’s eye again, hoping he might receive some guidance on what to do next. The shining pools of black watched Rufus as he came in close for a sniff, but it didn’t show him the way to any more ideas. Lacking any himself, Rufus resorted to a course of action that had only failed him a few times in the past, and Rufus had never been a dog to throw the puppies out with the bath water.

He started to lick the dry skin around the fish’s face. The taste was hard to compare to anything in the wide range of animals, vegetables and minerals that Rufus had tasted in the past, though that library was quite extensive. It was almost like someone had made a leather shoe out of cat food. The skin was very dry, but not in a good way like a biscuit. It was dry like an old sponge, like it should have been wet, and had been for quite some time, but now it was dry. He tried to think about biscuits to keep his tongue wet, fully confident in his ability to accomplish this task. After all, he hadn’t met the person yet who didn’t eventually push him away when he licked them. He just had to think of this as a bigger person.

The great eye watched Rufus as he worked. The moisture made it’s skin feel cooler in the tropical breeze, and the massive animal untensed from the last bit of fear it had for the strange legged creature. It was in the process of accepting the inevitable, and was just beginning to come to terms with eternity when it saw the jackal wandering up. It had heard stories from others of it’s kind of tiny monsters on the shore that would pounce on the poor whales that had lost their way and become trapped out of the water. The whale had feared a painful death when it started to growl, but when it came closer and the whale could see that it didn’t look exactly like a jackal, it let curiosity still it’s fear for the time being.

Now the laps of Rufus’s tongue were circling the eye, unconsciously keeping the drying skin from cracking. Soon though, the dryness began to infect Rufus, and the dog began to whine with worry. He’d learned his lesson early on about not drinking the salty water, but maybe if he was quick, he could take some into his mouth and spit it out. He wandered over to the surf and gave it a try. A wave came in and the dog snapped at it’s crest, taking a bite from the crashing water and letting it wash straight back out of his gaping mouth. Trotting back over to the fish’s head, he knew this would not be a good solution. He could feel the salt in the water sapping the natural moisture from Rufus’s mouth. He gave the skin around the mouth a few cursory licks to confirm his theory and found it was like rubbing the fish with paper. Rufus looked around, concern building in the back of his throat. There were sea shells, tasteless garbage. Some plants further up the hill, though he should stay away from trees and thorny bushes. He ran up to the tufts of grass at the foot of some palm trees and took a hearty bite. A few more, and Rufus had a mouth full of saliva mixed with a little bit of grass juice.

He ran back to the fish and began licking anew, filled with assurance that his goal was now absolutely possible. The whale, meanwhile, touched by the little animal’s efforts, had not yet given in to hope. It was only one dog after all.

For some time, this system continued, Rufus would lick the giant fish at different spots until his mouth ran dry, then he would run up the hill for a few helpings of delicious foreign grass, then back down to help his friend feel better. He kept up this attitude for hours, even after his legs began to shake with the effort and the sun started to touch the horizon. The eye didn’t spend much time open by that point, which Rufus thought was a good idea. The fish should take a nap while Rufus worked, it would need it’s energy when it had to swim back out to sea. That posed a difficult question to Rufus, how was he going to get the fish back in the water? He thought back to when Johnny had goldfish before the ones that stuck to the bowl. They’d jumped out of the water, but they were small enough that Johnny could just pick them up. That was a dead end, but it also posed another, more alarming question to Rufus; where was Johnny?

In a sudden burst, Rufus spun away from the whale, careful not to throw up any sand with the movement and compromise the days work. He ran a few bounds from the napping creature and started to bark, confident that he was far enough away not to wake it. Still, he barked so loudly that he had to turn back and check, but felt deep relief when he saw that the eyelid had not stirred. Rufus took that as permission to continue barking, loudly into the growing darkness, toward the sparkling lights of the bungalows. Barking always brought people, whether it was early in the morning, or the middle of the baby’s nap or the middle of the night, people always came running if Rufus barked loud enough. He kept at it for some time, hoping to see Johnny and his parents come bounding around the bend. He would have ran up to meet them part way, but he didn’t want to leave his friend by itself.

Conscious that it might have worked if he’d only barked for a few more minutes, Rufus gave up after about an hour of solid barking. The sun had sunk lower, and the fish’s tail was now several feet away from the water. Rufus ran up and started to lick the tail, but changed his mind when he found that it was still slightly damp from the tide. He ran back up to the creature’s nose instead, or where Rufus thought it’s nose should’ve been. This point had been out of the water for the longest, an was starting to crack badly. Rufus gave the whale some gentle licks, then directed his tongue with slightly more precision, aiming to lessen the stress on the whale by applying his canine medicine to the worst areas.

Unexpectedly, the fish let out a great, silent, rumbling vibration that caused Rufus to jump, bark a few times, then resume licking. He knew it had come from the fish and he took it as a sign of gratitude, which, in a way, it was. Soon Rufus could see the moon, and couldn’t help but let out a mighty howl to mark the occasion.

“Rufus?” The call was faint, just at the edge of Rufus’ hearing, but it was unmistakable. That was Johnny’s voice, and it was coming from around the bend. It was followed by several similar voices, or at least two, that belonged to Mr. and Mrs. Johnny’s Parents. Without waiting for more confirmation, Rufus leapt up and bounded off for the voices, confident that Johnny would be able to help. He always did. It didn’t take long to spot the family, they held flashlights to make it easier for Rufus to find them whenever they got lost at night. He bounded forward, barking madly until they were sure it was him. It took all of his canine willpower, but as soon as the family were sure that it was their Rufus running toward them, the dog turned in an arc and bounded off for his stranded friend. He knew the family would follow him, they were smart like that.

More people came after Rufus made the situation perfectly clear to Johnny and his parents, someone even brought a boat and some more rope. The whale opened her great heavy eyelid just in time to see an entire herd of people gathered around her, some dousing her with buckets of water, some tying ropes to her flukes, some pushing with their bare hands. The tide was coming back, so with an hour or two of solid effort from the little people, the whale was soon returned agency over her own environment, and she swam away to find the rest of her pod.

Rufus was rewarded a half a roasted pig for his efforts. He knew he hadn’t been able to do much for his big friend, but he knew that people liked when he brought them to things he found. He would have been happy with a nice warm spot to sleep that night for a reward, barely able to fathom that his efforts had saved a life. Of course, dogs tend to live more peaceful lives than humans because they are more enlightened creatures. Even if Rufus didn’t have any way of knowing that somewhere, deep in the waters of the Pacific Ocean, a mother whale had a son later that year, a son she chose to name ‘Rufus’, he was simply content in the knowledge that he’d been a good boy.