Part 2: We Got a 911 Call About a Dog Crying in an Old Well. It Was 40 Feet Down, Standing on a Ledge With Water Up to Its Neck. I Went Down on a Rope. What the Dog Did When We Reached the Top Made Me Cry in Front of My Whole Crew.
PART 2
I have to tell you what it was like going down that well, because it matters for everything that came after.
A forty-foot stone shaft is a tight, cold, dark place. The walls press in. The light from the top shrinks above you as you go down. It’s wet, and it smells of old water and stone, and there’s a primal wrongness to being lowered into a hole in the earth on a rope that I felt in my whole body even as a trained firefighter.
And the whole way down, I thought about the dog. Because if it was getting to me — me, with a rope, a harness, a crew up top, the certainty I’d be pulled back out — then what had it been for him? Down there in the dark and the cold water, no rope, no crew, no understanding of what was happening or whether anyone would ever come. Just a ledge the size of a dinner plate and the will to keep standing on it.
I got down to him. My light found him on that ledge, water to his neck, and my heart broke. A Pit Bull, soaked, shaking violently from the cold, his eyes huge and hopeless. And here’s the thing I wasn’t ready for: he didn’t react when I reached him. He didn’t bark, didn’t struggle, didn’t even really lift his head. He was so cold, so exhausted, so far past the end of himself, that he just stood there on his ledge, barely conscious, as a stranger descended out of the dark toward him.
I got to him on that ledge, crowded into that tiny space with him, and I talked to him low and steady, and I got my arms around him. He was ice-cold. Dead weight, almost. He didn’t help me and he didn’t fight me — he just let me take him, this dog who had nothing left, who had been standing in cold water in the dark for who knows how long, holding on by sheer will to a ledge the size of nothing.
I got him secured against me, and I called up to start hauling, and they pulled us up — the two of us together, me holding that freezing dog against my chest, rising slowly up out of the dark shaft toward the circle of light at the top.
And when we cleared the top of that well, and my crew got hands on us and pulled us over onto solid ground, and I was kneeling there with this dog still held against my chest —
that’s when it happened. The thing I’ll never forget.
PART 3
We got to the surface, and I sank down onto the ground with the dog still in my arms, and my crew was around us, and the dog — this exhausted, freezing, half-dead dog who hadn’t reacted to anything down in the well — the dog lifted his head.
And he put it on my chest.
He laid his head against my chest, right over my heart, and he let out a sound, and then he started to cry.
I don’t mean whimpering, exactly. I mean — and anyone who’s been around dogs in extreme distress knows this, it’s real — the dog began to cry, this deep, shuddering, releasing sound, his whole body trembling against me, his head pressed over my heart, crying. The way a creature cries when it has held on past the end of its endurance, alone in the dark, certain no one was coming, and then someone came, and it’s finally, finally safe, and everything it’s been holding back for days comes pouring out all at once.
He cried into my chest. This dog. And I —
I lost it. I’m a firefighter. I was twenty-four and trying to be tough and professional in front of my crew. And I knelt there on the ground next to that old well with a crying dog’s head over my heart and I broke down completely. I cried like I hadn’t cried in years, holding that dog, both of us shaking, both of us crying, this stranger-dog and me, wrapped around each other on the ground.
And here’s the thing that finished all of us. My crew — these are firefighters, hard men and women who’ve seen everything, who hold it together through the worst things people can imagine — my whole crew stood around us, and one by one, they started crying too. Big tough guys, wiping their eyes, turning away, some of them just standing there letting it come. Because you could not witness that — a dog crying with relief into the chest of the man who’d pulled him out of the dark, both of them sobbing on the ground — and not feel it crack something open in you.
We stood around that old well, the whole crew, and we cried. For a dog.
I didn’t know yet why he’d been down there. I didn’t know the saddest part. I just knew that I was holding a creature who had been more alone than anything I’d ever encountered, and who was crying because he wasn’t alone anymore, and that something between us had been forged in that moment that was never going to come undone.
PART 4
We got him warm, got him to an emergency vet, and he lived. Hypothermia, exhaustion, dehydration — three days, we’d learn, was about how long he’d been in that well, standing on that ledge in the cold water — but he lived. Tough dog. Impossibly tough.
And while he recovered, the story came together, and it’s the part that takes this from a rescue to something that breaks your heart wide open.
The police looked into it — whose dog, where from, how he’d ended up in an old well on disused land. And the dog had a microchip, and it led them to an owner. A young woman. Lived a few streets away.
And when they went to find her, they found that she had died.
Three days earlier. A heart attack — sudden, young, the kind that takes people with no warning. She’d died alone in her home three days before we pulled her dog out of that well.
And now put the pieces together, the way we did, slowly, with our hands over our mouths.
The dog hadn’t been dumped in the well. Nobody had thrown him down there. What had happened was so much sadder than that.
His owner had died, suddenly, at home. And the dog — who didn’t understand, who couldn’t understand, who only knew that his person was gone — had somehow gotten out, and he had gone looking for her. Searching. The way a dog does when its person vanishes. He’d run out into the world looking for the woman who was the center of his entire life, who had simply disappeared, and somewhere in that searching, that desperate looking-everywhere for her, he had come across an old well on old land, and in the dark or the confusion or just the blind grief of searching, he had fallen in.
And then he’d stood on a ledge in cold water in the dark for three days. Three days. The same three days his owner lay dead a few streets away. He’d gone looking for her and fallen into the earth and held on, on a ledge the size of nothing, for three days, waiting — for her, maybe, or for anyone, or for nothing, just holding on because that’s what he had left to do.
He didn’t know she was dead. He’d gone looking. And he’d fallen. And he’d held on for three days in the dark.
PART 5
I couldn’t let him go.
You already know that’s where this was headed. I was twenty-four, single, no family close by, living the kind of life where the job is most of what you’ve got. And I’d pulled this dog out of the dark, and he’d cried on my chest, and I’d cried back, and there was a vet bill and a recovery and a question of what happens to a dog whose owner has died with — the police found — no family to claim either her or her dog.
There was no question. He was mine. He’d been mine since he put his head over my heart at the top of that well.
I named him Well.
It works two ways, and I meant both. Well, for the well — for where I found him, for the place he survived, the dark shaft he held on in for three days. I wasn’t going to erase that; it was the truth of him, the thing he’d come through.
But also Well, like — well. Like okay. Like the answer to “how are you?” Like the thing he was going to be now, finally, after everything. Are you okay? Are you well? Yes. Now you’re Well. You came out of the well, and now you’re well, and you’re going to be well for the rest of your life, I promise.
He came home with me. And he became, in the safety of a home that loved him, the most devoted, gentle, grateful dog you can imagine. He healed all the way. The dog who’d cried on my chest grew into a happy, settled, joyful animal — though he never liked being left alone, never liked the dark much, and I understood why, and I worked around it, and mostly I just made sure he was never alone in the dark again as long as he lived.
And here’s the thing I came to understand, living with Well, that makes the whole story make a kind of sense I can’t shake.
PART 6
Let me lay out what I’ve come to believe, because eight years with that dog gave me time to think about it.
A young woman died, suddenly, alone, with no family. And her dog — her grieving, searching dog — fell into a well looking for her, and held on for three days in the dark.
By every measure, this is just tragedy. A woman dead too young. A dog who suffered terribly. Nothing good in it.
Except.
Except that the dog’s searching, his falling, his three days of crying in that well — it’s what brought us all there. The 911 call about a dog in a well is the reason anyone went to that property, and it’s part of how the police came to discover the young woman who’d died alone and might otherwise have lain there much longer, unfound. The dog, in his grief, in his searching, became the thread that led the world back to his lost owner. He didn’t mean to. He was just looking for her. But his looking mattered.
And here’s the part that I hold onto, the part I say at the well every year.
That young woman lost everything. Her life, far too young. And she lost her dog, too — Well, the dog she loved, who’d have been hers for years more if her heart hadn’t given out. She lost Well.
But Well didn’t just get lost. Well got found. He fell into the dark searching for a woman who was already gone, and instead of dying down there, he was pulled out, and he found me. A young man, alone, no family close, who needed something to love as much as that dog needed someone to love him. The dog that a dying woman lost became the dog that a lonely young man found.
She lost him. But in losing him, somehow, she gave him to me. And he saved me as much as I saved him — gave a solitary young firefighter a heart to come home to, a family of two, a reason that wasn’t just the job. I’d had a small, work-shaped life. Well filled the rest of it in.
I think about her a lot. The woman I never met, whose dog I pulled from a well. And what I’ve come to feel, what I say out loud once a year, is gratitude — which is a strange thing to feel toward a tragedy, but it’s true.
She lost Well. But Well found me. Thank you, whoever you were. I’m sorry you died alone and young. But your dog became the best thing in my life, and I will love him the way you would have, every day, for as long as he lives.
PART 7
Well lived with me for eight years.
Good years. The best of my life so far, honestly. He was at my side through everything — through more years on the job, through the ordinary business of a young man becoming a less-young man, through all of it. The dog who’d had nothing, who’d held on alone in the dark for three days, never spent another day unloved or alone. I made sure of it.
And every year, on the anniversary of the day I pulled him out of that well, I did something. I still do.
The old well got filled in, eventually — old wells get capped and filled for safety, and that one did. So there’s no well there anymore, just a spot on old land where one used to be. But I know exactly where it was. And every year, on that day, I go there. And I lay down a single flower.
Not for the well. For her. For the young woman I never met, who died alone and young, whose dog fell into the dark looking for her.
I lay a flower at the place where her dog held on for three days, and I tell her what I always tell her. That I’m sorry. That I found her dog. That her dog is loved, is happy, is well. That she lost him, but he found me, and that I’ll never stop being grateful for the strange and terrible way our lives crossed — her death, his searching, his fall, my rope going down into the dark.
She gave me Well without ever knowing it. The least I can do is bring her a flower once a year and tell her he’s okay.
PART 8
Well passed last year. Old age, in his sleep, in our home, with my hand on him — warm, and safe, and not alone, and not in the dark, the opposite of every single thing about the place I found him.
I held him at the end the way I’d held him at the top of that well, and I told him he was a good boy, the best boy, and that he’d been well, hadn’t he, he’d been so well, all these years.
I still go to the spot where the well was, every year on the day. I still lay the flower. I always will. It’s not just for her anymore — it’s for both of them now, the woman and the dog, the one who lost him and the one who found him, somewhere together now, I have to believe, finally reunited, the searching finally over.
People ask me about the hardest rescue of my career, or the most memorable.
I tell them about a 911 call. A dog crying in an old well. Forty feet down, on a rope, into the dark.
And I tell them about the moment a freezing, dying dog put his head over my heart and cried, and I cried, and a whole crew of firefighters stood around an old well and wept, for a dog who’d held on three days in the dark looking for a woman who was already gone.
She lost Well.
Well found me.
And we were well, the two of us, for eight good years.
That’s the whole story.
That’s the only part that matters.
Follow this page for more stories about the ones who hold on in the dark until someone comes — and the strange, grace-filled ways our lives cross. And if Well’s story reached you, leave the name “Well” in a comment and I’ll make sure you see the rest of it — and the ones that come after.
