If dogs could speak, there’s a hair-raising tale we’d like our dog to tell. But while she often looks as though she’s about to talk, Zazel has yet to utter anything more intelligible than her usual highly expressive barks, so I’ll just have to tell her story myself.
It happened in Canada, not far from where we live, about eight years ago. My husband Duncan and I were out hiking with three friends in British Columbia’s beautiful Bear Creek Provincial Park. Zazel, our tan-and-white Jack Russell terrier, was just a year old at the time. At thirteen pounds she was lean, fit, and keen as only a terrier can be, scampering and sniffing and straining at the leash.
All was perfectly normal, in other words, as we tramped along happily on that sunny Sunday in June, inhaling the fresh, pristine air, and loving the spectacular views. All was peaceful, and still, and it probably would have stayed that way, if it hadn’t been for that sassy chipmunk. He was only doing what chipmunks do, to be fair – popping up out of a hole in a log with a cheeky chittering that cut through the still air and catapulted Zazel into red alert, as she yapped hysterically and tore pell-mell towards it – doing what terriers do.
I did what owners do and hauled back on the leash with all my might. But Zazel was as unpredictable as she was determined, and before I knew what had happened she had jerked the leash out of my grasp and scrambled through a hole at the bottom of a five foot metal safety fence that ran along the edge of the long, precipitous gorge.
The entire agonizing scene took no more than a few seconds to play out, but it still seems like a lifetime to me that I dashed back and forth, my heart in my throat, and saw Zazel lose her footing and plunge two hundred and fifty feet into the raging creek below. I felt like I was hurtling downward with her, and I’ll never forget the sinking sensation I had, hearing her distant, disappearing yelps, as she bounced off canyon ledges at maximum velocity…not one, not two, but three stomach-churning times.
The first miracle was that she was alive. My friend Sue Miller spotted her, a tiny white dot splashing into a large pool in the middle of the creek, beneath an eight-storey high waterfall. Sue actually watched Zazel swim to the opposite shore and huddle, almost motionless, on the canyon shoreline.
In an eerie twist of nature, the weather had shifted suddenly, as gusts of wind and dark rain squalls rolled through the canyon. Help was needed urgently, but we were the only ones around, and though we were desperate to get to her, the sheer canyon walls intimidated us Sunday hikers. If Zazel had any hope of survival, we all knew she would have to be rescued…and soon…by experienced climbers.
Extreme Measures – at a Distance
What we had to do, clearly, was collect our senses and get organized. After a quick discussion, we decided to split up, with some heading off to look for help and some staying put atop the canyon wall, where we could keep an eye on Zazel.
As luck would have it, all of us were skilled energy Pranic Healers TM who had been taught to scan and treat injuries at a distance. Before we could even begin to assess Zazel’s condition, however, we had first to clean ourselves of our own shock and stress. The whole process took a few minutes, as each of us calmed ourselves and focused on the task in hand. Then, one by one, we began to articulate what we were finding, each elaborating on details and thereby assisting the others in validating what they found.
Before long we reached a consensus that her injuries were severe and complex. The greatest concerns were: hypothermia, shock, internal bleeding, broken bones, trauma, disorientation, concussion and stress. The first three problems alone were all independently life-threatening. Each healer scanned and verified Zazel’s broken bones. She had a hairline skull fracture and three broken ribs, (one of them quite badly broken). Her back was broken (crushed, actually) from mid-back to the base of her tail, and her right hip was broken with numerous pieces displaced.
Zazel’s lungs were bruised but not punctured. Her bladder, spleen and pancreas were bruised and bleeding. Her right kidney had exploded and was bleeding profusely. She had six inches of collapsed, perforated intestine, also bleeding, and she had a brain concussion. Beyond all this, of course, she was wet, cold, lost, alone – and in severe pain. To make matters even worse, the sound of the pounding water of the eighty foot waterfall just above her must have been deafening.
We decided to split the tasks and begin treatment. I took the job of treating the hypothermia and shock exclusively, while Sue set to work stopping the internal bleeding. After we had worked on Zazel this way for over an hour, I had a pressing call from nature and headed for some bushes to relieve myself. I had just crossed the trail and was approaching a tree when Sue called out urgently to me that she had lost all vital signs and measurements, and Zazel was gone! I ran back to our lookout station and we both looked on, terrified, as a bald headed eagle settled on a tree directly above her. There was little we could do now but pray.
I kept trying to scan her little energy body, but there was nothing. Zazel could not receive any of the energy I was sending. Then, out of nowhere, thrillingly, Something Else intervened, and I saw a white wolf spirit stand over Zazel’s body and direct tiny rays of energy out of its pores directly into hers. After several more heart-stopping moments, Zazel’s energy body reappeared, and Sue and I resumed our distant treatments. For the next five hours, without pause, we continued the healing process.
To the Rescue
In the meantime, Duncan and our friends Bruce and Valerie had hiked back to the Park office, a good half-hour descent from where we were, and spent the same five hours trying to find help. The Parks staff spent considerable time and effort, but were not able to make the dangerous trek through the canyon from below to retrieve Zazel. SPCA, for its part, did not have trained rescuers, while provincial Search and Rescue would not go in for an animal. Crowds and the media began to arrive as word of the unfolding drama leaked out, but all hopes for an actual rescue attempt seemed very remote.
In a last ditch effort, Duncan had called the Vallhalla Outdoor Hikers retail store in Kelowna. Steven McFadden the staff person who took his call, said that all the good free climbers he knew were probably out climbing. He was alone in the store at the time, but said he was prepared to do what he could after he locked up the store at five that afternoon. Later, at the precise moment he drove into the Park entrance, serendipity intervened in the form of two of our friends, the Benge brothers, Mark and Anthony who are also experienced free climbers.
It was 5:30 PM by the time we introduced the climbers to each other and gave them an empty backpack and some towels to use in rescuing our Zazel. They descended quickly without ropes, as we watched anxiously from above. In less than forty minutes the trio had reached her. Zazel, of course, had never laid eyes on any of them before, and was so traumatized that she would only bark and snap at them, and they couldn’t get near her. Eventually, they wrapped the towels around their hands and in this way were able to get hold of the end of her leash, which was clipped to a choker chain around her neck. This accomplished, they had no option but to suspend her by the leash and haul her behind them up the cliff.
It was over six hours after her fall by the time Zazel finally reappeared at the top of the canyon, dangling on the leash held by Mark Benge, one of our three brave heroes of the day. We wrapped her wet, cold body in blankets and took her home. Because of the collapsed perforated intestine she could not digest food so we fed her asprin, nutritious liquid food and tea tree oil (to prevent infection) by dropper. She urinated what looked like straight blood for many days.
A Happy Ending
We took Zazel to our vet the following day. He X-rayed her and confirmed our assessment. He wanted to book her for hip surgery that would include metal pins and plates, and estimated the cost for this procedure at between two and four thousand dollars. We decided against it, concerned that if they opened her at this point she might bleed to death. Duncan also worried, because she is such an active dog and could jump as high as our waist, that any plates or pins the surgeons might insert could be shaken loose when (and if) she returned to normal activity.
The vet asked us how we knew what was happening inside her and we told him it was the same way we knew what bones were broken before he had X-rayed her. He was not convinced by this, and suggested that perhaps we didn’t care enough about our dog to spend the money. We bid him good day and took Zazel home, where she received Sonic-Healing TM for Stress and Digestive and Eliminative treatment over the ensuing months, as well as Pranic Healing and kennel rest. When she appeared restless in her bed we would turn on one of the Sonic Healing Programs for her to listen to she would cock her head to one side then settle down and often be asleep in minutes. She seemed aware of our non touch Pranic Healing TM treatments as well often falling asleep early into the treatment. In this way, gradually, she regained her strength and mobility.
Four months after the accident we took her back to the same clinic for another X-ray, as we wanted to confirm her healing process. The vet was surprised to discover that the three ribs, the spine and both hips looked perfectly normal and straight and stated as much. I took a ruler and measured the two hips on the X-ray plate to show him we still had a bit more work to do as one hip was still about an eighth of an inch higher than the other. He seemed surprised and baffled. We took Zazel home again. Our total vet bill was $170.00 (for the two X-rays).
Zazel is now nine years old and can still jump as high as ever. The only area of her body that did not heal completely is the very end of the spine where her tail begins. She would not stop wagging her tail throughout the healing process, as she was often so happy. So we cannot pet her there or she growls a bit. She was also very nervous of rivers, streams, and lakes for many years, she barely tolerated her weekly bath but has grown steadily less timid around water and this past year she actually swam in the lake and seemed to quite enjoy it. Duncan and I love her to bits and are so thankful she’s still with us. She is a brave, active, and sweet pet, and would probably tell you so, if she could.
Kelowna, BC – August, 2006
Footnote
Sometimes one calamity precipitates another. This could easily have been the case that fateful afternoon, when three young cliff jumpers arrived on the scene at the very moment our climbers reached Zazel. We watched in amazement as two of them, both young men, jumped over the eighty-foot waterfall into the pool and swam to the shore near Zazel. Their friend, a girl, remained behind, afraid to jump.
The parks warden who was watching the rescue with a large crowd near us told me the water was too shallow to be jumping. He was surprised the two men had survived the jump. He also said that they were trapped now and would have no alternative but to climb the cliffs to get out. The girl stayed frozen on top of the cliff for some time, but finally jumped when her companions continued to coax her.
In the end it was up to our climbers to rescue the three of them, as well. They eventually succeeded, although often one of the jumpers would get frozen on the cliff and the climbers would have to help unglue them. I still feel there was some sort of synchronicity at work, however, as the parks staff said the jumpers could not have survived the night in the wet cold canyon.
There's yet one more thing I probably should mention. Many people have asked where Zazel got her name. It was Duncan who came up with it, when we first got her and discovered how acrobatic she can be when she jumps. She is named after the famous nineteenth-century European trapeze artist. That Zazel was a sensation as the first human to be shot out of a cannon during her popular circus performances.
|
|
|
 |
“My experience was that for the first three or four times of treatment Buddy was interested and perky about the sounds as he had never heard this before. I could see him relax when I put the tape player on the bed. It was rather astonishing. Then, as the healing began to take hold, I felt a calmness that set in over the panic one feels when their little innocent friend is in danger. Buddy’s treatments also healed my stress as time progressed.”
Joni Prittie, Eugen, Oregon
(Buddy had been suffering with liver cancer)
|
|
|
