I lost my dog when I was 17

I used to live in Western Wyoming, back when I was in highschool. My dad retired early from his position as an architect and took to ranching. We lived in one of those podunk nothing towns where everyone drives an hour to school and the wind blows so hard the birds fly backwards.

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Friends were hard to find, so we kept a lot of pets. Mom loved cats, but my favorite were dogs. I had two dogs, a mutt named Lucky and a labrador called Daniel (I don't know why we called him Daniel, it just seemed funny at the time). Daniel was lazy, but Lucky liked to get in trouble. That's probably what got him in the end.

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I don't know how he kept finding ways to get in trouble; Wyoming sucks. It's just miles and miles of nothing. My family's personal patch of miles and miles of nothing had the freeway on one side (I-80) and a big pile of windmills on the other, on government land. Lucky would dig under the fence at night and I'd have to go find him. Sometimes he was on the wrong side of the freeway, sometimes he had skunk spray all over him, and some times he'd have a deep scratch from some kind of animal or another. We could never figure out what kind, but my dad figured it was coyote, maybe even mountain lion. We tried a coyote vest, but he would bark and whine till we took it off. He was a dumb dog, but sweet.

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Anyway, the night he died, I was a senior in high school. Lucky was getting on in the years, getting a cataract in one eye, but still healthy enough to cause trouble.

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I was sleeping deeply after a hard night of ACT studying, when something woke me up. To this day, I don't know what it was--a feeling, a premonition, or maybe a sound through my open window. But I immediately knew something was deeply wrong.

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I looked out my window and saw a dark spot in the snow near the fence, where Lucky had dug out. I threw on my jacket and headed downstairs. I didn't bother waking Dad; he got angry about being woken up, and I wasn't in the mood for a fight.

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The air was so cold that it hurts just to think about it. Lucky had thick fur, but I was worried he would freeze and die in the cold weather. I followed his tracks across our property.

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It gets dark in Wyoming, and a blizzard was coming that night. As I followed the tracks, all I could see were the tall, blinking red lights of the windmill and the towering shadows of the pillars beneath them. (If you've seen it before, you know it. There's a lot of videos of it online, like this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nyoZTF6zE1E)

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Lucky's trail was spotty and inconsistent, sometimes with wide spaces between pawprints as he ran, and sometimes in a little tangle as he circled about for minute. There was one spot that was trampled over and over, as if he had paced back and forth for several minutes. There was even a small trail heading back to the house for a bit before going on.

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I passed on, in between the dark shadows of the windmills and the red lights that illuminated nothing. That's when I heard his voice: a low whine, like nothing I'd ever heard before. It wasn't angry, or scared--it sounded like giving up. It sounded like an animal that had absolutely nothing left.

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I forged ahead, but the track ended. I stopped to listen, and heard the whine again. It sounded like it came from...above?

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I looked up, trying to figure out how my dog could climb up that high. All I could see was the red lights. But as soon as I looked up at them, they all blinked on and off at once. And then they moved. The ground shook and threw me to my feet. Over and over again, the ground thudded, until the red lights were far away. I could hear Lucky's whine move with them.

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I gathered myself up and walked a long, lonely walk home. I stopped when I crested a hill and saw more windmills, far off to my right. I could see their blades spinning clearly against a low patch of starlight shining through the clouds. Their lights were dimmer, the towers shorter than....whatever I had seen.

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I told dad the next day that Lucky had gotten out again. We fought and never talked about it again. That's the way it was that year, and that's why I moved out and never came back. I never told him about the lights. He wouldn't have believed me.

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I'd like to believe that Lucky was still alive, but that whine was the sound of a creature's last breath. It's the sound that a cat makes after falling off a twenty-story balcony, or a horse makes when both legs are broken. It was a cry for help. I just hope that he got the help he needed, and passed peacefully.

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I still pass through Wyoming from time to time. At night. And I always keep an eye on the windmill lights. Just in case.