Were Ben at 14

After seven days, when the rescue teams broke through, they found no survivors. Bodies and body parts were scattered on the shaft walls, impaled on drill teeth, and buried under slag. The explosion had collapsed the roof. Those not instantly blown apart died from suffocation. It would take weeks to recover the dead and months to arrange their funerals, cremations, interments, and memorial services. Some might never return to the surface, with the Black Rock coal shaft # 7 as their final resting place.

Regarding the mystery of the dog’s tail, it remained just that, a mystery. What the dog was doing five hundred feet below ground when the bomb went off, trace elements unrelated to mining prompted the governor to declare it an ecoterrorist attack, was left to the imagination of the press.

“It’s not a dog’s tail; it’s a wolf,” EMT Grant Spencer told the Channel 3 newswoman outside the enclosure. He held it in front of her camera as proof, in case she doubted his survivalist credentials. There had not been a wolf sighting in West Virginia for two centuries, and although the tail’s presence merited a paragraph in the Herald-Dispatch, interest soon waned. One of the miners had chosen the wrong day to bring his dog down the shaft. No other explanation seemed likely or necessary. It was a small matter considering the scale of the tragedy, a county’s hammering heart permanently stilled.

The tail hung from the rear-view mirror of Spencer’s RAM pickup for the better part of a week. He continued calling it a wolf’s tail even as friends scoffed and told him to throw it away. Then his wife Lorna delivered the ultimatum. “Get rid of that disgusting thing or you’re doing your own laundry.” Already the stench permeated his clothing. Any minute it would trigger an asthma attack. He didn’t want that, did he? Reluctantly, he tossed the tail into the underbrush behind the pool shed and left it there to decompose, forgotten.

Not everyone forgot.