For a moment a sign tacked up on a telephone pole misleads me. STOLEN, I can see, and WHITE, and my heart flip-flops, but when Puzzle and I get close enough to read the whole sign, I see it’s not about a missing dog at all. Someone is missing a plant stand, freshly painted white. Someone thinks that maybe someone else accidentally took it from its painting place, thinking it was a curbside castoff. But it’s not! It’s a family heirloom! Not worth much to anyone else, but precious to someone’s family! Someone would be thrilled to get the plant stand back, no questions asked of someone else. Someone is offering a small reward! It’s more an essay than a sign, peppered with exclamation marks, and only a driver going two miles an hour and wearing Mr. Magoo spectacles could read it, but the way it’s written and the direction it’s facing makes me think that maybe someone has a good idea who took the plant stand, and the essay is an accusation.
“Can I help you?” asks a man loading tools into a truck, a utilities repairman that Puzzle has been flirting with from a distance while I paused uncertainly over the sign. I could feel her simper and wag at the end of the leash.
“I have a little stray puppy at the house and was looking for Lost signs,” I answer.
“That’s not a lost-dog sign. That’s about a missing plant stand.”
“I know.”
The man wordlessly jerks his chin over his shoulder to a yard full of plant stands of every shape and size. They are in neat, regular rows like a cemetery, all of them white and all of them plantless, but apparently accounted for and loved. He shakes his head slightly, then asks, “What’s the dog look like?”
“White. About this big. Large eyes and very long legs. Huge tilted ears.”
“I might know that dog,” the man says, but he looks doubtful. A white puppy he encountered last week was surely too far away. He recites the bullet points: small, skinny, white, a sick puppy tied in a shed to keep him away from a moving family’s other dogs. The family, he says, had been evicted from their home. When they left, they left the puppy too. The repairman heard whimpering and peered into the shed and saw a white scrap of little dog. He called animal services, but they arrived to find an empty shed and what appeared to be frayed clothesline used to tie him down. Either someone had come back for the dog or he’d chewed through it to make his escape. The repairman’s description certainly sounds like Jake Piper. But this was blocks away, he says, pointing. He names the cross street. I’m doubtful too. It’s a long, long way for a puppy to walk, a lot of streets to cross without getting hit by a car.
If I’m going to trespass, I’m going to do it without Puzzle. I take her home before heading back in the direction the utility man had pointed. Puz is too light and too visible. I don’t anticipate a confrontation, but if there is one, I don’t want her caught in the middle.
I take the car and turn left and then right down an unfamiliar street, watching my neighborhood dissolve and give way to another, which melts into another, and then another, Queen Anne architecture yielding to Craftsman and then to blocks of midcentury houses in steadily deteriorating shape. I drive slowly, not exactly sure where the right cross street is, and at the point I think I’ve overshot the house and shed somehow and am about to turn around, I see it: a once pretty 1920s cottage with peeling paint, sagging porch, and a freshly boarded back door. I can see it clearly from the corner, though it’s in the middle of the block, one of a huddle of derelict houses not yet demolished, as others around them must have been. There are several vacant lots for sale.
So that’s the house, and there’s the shed, much as the utilities guy had described it—as old as the house and well back from it, at the end of a grass-choked gravel drive. There must have been shade over that shed once, but now it abuts an empty lot where both house and trees were bulldozed, and only a few scraggly young hackberries remain. The makeshift crossbar that had once secured the shed’s double doors is on the ground, and one of the doors has been pulled open about half a foot. Pulled open with difficulty, it looks like. There’s a raw place where the bottom of the door scraped dirt and grass and gravel.
There are No Dumping and No Trespassing signs on most of the empty lots. I park the car and figure that if I walk onto this land as though I own it, maybe someone will think I do—or that I am interested in purchasing it. I sidestep the house and all the shattered glass surrounding it (not sure what has gone on there), moving straight to the shed. The open door is stuck fast in the uneven ground. If I wanted to, I could probably squeeze sideways into the shed through the door’s partial opening, but something about that idea raises the hair on the back of my neck. Too easy to get caught and cornered inside. I could see how simple it would be to stick a puppy out here and let it die, unheeded. Out of sight, out of heart, out of hearing. With empty lots on three sides all the to way the corner, there wouldn’t be a whole lot of people who could hear a little dog cry.
Peering through the gloom, staring straight into sunlight pouring through the generous cracks in some of the walls, I find the shed’s interior difficult to see, but to one side I can make out the metal skeleton of an old lawn chair, a gas can, a bike missing a front wheel, and a shredded garbage bag full of something. That’s it. The squeeze is too tight to turn my head.
No good.
I’m perhaps the most incompetent trespasser ever, uneasy, furtive, glancing around to see if anyone’s watching me. No one. I shove my hands in the pockets of my khakis and circle the shed, flustering insects in the tall weeds. An angry grasshopper levitates, and all sorts of flying things rise up in a cloud around me as I pass. On the ground, more broken glass. A headless doll and a crumpled Big Gulp cup. A screwdriver with a black-and-yellow handle protruding from the dirt. I am looking for any way to see inside the shed when I find a low hole in the broken plywood at my feet. The wood is rotted. When I kneel to the hole to peer through it, the wood crumbles easily to the touch.
Face pressed to the opening, I smell the inside of the shed before I can clearly see into it. The familiar, sickening stench of animal waste and, behind it, mildew and something very like the sweet-foul scent of decomposition meet me at once, and I reflexively pull back. I have smelled animal death in a hoarder’s house and a puppy mill, and I’ve smelled plenty of animal death in other places. Once you know the scent of that despair, it never goes away. For a moment I can’t look, afraid that there may have been a litter of puppies in this ugly story, and that only one escaped.
I inhale and hold it, again put my face to the shed to see what I can see in the space of a breath. There’s the bike and the lawn chair. There’s the garbage bag and there, beside it, two very large, very dead rats. There’s another—a third stiff rat on the bag itself. Near the back of the shed, a pair of plastic mixing bowls are overturned on the dusty ground. A ragged end of clothesline droops from where it is tied to a metal toolbox not far away.
That’s all I can see. It’s enough. The shed tallies with the repairman’s description, and if a little white dog had been in there, that little white dog is gone—mercifully gone, maybe—and not lying among the dead.
Was this Jake Piper’s beginning? How many white puppies in trouble could there be in the space of a week? And if it was Jake in this garage, how did he avoid whatever killed those rats? How did he manage to make his way to me?
I push back, get up, and turn away from the shed, wondering how many times animal control officers walk up to places like this and prepare themselves for the worst. I wonder how many times they find it. It is a job I could never, ever do.
12
WAS THERE EVER ANY DOUBT that Jake was staying? Probably not. At least for a little while, I rationalize about the collar and the toys from PetSmart. I posture left and right about finding him a home, convincing no one. Even had I been more determined that he needed to go, talking to fellow rescuers would have changed my mind. They are unanimous: There are too many homeless puppies these days. Most rescue shelters were overloaded and would find a sick pit bull mix unadoptable. This kind of
puppy wouldn’t last a day in a shelter, several tell me.
Certainly my vet knew Jake would stay where he landed. For four days there are grave reports and guarded prognoses, but on the fifth day he calls to say that “Jake Piper is up this morning and playing like a puppy. He can go home tomorrow.” Then he asks if I want him microchipped.
I do. I send the papers off in my name, because, really, he has to be registered to someone.
Now as we sit together on the floor, I can see how much he’s improved and how far he has to go. Jake is still terribly thin, but he’s quietly playful, resting in my lap and gnawing at the long tails of toys I dangle over him. The Poms aren’t certain what to make of him, this puppy that, even skeletal and weak, is already bigger than they are. Perhaps they sense his frailty. Often a new rescue in the house will rev them up for an evening, but not this time. They sit in the doorway and watch speculatively. Jake is still so dazed he hardly seems to know the Poms are there.
But that’s not the case with the golden retriever. The youngster is devoted to Puzzle. When she passes by him tonight, he stretches out skinny legs to tap her with his paws, a sort of doggy Morse. Hey. Stop. Hey. Me! Notice me! Puzzle was spayed before she ever had a litter, but her maternal instinct has kicked in. This surprises me. She alternately cradles and corrects Jake as though he were her own. Now she stops in passing and gives his ears an affectionate lick.
Jake will be slow to regain strength. The vet has made it clear just how close we were to losing him. Starvation, hookworms, and hemorrhagic gastroenteritis. Ugly words all, and they have all taken a toll. He is a ghost puppy these first weeks back at our house—all knobby joints, tucked tail, and big dark eyes. His strength is elusive. “He has turned a corner” is what they say about an invalid who’s condition has improved, but sometimes, literally turning a corner is too much for Jake. There are days he walks down the hall like an old dog. I watch his legs buckle, or I hear the clatter of his bones on the hardwood floor and look to find him lying on his chest, bemused and panting, gathering strength to make it to the water dish.
The Poms follow him from a distance like a little Greek chorus, commenting on his successes and his failures. Those familiar with Pomeranians could probably chart Jake Piper’s progress across the changes in their behavior—from subdued muttering to spins with chittering to insulted yapping when Jake crosses their invisible boundary lines. As he improves, he gets bigger and stronger. Now that they’ve figured him out, the Poms, unimpressed, draw more lines. They follow him more closely. Correct him more often. Not that couch, that cushion, bed, or bowl. He complies.
A friend sees a photo and comments that Jake Piper “is looking a little less like Gollum and a little more like Yoda these days.” Her description is right on. Certainly Jake has Yoda’s ears. What to make of them? Not floppy and not upstanding, they are enormous sails and unevenly folded. Wayward too. When Jake Piper walks south, one ear heads that direction and the other points east. The southbound ear has rusty spots rimmed in dark gray. The eastbound ear has rust polka dots. The same friend who called him Yoda describes the ear mottling as “a cross between mold and mildew.” A few observers say he’s adorable; a handful call him cute, stressing the word in the way they’d use it to refer to ugly babies—falsely bright—then change the subject.
One search-and-rescue colleague cuts right to it and says that what Jake lacks in beauty, he may make up for in brains.
He’s got a good nose, certainly. I find this out early, when he scents a single piece of dropped kibble through a closed cupboard door.
Because he’s still shy of full strength, it’s difficult to know what kind of dog Jake Piper’s going to be. I watch for hints about his drives and aptitudes. Like Puzzle, he’s a nose-y beast. The way one dog will model another, Jake mimics her working scent, but I can already tell that he’s far less independent than my search dog. Jake Piper is a softhearted boy. He’s curious but friendly with cats and submissive to even the smallest of the Pomeranians.
Jake likes a toy. He likes a ball a lot, with an almost Border collie obsession for fetch. But bottom line, Jake prefers other dogs to toys, and he prefers humans to dogs. Jake loves a human most—and not just those he knows. All humans. Any humans. Especially children, as he proves when I test him on a leash. Neighbor children are charmed by Jake’s long-legged, kite-eared appearance and his large, dark eyes, and when they approach and ask to pet him, he is gentle and eager. While he shows no sign of separation anxiety when I leave for the day, Jake is not Puzzle, who enjoys human contact on her own terms, who prefers her work off-lead and yards and yards away. No: Like Misty, Jake glows with human contact. He wants his people close.
I wonder about Jake Piper as a working partner. I deliberate in e-mails to friends with working dogs. While I won’t test him yet, I won’t force him, and Jake has no obligation to be anything more than a good family pet, he is so unusual a puppy that I’m curious.
One night, in the middle of Jake’s wrestle game with Puzzle, I touch a finger to my cheek. “Jake, look at me,” I say. It’s the first time we’ve tried this. Jake knows his name. He turns his attention from Puzzle and looks into my face.
“Good look!” I praise him. “Good look.”
And then Jake turns upside down in front of Puzzle, wraps his paws around his nose, and snorts. He peeks up at me, keeping the eye contact while also showing off, and for the first time since Sam and Misty died, I feel my sadness lift.
A rescued dog’s ability to give up old baggage often tells us what kind of dog he can be, whether pet or working partner. Starving Jake came with plenty of baggage. He is never far away from that shed and the clothesline that bound him. In many ways, it seems he’s never left it.
Food is his greatest worry. I have had plenty of starved dogs in the house before, but Jake’s desperation exceeds any dog’s in my past experience. Jake is hungry before meals, during meals, and after meals. He is so hungry that sometimes he whimpers as he eats, a jumble of impulses, unable to recognize that the anxious croon for dinner is being satisfied even as he moans for it. Jake is hungry even when he really can’t be. He wolfs down food like it may vanish at any moment. This is understandable, of course, but his early manners with us are atrocious. He often knocks the food bowl from my hand before I can put it down.
It’s more than an issue of manners. In time, this frantic eating could be dangerous for Jake Piper. Bloat—a horrible and often fatal condition that can result from a dog’s gulping meals, swallowing air, and then doing some simple activity afterward—is especially possible in deep-chested dogs like Jake. I need to teach him to slow down. I do a standard trick to slow a gulping dog: I put his food into a muffin tin so that he has to extract it with his tongue before he can chew and swallow, and I slow him down even further by greasing the bottom of the tin with peanut butter. Jake is still faster than every other dog in the house. He punctures several muffin tins with sharp, eager teeth when the meal is finished, still kibbling even though the kibble is gone. When I pull the tin out of his crate, it looks like it’s been stabbed with an ice pick.
So Jake has a lot to learn. I have compassion for his history and respect for his intelligence and his willing heart. I believe that a slower, more civilized dinnertime Jake is possible, and it will be a huge indicator of his willingness to trust humans for good things. Even though he’s desperately overeager for food, and even though he’s hell on a muffin tin, Jake is also full of surprises here. He has known starvation, but Jake doesn’t guard his food with humans or other dogs. I can touch his bowl at any point while he’s eating without fear. Another dog can even approach his crate at mealtimes. While Jake doesn’t offer to share with the others, he also doesn’t give the sidelong stare or growl, and he doesn’t bare his teeth. I have a golden retriever who’s never been denied a meal in her life that didn’t come into the family that gracious.
That softness from a dog that has starved, that early trust, is a very good sign from Jake.
&n
bsp; We begin training good manners with Sit, one of the single best contracts between a dog and a human. A dog that sits necessarily gives up power. I still remember a favorite dog trainer’s mantra: “Sit for petting. Sit for treats. Sit because I told you to sit. The dog should think his middle name is Sit.” For a dog like Jake, who has no reason to have faith in humans, who had to fight his way out of a shed just to stay alive, the test of Sit is the first real look at just what his background has done to him and just what kind of dog he is willing to become.
Jake is attentive and he thoroughly models Puzzle. He learns the Sit command quickly after only a few tries. Competitive Jake seems to want to best Puzzle at being good. Jake enjoys being good. He sits for toys quickly. He sits for petting, too, but is sometimes so overcome with the joy of a fine scratching that he melts, leaning against my legs and sliding belly-up onto the floor. Sitting for treats is harder. Jake sits for them and then pops up the minute a treat is given. Food is such a joyful thing. It takes a few days for him to keep himself planted on the floor throughout the whole process: sit, treat, chew, swallow.
Then we begin working on mealtime etiquette. “Kennel Up!” is the next command, and Jake learns quickly that he should run to his crate, sit in it, and wait for his food. But God help any dog or cat that gets in the way. Jake makes the quick connection of command to the kennel, but sometimes his enthusiasm causes him to pogo during the gallop down the hall. I fall over him a few times. He hits the bowl with his head a few times too, the kibble scattering like shrapnel causing a frenzy of Pomeranians and an eager Jake attempting to shoehorn himself under bookcases for a single piece of food.
The Possibility Dogs Page 11