Bella's Story

by W. Bruce Cameron

  The tall man put his big shoes back on, picked up his poles, and shoved off. He went away, moving quickly in a gliding sort of way I’d never seen before.

  The male dog threw himself down, squeezing his body next to his person. His tongue was out and his body was trembling.

  The man lying on his back did not open his eyes, but he moaned.

  “It’ll be okay. He’ll be okay,” the kneeling man told me. He reached out a hand toward me. “Good dogs. You got him out. Good girl.”

  I sniffed at the hand in its big puffy mitten. The male dog squirmed even closer to his person and licked and licked at his face.

  * * *

  I stayed with the moaning man, the dog, and the other man, who was nice enough. He took a sack off of his back and fed both me and the other dog a piece of bread.

  “Dutch, is that your name?” Bread Man asked as he looked at the male dog’s collar. “Hi, Dutch!” I could tell from the male dog’s reaction that this was what people called him.

  “What about you? Where’s your collar, huh?” Bread Man asked me. He scratched around my neck. I wagged. Yes, I would have more bread if that’s what he was asking.

  After a while I heard loud machines approaching from far below. When they were closer, I could see that there were two of them, flying up toward us. Each carried two people on its back and one dragged a flat sled behind it.

  Three women and one man jumped off the machines and carefully lifted Dutch’s person onto the sled. They strapped him down. The man groaned loudly when they moved him, but he did not wake up.

  “Is he going to be okay?” Bread Man asked one of the women.

  “Depends on how long he was stuck under the snow without oxygen,” she answered. “It’s a good thing you were able to dig him out so quickly.”

  “What about his dogs?” Bread Man asked.

  “Oh,” answered the woman.

  “Will you send somebody to get them?”

  “That’s not—we aren’t really equipped to take care of dogs,” the woman told him.

  “Huh.” The man put a mitten down to stroke my head, and I rubbed up against him like Big Kitten did when she greeted me. “So what’s going to happen to them?”

  The woman shook her head. “I guess that’s up to you.”

  We watched as the people climbed onto their machines. With a lurch, they drove off, dragging Dutch’s man on the sled behind him.

  Dutch let out a cry and plunged after the machines. “Dutch! Here, boy!” Bread Man yelled after him. He shoved on his long shoes, and glided after Dutch, who had left the hard-packed area and was now sinking down with every step, just as I did when I was hunting with Big Kitten in this stuff. The man leaned down and grabbed hold of Dutch’s collar.

  I watched.

  Bread Man had called Dutch by his name and seized his collar and was now stroking him and speaking to him in soft tones. But the man had not called me Bella. He did not know me.

  I breathed in. I could not smell Big Kitten, but I knew she was out there, probably not too far away. We would find each other.

  More important, I could feel the pull of Lucas.

  Bread Man was looking at me. He lifted his hand to his mouth and whistled. “Come on, girl!” he shouted. “Good dog!”

  I hesitated. Now Bread Man was slapping his thighs. It meant he wanted me to go to him.

  I wanted to do Go Home. But it had been so long since I’d heard a human voice. And this human was calling me, telling me that I was a good dog. He was being nice to Dutch, and he had bread.

  I was still doing Go Home to Lucas, and I was still taking care of Big Kitten. But right then, at that moment, I felt the same yearning I’d felt when I lived with Mother Cat and her kitten family, the need to be with humans. In just a moment, I would return to my journey, but right now, I needed something else.

  I ran to the man.

  Bread Man took his sack off his back, and I wondered if he had another piece of bread. He did! He reached out for me, holding bread in his mitten, and I gobbled it up.

  While I was eating, he looped something around my neck, tightening it with gentle pulls. I swallowed and realized what it was.

  A rope. I was on a leash.

  No! I needed to be with Big Kitten! She needed her Mother Cat! I had made a terrible mistake, giving in to the urge to be with this man and his bread. I tried to shake off the rope, backing away.

  “Steady, girl,” the man said gently.

  Dutch was on a leash, too, on the other end of the rope, and Bread Man was holding both of us by the middle. Dutch was trying so hard to be a good dog that he was quivering with the effort. What he wanted to do, I knew, was to run after that sled, to get to his person. It’s what a lost dog needs to do. It’s what I needed to do.

  I didn’t know what Dutch was feeling, but I was miserable. Somewhere out there, Big Kitten was waiting for me to find her. But I was on a leash.

  “Okay, let’s try this, but go slowly. You ready? Let’s go!” Bread Man said.

  I was startled when, with a tug on my rope and a whispery sound, Bread Man was suddenly sliding past us on his long shoes. Dutch and I were both jerked into motion. I tried to stay close enough to Bread Man to keep the leash loose, but Dutch bolted ahead.

  Bread Man fell flat on his face.

  “Hey! Dutch! Stop!” he yelled.

  I went to Bread Man, wagging, and sniffed at his wet face. Clearly the leash wasn’t working out. Clearly he would let us go.

  But he didn’t. After some struggling, Bread Man got back to his feet. He looked at us. Dutch whined. I wagged.

  “This is going to be harder than I thought,” Bread Man told us.

  We kept going. Bread Man flopped down sprawling in Snow Do Your Business a lot, for no good reason that I could see. But we climbed a good way down the hill. Dutch seemed to understand that we were going the same direction as the machines that had taken his person, and he was a little calmer now.

  Soon I smelled Bread Man’s tall friend approaching, and then he appeared on top of a small hill. “Taylor! Over here!” Bread Man called.

  The friend glided down to us, and he and Bread Man talked for a while. Dutch pulled at the leash and whined, restless. I sat and breathed heavily. We’d been walking with difficulty for a while, and I was tired and sad.

  “So,” Bread Man’s friend said slowly. “I can’t help but notice that you have two enormous dogs with you.”

  “Yeah. The mountain rescue people couldn’t take them. So I was thinking…”

  “Oh, no.”

  “Well, they need to be fed. Look at the female—you can see her ribs right through her fur. I thought we could take them home and get them something to eat, and call the hospital to find out what happened to the guy who got buried in the snow. We can’t just take them to an animal shelter until we know what’s going to happen to their owner, right?”

  The friend groaned. He reached into his pack and pulled out a knife and sawed through the rope and now, just like that, Dutch and I each had our own leash! The tall man took Dutch’s. “Right. Okay. Well, the first thing to do is get about two tons of dog down off this mountain.”

  18

  We soon figured out that Bread Man’s name was Gavin, and his tall friend with the dark skin was Taylor. Well, I figured it out. Dutch didn’t really care about anything but getting back with his person.

  We followed them down off the mountain, and then they took us for a long car ride. I did not want to get in the car, but I knew that a good dog went where her leash took her.

  I could not find the scent of Big Kitten on the air. What would Big Kitten do on the mountain by herself, without me to take care of her?

  Worse, I could tell that we were not going toward Go Home. In fact, Go Home was actually behind us, in the other direction.

  Eventually we arrived at a big house with hard floors and several rooms. In one of them there was a hole in the wall filled with pieces of burned wood. I sniffed carefully at them. D
utch ignored them.

  There was a backyard, too. It had a metal fence around it, and inside it there was no Snow Do Your Business and no slide up against the fence, just grass and plants and a tree with no squirrels.

  There was also food. Gavin brought in a big bag that smelled delicious and filled up bowls with it. Dutch did not want to eat his, so I ate it for him.

  I was grateful for the food, but I knew something that these two humans did not seem to understand. They had two dogs in their house, and neither one of us truly wanted to be there.

  At the first chance, I would leave. I would do Go Home to Lucas, and catch up with Big Kitten.

  After I ate up both bowls of food, Gavin and Taylor sat on the floor with me and played a game I did not understand.

  “Molly? Carly? Missy?” they asked me.

  I wagged my tail. Maybe all this attention would come with a treat at the end of it.

  “Daisy? Chloe? Bailey? Blanche?” Gavin asked.

  “Blanche! You’re kidding!” Taylor fell back on the couch and held a pillow to his face, laughing loudly.

  “What?” Gavin demanded.

  “Who would name a dog Blanche? Let’s do this a better way.” Taylor moved to a table and made clicking noises with his fingers on a toy. “Here’s a list of the most popular dog names.”

  “Is Dutch on it?” Gavin wanted to know.

  “Uh … doesn’t look like it. But let’s try.” Taylor looked down at me. I looked up at him, waiting to figure out what he wanted me to do. “Ellie?”

  I stared back. Was Ellie some sort of treat?

  “Max? Bailey?”

  “We tried Bailey,” Gavin objected. “And Max is a boy’s name.”

  “What about Maxine?” Taylor challenged.

  “Molly?” Gavin suggested.

  “Bella?” Taylor asked me.

  I cocked my head. It was the first time either one of them had said my name.

  “Look at that,” Gavin exclaimed. “Bella! Bella!”

  I turned to him. Why was he saying my name?

  “Yes! Wahoo!” Taylor jumped up from the table. “It’s Bella!”

  I couldn’t help myself. I leaped up, too, and when Gavin ran around the table yelling my name, I ran with him, barking. Dutch watched from a pillow on the floor and turned his head away.

  The next day Gavin brought me a new collar and slipped it over my head. It had a tag on it that made a jingling sound.

  Taylor fingered it. “So, wait, you put our phone numbers on it?”

  “Of course! What other number would I use?” Gavin replied.

  “Uh, how about the one on Dutch’s collar?” Taylor suggested.

  “That one’s disconnected,” Gavin pointed out reasonably.

  From that moment, we were Bella and Dutch, two dogs living with Gavin and Taylor, both of us anxious to get back to our real people.

  I waited patiently for my chance to do Go Home, but days and days went by and it didn’t come. The fence in their backyard was high and there was still no slide to help me jump over it. I was taken for many walks, usually at night, but always on the leash.

  Dutch was sad. He spent a lot of time with his nose to the crack under the front door, sniffing and sighing. He did not want to play with me much.

  Sometimes Gavin or Taylor would get down on the floor with Dutch and put their arms around him. “You going to be okay, big guy?” they would ask.

  When they did that, I could feel the knot of pain inside Dutch loosen a little. He was comforted.

  One evening came, though, when both Gavin and Taylor seemed to need comforting. They sat on the couch as Taylor talked on his phone. Then he put the phone down and lowered his head.

  “So what does the guy we dug out of the avalanche say?” Gavin asked.

  “His name’s Kurch,” Taylor answered. “And he’s home from the hospital. His phone’s working again.”

  “What kind of a name is Kurch?”

  “Did I name him? I don’t know. Anyway, I didn’t talk to him. He’s still pretty banged up, I guess. But that was his sister. She didn’t even know he had dogs.”

  I looked up from where I was chewing on a toy near the fireplace. I could feel that it was about to give way under my teeth. Soon I’d have it in shreds, which would mean that I’d won.

  “Yeah?” Gavin asked.

  “Yeah. She says we can bring them by next week if we want to. She didn’t sound all that thrilled about it, but I guess we have to do it.”

  “We do?” Gavin repeated, just a little hopefully.

  “Gavin,” Taylor said, a little sternly. “Of course we have to take the dogs back to this Kurch person. They’re his dogs.”

  Gavin sighed. “Yeah. I know. It’s just…” He looked away.

  They both sat there in the same way that Dutch sat by the door so often. I got up, dropping my toy to the floor, and padded over to them. I put my head in Gavin’s lap because he was sad.

  I liked Gavin and Taylor, even though I’d have to leave them soon. I didn’t want them to be sad, the way Dutch was sad. I sighed, and Gavin rubbed my ears. I could tell he felt a little better.

  “Next week, Bella,” he told me, “we’re going to take you back to your owner.”

  * * *

  After several days went by, something exciting happened. Gavin gave us a breakfast with bacon in it. Bacon!

  Then he and Taylor took us for a long, long walk. After that, a car ride.

  The walk and the bacon were good. But neither Gavin nor Taylor seemed happy. As the car ride stretched on and on, I started to feel uneasy. We weren’t going closer to Lucas; I knew that.

  Then the car turned from a big road onto a little road, and Dutch went stiff. He leaped to his feet and stood, staring out the window as if he could see a squirrel.

  “That’s right. We’re almost there, guys,” Taylor said.

  Gavin sighed, the way he had been doing the whole car ride.

  When we stopped, Dutch pawed at the window and made a low, excited whining noise. Clearly he thought something was happening. What it was, I had no idea.

  When Gavin opened the car door, Dutch shot out and up onto the porch of a small house. Gavin and Taylor and I followed.

  Dutch was squirming and whining beside the door. “It’s okay, Dutch,” Gavin said. He knocked and then pushed the door open a crack. “Hello? Anybody home?”

  Dutch shoved the door all the way open with his nose and charged inside. I looked up at Gavin in confusion. “You’re home, Bella,” he said to me.

  Home? Was he trying to tell me to do Go Home? If that was the case, what were we doing here?

  “Argh! Get down, Dutch!” someone shouted from inside.

  Gavin and Taylor glanced at each other and took me in.

  We found Dutch in a small bedroom, lying on top of a man in a bed, wagging and licking his face. The man had on stiff, thick white pants that were so heavy he could barely move his legs. One arm was covered in the same stiff white material. I never really understood the point of clothes, but these clothes were particularly bewildering. Why would anyone put something on that kept them from moving around?

  “Dutch! Down!” Gavin commanded.

  Dutch dropped reluctantly to the floor.

  “You dumb dog,” the man in the bed said to Dutch, “you trying to put me back in the hospital or something?”

  Gavin stared at him. “He was just glad to see you,” he said. “I’m Gavin. You’re Kurch, right?’

  “Sure,” said the man in the bed.

  “My roommate talked to your sister,” Gavin said. “We brought your dogs back.”

  “Yeah. Hey, Dutch.” The man put one bandaged hand on Dutch’s head. Dutch leaned into the touch, his eyes half closed, and I missed Lucas at that moment more than I had in a long time. “But what do you mean, dogs?” the man went on. “That one’s not mine.”

  Gavin looked at me. I looked back. Car ride? Treat?

  “Not yours?” Taylor repeated. “What do
you mean?”

  “Yeah, never seen that one before,” the man on the bed answered.

  “But … Bella was with Dutch when we got to you. They were both digging for you in the snow. That’s how we found you,” Taylor told him.

  “Huh. Well, must have been a coincidence,” the man said.

  “A what? A coincidence?” Gavin sputtered. “So … Bella isn’t yours?”

  “Nope. No way I can take care of a dog now, anyway. Sorry you came all this way,” the man replied.

  There was a long pause.

  “What are you saying?” Gavin asked slowly.

  “I’m saying I’ve got eleven fractured bones, that’s what I’m saying,” the man said impatiently. He took his hand off Dutch’s head. “Both of my legs are in casts, can’t you see? I can’t even take care of myself, and my sister says she can only stay another few days. I’m saying I can’t handle Dutch. Sorry.”

  “Sorry? You’re sorry?” Gavin demanded. “Dutch is your dog!”

  “So? I was in an avalanche!” the man snapped. Dutch looked up at him nervously.

  “Because you were snowshoeing in an avalanche zone!” Taylor shot back. “Forget it. Forget that. You’re saying you don’t want these dogs. That’s what you’re saying?”

  “How many times do I got to repeat myself, here? I got enough problems as it is.”

  Gavin and Taylor and the man on the bed looked at each other for a long time. Dutch whined for attention. I felt like whining, too.

  Then Gavin looked at Taylor, sort of the way I used to look at Lucas when I wanted a walk or a treat.

  “Fine,” Taylor said, nodding sharply. “Fine. Sorry to bother you, Kurch. Dutch, come.”

  Dutch turned his head toward Taylor. He looked back at the man on the bed.

  The man moved his head to stare at the wall.

  Gavin and Taylor walked out of the room. I went with them. I didn’t like this place very much.

  Dutch took a long time to follow us.

  He kept turning to glance back down the hall. He seemed bewildered.

  We went back out to the car. Gavin and Taylor stood still, gazing at each other.

  Taylor shook his head. “I guess we have two dogs now,” he said. “Two enormous dogs. Just like I don’t remember saying I ever wanted.”