Bella's Story

by W. Bruce Cameron

  The woman reached out toward me with her long metal pole. The wire loop came close to my head.

  I remembered a pole with a loop like that. When it went over my head, it had been a strange, uncomfortable leash that had taken me on a car ride I did not want.

  I knew what to do now. I must get away from the person with this leash. I must not let her touch me, even though she had treats.

  I turned and dashed away in the opposite direction, away from the woman, away from her treats and her strange leash. Ahead of me, two cars had parked right next to each other, with the front bumper of the back car stuck deep into the rear bumper of the one in front.

  I flung myself under the cars, wiggled on my belly, shoved with my back feet, and burst out on the other side, running as fast as I could go.

  Ahead of me was a wooden fence, taller than the metal one I’d jumped over earlier. But I could do it! I could get over this fence, too! I put all my strength into my leap, and I was soaring over it.

  I landed hard on stony ground. The thump hurt all over, from my paws to my tail, but I did not have time to worry about that.

  I flung myself forward, but I felt a worse pain in one rear paw. It was trapped! My foot had slipped into a crack between two rocks and I could not get it out.

  I lunged and tugged at my trapped foot. It hurt so much I whimpered out load.

  “Easy, girl. Easy!” called a voice behind me.

  The woman with the strange leash was struggling over the fence. She got to her feet and walked slowly toward me, holding her leash out toward my face.

  “We don’t want you to hurt yourself,” she said softly. “Just stay still, girl. Just stay still.”

  I could not let that strange leash touch me. I could not let this woman take me away. Not now, not when I was finally so close, so very close, to Go Home.

  I yanked on my trapped foot with all my strength. The woman jumped forward, trying to get me. But it was too late! I yelped with pain as my foot came loose, and the woman stumbled and fell down on one knee as I raced away, down the stony slope, into a small stand of trees, across a much smaller and quieter road, and away. Away from all these cars and people. Toward the town, toward Lucas, toward Go Home.

  My foot hurt every time my weight landed on it, but I did not let that stop me. I would not let anything stop me.

  I was very close now. Soon, soon, I could be Go Home.

  * * *

  It was dusk when I limped into the town at last. There were leaves on the ground, scuttling ahead of me in a light breeze.

  I knew this town was the right one. I knew it was Go Home.

  But where was Lucas?

  I slept under a bench in a park that smelled like children and dogs. That night I had strange dreams. I felt Big Kitten’s rough tongue on my neck where the small bad dog had bitten me. I felt Gavin and Taylor with their arms around me. Dutch groaned with contentment in my ear. I tasted Uncle José’s salty treats and felt Aunt Loretta arrange my Lucas blanket around me.

  It was as if they had all come to tell me goodbye.

  In the morning I woke and shook myself alert. My foot hurt less today, and I could put more weight on it. I found a clear, cold river and drank from it eagerly.

  People walked along a path by the river, and some of them even had dogs on leashes, but I stayed away from them. I had no way to know which ones might try to keep me from getting to Lucas. And I was so close now. I could not let anyone slow me down.

  Behind some buildings I found a bin so overstuffed that the lid was propped open. I tried to knock it over, but had no luck. So I leaped up and thrust my snout under the lip, grabbing at the first thing I touched. It was a sack with nothing to eat inside it. I tried again, and this time I snagged a plastic bag with chicken in it, and also a foil wrapping that had spicy meat and flat bread.

  After I ate I lifted my nose to the air, sniffing carefully. I could smell people, many people. I could smell cars with their combination of metal and smoke and rubber. I could smell squirrels and cats and dogs and clean snow high up in the mountains.

  Somewhere among all these smells was my boy.

  I trotted forward, keeping my nose high into the breeze. The smell of Go Home was starting to separate itself into distinct parts. It was the opposite of what had happened when Audrey drove me away from Lucas. Then, trees and dirt and people and water and houses had all blurred together into one single smell. Now each part of that smell was becoming itself again.

  My legs were getting tired, but when I reached the park where Lucas used to throw the ball up the slide, new energy surged through me. I bounded forward. Children were swinging on the swings and sliding down the slide, and two female dogs raced forward to sniff me. I let them investigate the spot beneath my tail, just to be polite, but I could not stop and play.

  I was almost Go Home.

  23

  Now I ran through the grass, across several streets (one car made a long honking bark at me, but I ignored it), and turned one last corner. Everything around me was familiar now—each tree, each bush, each square of the sidewalk. My nose knew everything I met.

  Except for one thing.

  The house where I had been born, where I had lived with my family and with Mother Cat, was not there. A tall building had taken its place. I could smell many people inside, their scents flowing out of open windows.

  But I had no time to investigate this new building. I was almost there! I had done Go Home!

  I dashed along the sidewalk to my very own porch. I knew I should curl up behind the chair, but it was missing and anyway I was too impatient to be a good dog. I jumped up on my back legs to scratch at the door, wagging and barking. This was no moment for No Barks. Lucas would open the door now. Lucas!

  The door opened. A woman I had never met stood there. Home smells poured out around her. “Hello, dear,” she said to me.

  I wagged, but she was not Lucas. I pushed past her into the house.

  “Oh, my!” she said behind me, but I did not pay attention.

  I could not smell Lucas. I could not smell Mom.

  There was a new couch in the living room instead of the one where Mom had lain so often. The table was different. Lucas’s room did not have a bed in it.

  “What are you doing, sweetheart?” the strange new woman asked when I came back out of Lucas’s room and joined her in the kitchen. “Are you looking for something?” She held out a hand to me.

  I went to her, wagging. Could she explain somehow? Where was Lucas?

  People can do wonderful things, like open doors and fill bowls with food and make cars go for rides and find toys that have vanished under the furniture. I was hoping that this person could fix this problem for me, because it was clearly not something a dog could understand.

  “Whoever you’re looking for isn’t here, sweetie,” the woman said to me.

  I couldn’t understand her words, but I could tell she was not going to help me.

  I felt sick inside.

  Lucas was gone.

  I needed to go outside, to get moving once more. I had not done Go Home right, because Lucas was not here. The point of Go Home was to be where Lucas was.

  I went to the door and sat, waiting for the woman to open it.

  She came over to me and very gently took my chin in her palm. She looked at me carefully. “I have the sense that you came here for a very important reason,” she told me. “But I don’t have anything to do with it, do I?”

  I heard the kindness in her voice and wagged.

  “I hope you find what you’re looking for,” she told me, and she opened the door.

  I dashed outside. But where should I go?

  For so long, I had been doing Go Home. I had known exactly what to do. Even when it had been hard and lonely and hungry, I had kept on. I’d found my way to the right town and the right street and the right door.

  But not the right person.

  What should I do now? Where should I go? I roamed restlessly along the
street, moving from yard to yard. I could not stay still, because I was not Go Home. But I didn’t know where to find it anymore.

  I moved through yards with swings and slides, yards with bushes, yards with trees. Sometimes a person came to a doorway and spoke to me, or someone on a sidewalk held out a hand.

  I ignored them. They were not the right person. There was only one right person—Lucas.

  Where had he gone?

  As I crossed yet another yard, a familiar scent drifted up from the grass at my feet. I put my nose down and sniffed. It had been a long time since I’d had that smell in my nose, but I knew it at once.

  I followed the smell to a space underneath a deck. There were thin strips of wood that kept me from crawling into the darkness under there, but in one spot there was a hollow in the dirt where something small could squirm beneath the slats. I put my nose into the hollow and whined.

  Mother Cat was underneath there. I could smell her. She had found herself a new den.

  I pulled my head back and waited. In a moment she came out, purring, and stretched up to rub her head against my chin.

  She was plumper than she had been when we’d lived together in our old den, and her fur was smoother. But even so, she was so tiny! I did not know how she had gotten herself so small.

  I was still anxious to find Lucas, but the touch and smell of my cat mother was a comfort to me. She had been my second family, and right now she was the only family I could find.

  Mother Cat leapt gracefully up onto the railing of the deck and balanced there, looking down at me. I found some steps so that I could climb up to be with her.

  Now that we were on top of the deck, I could see that it was connected to a house. There was a door made entirely of glass, and near it were a bowl of water and another one with food in it. The smell of humans was on both bowls. I realized that someone was taking care of my mother here at her new den, just as Lucas had fed her at the old one.

  Mother Cat sat and watched me as I gobbled up the moist, fishy food in her bowl. There was not much there, but the few bites I gulped down were delicious. She licked my face after I’d finished. I licked her back, politely, and left her entire head damp from my tongue.

  Then the glass door slid open. A woman stood there. She smelled of flour and sugar. I expected my cat mother to run, but she didn’t. Instead, she went and sat by the bowl, looking up at the woman expectantly.

  Maybe there would be more food soon? I did Sit, too.

  “Daisy? Who is this dog?” the woman asked.

  I wagged at the word dog.

  “Oh, Daisy, this is a stray. She doesn’t even have a collar. Did she eat your food?” The woman frowned at me. “Shoo, dog. You don’t belong here.”

  The woman pointed. She moved her hand quickly through the air, as if she were throwing a ball. I turned my head, but I didn’t see a ball hit the ground. I looked back at the woman.

  “Go home!” she told me.

  I jumped to my feet, suddenly anxious. I had done Go Home! It hadn’t worked!

  “Go!” the woman shouted.

  I could see that she thought I was a bad dog, maybe because I hadn’t done Go Home the way I should have. I slunk off the deck back down to the grass. Mother Cat followed me.

  “Daisy? Kitty-kitty?” the woman called after her. “Daisy, come here!”

  Cats don’t understand the word come. I had noticed that before. Mother Cat did not go toward the woman who had called out come. Instead, she followed me to the next yard, where I found a spot under the bushes to curl up.

  Mother Cat curled up with me and purred, which was comforting. But I still missed Lucas. And I still did not know how to do Go Home anymore.

  In the morning Mother Cat got up and stretched in the grass. I did the same. She trotted off in a new direction, and since I did not know what else to do, I followed her.

  She did not take me back to the deck where there had been food in a bowl. Instead, she took me to another house. This one had a patio of hard brick near the back door. Mother Cat sat beside the door and it opened up. I stayed a little way back, in case the person who opened this door would think I was a bad dog, too.

  “There you are, Princess, right on time,” a man said. He put down a bowl and shut the door.

  Mother Cat put her head down to the bowl. I moved forward and did the same thing. We shared, just like we had done long ago, in the den under the house, before I became Lucas’s dog.

  Then Mother Cat led me to a different house. This time nobody came to the door, but there was crunchy food in a bowl on the front porch.

  This reminded me of the times I had led Big Kitten through the wilderness and we had stopped at all those places with the metal bins full of food. I had led Big Kitten to food then, and Mother Cat was doing the same thing for me now.

  Also, I was beginning to see why Mother Cat was not skinny any longer.

  At the next house, there was another deck. A woman was sitting at a small table with a mug of something hot in her hand. Mother Cat jumped up and I found some stairs, just as I had before. I climbed up the stairs carefully, checking to see if the woman would tell me to Go Home or pretend to throw a ball.

  “Molly, did you find a friend?” the woman asked. She did not get up as I followed Mother Cat to a bowl of damp food that tasted a little bit like chicken. Mother Cat had three bites and I had the rest.

  “Hmmm. You look very hungry,” the woman said quietly.

  She got up, moving slowly. I backed away, in case she would think I was a bad dog because I wasn’t doing Go Home. But she didn’t seem to think so. She just opened a door and went inside, leaving the door open behind her.

  “Want some more?” she called out.

  I heard a can being opened. I heard food plopping into a bowl. These were very good sounds.

  Mother Cat thought so, too, because she went to the door and looked in. I peered over her head. The woman had put a bowl with more food in it on the floor of a kitchen.

  “Come on in,” she told me.

  Food! I trotted in and gulped down everything in the bowl. Then I turned back to look at Mother Cat in the doorway.

  “Molly never comes inside,” the woman told me. “She’s been a stray a long time. She’s nervous around people. You, though—you’re not nervous at all, are you?” Slowly, she reached out to me and scratched my neck. Her hands smelled like chicken. I licked them and let her pet me. It felt good to have human attention, even if the person giving me the attention wasn’t Lucas.

  “What a sweet dog!” the woman said. “But no collar, huh? I think you need some help, baby.”

  Still moving slowly, she got up and shut the door.

  24

  I trotted over to the closed door and scratched at it with one paw. Mother Cat was out there. I wanted to be with her.

  I looked up at Chicken Lady. She could open the door for me. People know how to do things like that.

  But she didn’t. She did give me some more chicken, though, and a bowl full of water.

  “So there’s a really big dog in our kitchen,” a new voice said while I was lapping. I looked up. Another woman was in the doorway, wearing pajamas. She had bare feet.

  I gulped down another drink and went to sniff at her feet. She shuffled back.

  “It’s okay. She’s so friendly,” said Chicken Lady.

  “You think all dogs are friendly,” Pajama Lady said. She reached out a hand to stroke my head lightly. “Sheesh, she’s filthy.”

  “I know. She’s a stray.”

  I was licking Pajama Lady’s toes. They had an interesting taste.

  Pajama Lady giggled. “Okay, I admit that she’s probably not dangerous. But we can’t keep her! You know we can’t have pets in this place. You’re not even supposed to be feeding that cat.”

  “I know.”

  “So you’re going to call animal control?”

  Chicken Lady picked up her phone and, after a moment, talked into it.

  Pajama Lady cooke
d some eggs and ate them and gave me some. Then she cooked some more, just for me, setting them on the floor on a plate. “Well, she looks so hungry,” she said defensively to Chicken Lady.

  Then Pajama Lady put on different clothes and shoes and rushed around picking up things, like a purse and a phone and some jingling keys. She hurried out of the house. Chicken Lady talked on the phone some more and then sat on the floor and talked to me.

  I went to the door a few more times and whined and scratched at it, but she didn’t get the hint.

  After a while, someone knocked at the front door. I did No Barks, but I didn’t get a treat. Chicken Lady went to the door and opened it. I stayed in the kitchen, sniffing at the floor to investigate all the food smells.

  The front door opened. I heard voices talking. A familiar smell gusted into the house and rolled over me.

  I knew that smell! I barreled out of the kitchen, heading straight for the new arrivals.

  Audrey stood at the door, talking to Chicken Lady. Olivia walked inside. Chicken Lady shut the door behind her.

  All of them turned to stare at me as I raced out of the kitchen. Chicken Lady let out a yelp of surprise. Audrey spread her hands wide, ready to grab me.

  I skidded to a stop at Olivia’s feet and jumped up to put my front paws on her. Olivia sat down hard on the floor of the hallway.

  It had been so long since I’d met a person I knew!

  Maybe I’d done Go Home right after all? At least a little?

  I was licking Olivia’s face, nuzzling my nose into her neck, and sniffing up all her good smells. “It’s okay, Mom. It’s okay! She’s friendly!” Olivia kept saying.

  Olivia had a light jacket on over her T-shirt. I stuck my nose inside the jacket. It smelled warm and cozy, and I caught a faint scent on the lining.

  It smelled like Lucas! Olivia had been near Lucas!

  This was so marvelous that I flung myself away from Olivia and raced back to the kitchen and turned around and ran to the hallway again. Olivia had climbed to her feet. I ran into a living room where I skidded on a rug and leaped onto a couch and off it again before I tumbled back into the hallway and sat at Olivia’s feet, panting happily up at her.