I was a dog who had learned to live among and serve humans as my sole purpose in life. Now, cut off from them, I was adrift. I had no purpose, no destiny, no hope. Anyone spotting me slinking along the shores at that moment might mistake me for my timid, furtive first mother—that’s how far back Victor’s abandonment had thrown me.
A giant tree that had snapped during the winter and fallen by the water formed a natural hollow on the bank, and as the sun faded from the sky I climbed into this dark place, sore and exhausted and completely puzzled by the changes in my life.
My hunger woke me the next morning, but lifting my nose into the air brought me nothing but the smells of the river and the surrounding forest. I followed the flow of water downstream because I had nothing better to do, but I was moving more slowly than the day before, hobbled by the empty ache in my belly. I thought of the dead fish that sometimes washed up at the pond—why had I merely rolled in them? Why hadn’t I eaten them when I had the chance? A dead fish now would be heavenly, but the river yielded nothing edible.
So miserable was I that when the rough bank gave way to a footpath redolent with the scent of humans I hardly noticed. I ambled lethargically along, only halting when the path rose steeply and joined a road.
The road led to a bridge over the river. I raised my head, the fog lifting from my mind. Sniffing excitedly, I realized I had been here before. Ethan and I had been picked up by a policeman on this very spot and taken for a car ride back to the Farm!
Many years had obviously passed—some small trees I remembered marking at one end of the bridge had grown to be towering giants, so I marked them again. And the rotting planks on the bridge had been replaced. But otherwise, the smells were exactly the same as I remembered.
An automobile rattled by as I stood on the bridge. It honked at me and I flinched back from it. After a minute, though, I hesitantly followed it, abandoning the river for the road ahead.
I had no idea where to go now, but something told me that if I went in this direction, I would eventually arrive in town. Where there was a town there were people, and where there were people there was food.
When the road joined another, the same inner sense told me to turn right, and I did so, though I shrank guiltily away when I sensed a car coming, sliding into the high grasses. I felt like a bad dog, and my hunger only enforced this belief.
I passed many houses, most of them set far back from the road, and often dogs would bark at me, upset by my trespass. Around nightfall, I was slinking past a place with a dog smell when the side door opened and a man stepped out. “Dinner, Leo? Want dinner?” he asked, his voice carrying that deliberate excitement people use when they want to make sure a dog knows something good is happening. A metal bowl was dropped with a loud clang on the top step of a short set of stairs.
The word “dinner” arrested me in my tracks. I stood riveted as a squat dog with enormous jaws and a thick body eased down the steps and did his business a few feet into the yard. The way he moved suggested he was an old dog, and he didn’t smell me. He went back and nosed around in his bowl a little, then reached up and scratched the door. After a minute, it opened back up.
“Are you sure, Leo? Are you sure you can’t eat anything?” the man asked. There was a sadness in his voice that reminded me of the way Al cried in the yard, that last day I spent with him and Maya. “Okay, then. Come on in, Leo.”
The dog groaned but couldn’t seem to pull his back legs up the last step, so with tender gentleness the man bent and picked the dog up, carrying him inside.
I felt myself powerfully drawn to the man and was struck with the sudden thought that this could be a home for me. The man loved his dog, Leo, and would love me. He would feed me, and when I was old and weak he would carry me back inside his home. Even if I didn’t do Find or school or any other work at all, if all I did was devote myself to the man in the house, I would have a place to live. This crazy, purposeless life I had led as Bear would be over.
I approached the house and did the sensible thing: I ate Leo’s dinner. After the weeks of tasteless, gritty dog food at Lisa and Victor’s home, the succulent, meaty meal in Leo’s bowl was the best thing I’d ever tasted. When it was gone I licked the metal, and the clang of the bowl against the side of the house alerted the dog inside, who woofed warningly. I heard him approach his side of the door, wheezing, a low growl mounting in volume as Leo became more sure I was there.
It didn’t sound as if Leo would be very receptive to the idea of me living in his house.
I bolted off the steps, so that by the time the light flicked on to illuminate the yard I was already back in the trees. The message in Leo’s hostile growl was clear; I would have to find my own home. And that was okay—with my hunger sated, my longing to live here had gone away.
I slept in some tall grasses, tired but much more content, my stomach full.
I was hungry again by the time I found town, but I knew it was the right place. The approach fooled me; I passed so many houses, their streets bustling with cars and children, where my memory told me there should have been only fields. But then I came upon the place where Grandpa used to sit with his friends and spit vile juices out of his mouth, and it smelled the same, though there were sheets of old wood over the windows and the building next to it was gone, replaced by a raw, muddy hole. At the bottom of the hole was a machine that pushed great piles of dirt in front of it as it moved.
Humans can do that, take down old buildings and put up new ones, the way Grandpa built a new barn. They alter their environment to suit themselves, and all dogs can do is accompany them and, if they’re lucky, go for car rides. The volume of noise and all the new smells told me that humans here had been very busy changing their town.
Several people stared at me as I trotted down the street, and each time I felt like a bad dog. I had no real purpose, now that I was here. A bag of trash had fallen out of a big metal bin, and it was with a huge sense of guilt that I tore the bag open and pulled out a piece of meat covered in a sticky, sweet sauce of some kind. Rather than eat the meal right there, I ran behind the metal bin, hiding from people just as my first mother had taught me.
My wanderings eventually brought me to the dog park. I sat at the edge, under some trees, and watched enviously as people threw soaring disks for their dogs to catch in the air. I felt naked without a collar and realized I should hang back, but the way the dogs were wrestling in the middle of the big yard drew me like a magnet, and before I could stop myself I was out there with them, rolling and running and forgetting myself in the sheer joy of being a dog at play.
Some dogs didn’t come out to wrestle; they stayed with their people or sniffed along the perimeter of the park, pretending that they didn’t care how much fun we were having. Some dogs were drawn to tossed balls or flying disks, and all of them eventually were called away by their people and given car rides. All except me, but none of the people seemed to notice or care that I didn’t have anyone there with me.
Toward the end of the day, a woman brought a big female yellow dog to the park and let her off the leash. By this time I was exhausted from all the play and was just lying in the yard, panting, watching two other dogs wrestle. The yellow dog excitedly joined them, interrupting the play for sniffing and tail wagging. I lurched to my feet and went to greet this new arrival and was shocked by what I smelled along her fur.
It was Hannah. The girl.
The yellow dog grew impatient with my feverish examination of her scent and spun away, eager to play, but I ignored her inviting bow. I excitedly dashed across the park to the dog’s owner.
The woman on the bench was not Hannah, though she, too, carried Hannah’s smell. “Hello, doggy, how are you?” she greeted me as I approached, my tail wagging. The way she sat reminded me of Maya, shortly before Gabriella the baby arrived. There was a sense of tiredness, excitement, impatience, and discomfort, all mixed together and focused on the belly just below her hands. I thrust my nose at her, drinking in Hannah�
�s scent, separating it from the woman, from the happy yellow dog, from the dozens of odors that clung to a person and were a jumble to a dog not trained in Find. This was a woman who had spent time with the girl very recently; I was sure of it.
The yellow dog came over, friendly but a bit jealous, and I finally allowed myself to be drawn into a tussle.
That night I folded my black body into the shadows, watching alertly as the last cars pulled out of the parking lot, leaving the dog park in silence. My stealth came to me so easily it was as if I’d never been taken from the culvert, as if I were still there with Sister and Fast and Hungry, learning from our first mother. Hunting was easy; trash cans were brimming with containers full of delicious scraps, and I avoided headlights and pedestrians with equal caution, hidden, dark, feral once more.
But there was a purpose to my life, now, a sense of direction even more powerful than the one that had brought me to town in the first place.
If, despite all the time and changes, the girl Hannah was here, then maybe the boy was here, too.
And if Ethan was still here, I would track him. I would Find Ethan.
{ TWENTY-NINE }
After more than a week, I was still living in the dog park. Most days the woman with Hannah’s scent would bring her happy yellow canine—Carly was the dog’s name—to the park. The smell of the girl reassured me, somehow, made me feel that Ethan was nearby, though Carly never had the boy’s smell on her fur, not once. Seeing the woman and Carly always brought me racing joyously out from the bushes; it was the high point of my day.
Otherwise, I was a bad dog. Regulars to the park were starting to act suspicious toward me, staring at me and radiating caution as they pointed at me and spoke to each other. I no longer approached their dogs for play.
“Hey there, fella. Where’s your collar? Who are you here with?” a man asked me, reaching out with gentle hands. I danced back from him, sensing his intention to grab me and not trusting the name Fella. That’s when I felt the deep suspicion in him and realized my first mother had been right all along—to remain free, one had to steer clear of people.
My thought was to find the Farm the way I’d found the town, but that proved more difficult than I would have supposed. Whenever I’d gone for a car ride to town with Ethan or Grandpa, I’d always used the smell of the goat ranch as my point of reference, a beacon for my nose. But all traces of the goats had mysteriously vanished from the air. Also vanished was the bridge whose rattle signaled the divide between car ride and car ride in town—I couldn’t find the place at all, not by smell, nor by any other sense. Padding along quiet streets after dark, I’d be confident of my direction, and then a large building would block both my path and my nose with the smells of hundreds of people and dozens of cars. A fountain of water in front of the place added even more confusion to the air, the mist carrying with it a faint chemical smell, like when Maya washed clothes. I lifted my leg against the thing, but that provided only momentary comfort.
At night, my black fur felt like protection from discovery. I melted into shadows, hiding from cars, emerging when there was no one around, always on Find, always concentrating on what I could remember about the Farm and its scent when I breathed in the night air. Frustratingly, I couldn’t pick up a trace of anything.
Meals came from trash cans and the occasional dead animal by the side of the road—rabbits were best, crows the worst. I had competition: an animal the size of a small dog, with a very heavy scent, thick, bushy tail, and dark black eyes, prowled the bins, adroitly climbing up their sides. Whenever I encountered one of these things it snarled at me and I gave it a wide berth, seeing nothing in those teeth and claws but an invitation to pain. Whatever they were, they were obviously too stupid to realize I was much bigger and that they should be afraid of me.
Also stupid were the squirrels in the park, who descended from their trees and bounced around in the grass as if the entire area weren’t protected by dogs! I had come very close to catching one, except they always darted up trees and then sat up there complaining. Carly the yellow dog often joined me in the hunt, but even together we were thus far unsuccessful. I knew if we kept trying, one day we’d capture one, though I wasn’t sure exactly what we would do then.
“What’s the matter, honey? Why are you so skinny? Don’t you have a home?” Carly’s owner asked me. I picked up the concern in her voice and wagged my tail, wishing she would just take me for a car ride and drop me off at the Farm. When she stood up off the bench, struggling to get to her feet, I sensed a hesitation in her, as if she was going to invite me to walk with them. I knew it would be okay with Carly, who always ran out into the dog park looking specifically for me, but I pulled away from the woman’s magnetic concern, acting as if I had someone nearby who loved me and was calling me. I trotted a dozen yards away before I stopped and glanced behind me—she was still watching me, one hand on her hip, the other hand resting on her stomach.
That afternoon a truck pulled into the parking lot with such a strong dog smell I instantly picked it up from where I lay in the grass at the edge of the park. A policeman got out and chatted with a few dog owners, who pointed at various places in the park. The policeman pulled out a long pole with a noose on the end, and I felt a chill go through me. I knew exactly who that pole was for.
The policeman walked around the edges of the park, gingerly peering into the bushes, but by the time he approached my hiding place I was gone, deep in the woods that lay beyond the park.
My panic kept me running; when the woods petered out into a neighborhood filled with dogs and children, I avoided human contact and did my best to stay in the foliage. I was far from town when I finally doubled back, taking comfort in the fact that my ally, darkness, was descending from the sky.
When the smell of dozens of dogs drifted toward me, I turned in that direction, curious. A volley of barking was coming from the back of a large building, a couple of dogs in cages howling at each other. A shift in the wind and they were barking at me, the timbre in their voices changing.
I had been here before: this was where the nice man the vet took care of me when I was Bailey. It was, in fact, the very last place I had ever been with Ethan. I decided to give the place a wide berth. I scooted around to the front of the building, and as I crossed the driveway I stopped dead, quivering.
When I was Bailey, a new baby donkey named Jasper had joined old, unreliable Flare in the yard one day. Jasper grew up to be much smaller than a horse but was built along similar lines, and he made Grandpa laugh and Grandma shake her head. I’d been nose-to-nose with Jasper; I’d sniffed him carefully when Grandpa brushed him; I’d played with him as best as I could. I knew Jasper’s smell like I knew the Farm, and there was no mistaking that scent now, right here in the driveway. Tracking back toward the building, I could find a concentrated area in the parking lot where the scent was overwhelming and fresh—there was even a dusting of straw and dirt with Jasper painted all over it, lying thick in the gravel.
The dogs were still baying at me, outraged that I was free while they were penned, but I ignored the racket. Drinking in the rich mixture of smells in the dirt, I trailed down the driveway and out onto the road.
The first time a car rushed up behind me, honking as its lights played out into the night, I was startled, so focused was I on following Jasper’s scent. I veered into the ditch by the side of the road, cringing from the accusatory wail of the car as it sailed past.
After that, I was more careful. While I was focused on Jasper, my ears were aware of the sounds of automobiles, and I slunk away from them long before their lights picked me up.
Though the track was long, it was easier than Find Wally—for more than an hour I traced in a straight line, finally making a left turn, and then another. Jasper’s scent was weaker the farther I went, which meant I was trailing him backward and that there was a danger I might lose him altogether. But after a right turn I no longer needed the scent; I knew where I was. Right here was where the
train crossed the road, the train that had stopped Ethan’s car the first day he left to do college. I picked up the pace, Jasper’s scent validating the instinctive turn I took to the right. Soon I was passing Hannah’s house, which curiously emitted no scent of the girl herself, though the trees and the moss-covered brick wall by the road were still the same.
Turning up the driveway to the Farm was such a natural move it felt as if I had just been there yesterday.
Jasper’s smell tracked right up to a large white trailer, a pile of grit and hay beneath it. His odors were painted everywhere and there was a new horse watching me with drowsy suspicion as I sniffed along the fence, but I was no longer interested in horses. Ethan, I could smell Ethan; he was everywhere. The boy must still live on the Farm!
Never before in my entire existence had I felt the joyous excitement that coursed through me then: I was dizzy with it.
The lights were on in the house, and as I circled around to the side, staying on the small grassy hill, I could see through the window into the living room. A man Grandpa’s age sat in a chair, watching television, but he didn’t look like Grandpa. Ethan was not in the room, nor was anyone else.
The dog door was still there in the outer metal door, but the big wooden door on the inside was firmly shut. Frustrated, I scratched at the metal door, then barked.
I heard vibrations within the house as someone approached. My tail was wagging so hard I couldn’t sit down; it pulled my whole body back and forth. The light blinked on overhead, and the wooden door made a familiar scratching sound before it eased open. The man I’d seen sitting in the chair stood on the threshold, frowning down at me through the glass.
I scratched again at the metal; I wanted him to let me in so I could run in and be with the boy.
A Dog's Purpose Page 22