A Dog's Purpose (29 page)

I simply could not believe that my purpose in this life was to attack humans. It was beyond unacceptable. The mere thought made me sick.

When Victor was not home I would bark and Lisa would come out and feed me and let me off the chain a little bit, but I never once barked when he was in the house.

The lady on the other side of the fence brought me little pieces of meat, which she poked through the hole. When I caught the meat as it fell through the air, she laughed with real delight, as if I had performed an amazing trick. It seemed the
only purpose I really had, bringing a little bit of joy to a mysterious woman whose face I couldn’t quite see.

“This is a shame, a real shame. They can’t do this to an animal. I’m going to call somebody,” she’d say. I could feel how much she cared about me, though it was strange, because she never came into the yard to play.

One day a truck pulled into the driveway and a woman got out dressed just the way Maya used to dress, so I knew she was a police officer. For a moment it felt as if she had come to fetch me to Find, because she stood at the gate to the backyard and stared at me, writing something down. That didn’t really make sense, though, and when Lisa came outside, her hands on her hips, I lay down. The police officer handed Lisa a piece of paper.

“The dog’s just fine!” Lisa shouted at her, really angry. I sensed the old lady standing behind me, just on the other side of the fence. She was breathing quietly while Lisa raged.

That night Victor yelled about me even more than usual, the word “dog” popping up every few seconds.

“Why don’t we just shoot the damn dog?” he yelled. “Fifty dollars? For what? We’re not doing anything wrong!” Something crashed in the house, a violent noise that made me cower.

“We have to get a longer chain, and clean up all the crap in the yard. Read the ticket!” Lisa shouted back.

“I don’t have to read the ticket! They can’t make us do a damn thing! It’s our property!”

That night, when Victor came out into the yard to urinate, he put his hand out to steady himself against the house and missed, tumbling to the ground. “What are you starin’ at, stupid mutt,” he mumbled at me. “Take care of you tomorrow. Not payin’ any fifty bucks.”

I slunk down low against the fence, not even daring to look back at him.

The next day my focus was distracted by a butterfly who was flittering around in front of my face, so I was startled when Victor suddenly appeared before me.

“You want to go for a car ride?” Victor crooned at me. I didn’t wag at the words; somehow, he made it sound like a threat instead of a treat.
No,
I thought,
I do not want to go for a car ride with you.

“It’ll be fun. See the world,” he said, his laugh turning into a cough that caused him to turn and spit on the ground. He un-clipped my chain from the post and led me to his car, yanking me around to the back of it when I stopped at the door. He inserted his key and the trunk popped open. “In ya go,” he said. I sensed his anticipation and waited for a command I understood. “Hokay,” he said. He reached down and gripped me in the loose skin at the back of my neck and above my tail. There was a quick flash of pain as he hoisted me up and then I was in the trunk, sliding on some greasy papers. He unsnapped my leash and let it pool on the floor in front of me. The lid slammed down, and I was in near-total darkness.

I was lying on some smelly, oily rags that reminded me of the night of the fire, when Ethan hurt his legs, and some cold metal tools, so it was hard to get comfortable. One of the tools was easily identifiable as a gun; the acrid fragrance was unmistakable. I turned away from it, trying to ignore the sharp smells.

I lay in a half crouch, my nails extended in a hopeless attempt to keep from slipping from one side to the other in the narrow trunk as the car bounced and swayed.

It was the strangest car ride I’d ever had, and the only one I could remember that wasn’t any fun. Still, car rides always
resulted in a new place, and new places were always fun to explore. Maybe there would be other dogs, or maybe I was going back to live with Wendi.

The cramped, dark space soon became quite warm, and I found myself thinking of the room I’d been placed in with Spike, back when my name was Toby and I was taken from the senora. I hadn’t thought about that scary moment in a long time. So much had happened since then. I was a completely different dog now, a good dog who had saved people.

After I spent a long, miserable time in that trunk, the car began to vibrate and ping and dust rose up in the air, a thick, choking cloud. I sneezed, shaking my head. Then the car braked to a sudden halt, sending me crashing against the inside of the trunk. The motor didn’t shut off, though, and we sat for a minute.

Oddly, as soon as we stopped, I could sense Victor inside the car on the other side of the trunk, feel his presence. I had the distinct sense that he was trying to make up his mind about something—there was a feeling of indecisiveness. Then he said something sharply, a word that was muffled, and I heard the front door open. Victor’s feet crunched on gravel as he came around to where I lay cringing, and I smelled him before the trunk popped open and cool air whooshed in around me.

He stared down at me. Blinking, I raised my eyes to his, then looked away so he wouldn’t think I was challenging him.

“All right.” He reached down and twisted at my collar. I expected him to attach my leash, so I was surprised when the collar itself fell away, leaving behind it an odd sensation, as if I were still wearing a collar, only one light as air. “Get on out of there, now.”

My legs were cramped as I stood up. I recognized his hand gestures and jumped out of the car, landing awkwardly. We
were on a dirt road, long green grass waving in the sun from both shoulders. Grit from the road painted the insides of my nose and settled on my tongue. I lifted my leg, looking over at him. What now?

Victor got back in his car and the engine made a loud noise. I stared at him in confusion as his tires bit at the road, spitting rocks. He turned the car around, pointing it in the opposite direction. Then he rolled down his window.

“I’m doing you a favor. You’re free, now. Go catch some rabbits or somethin’.” He grinned at me and took off, the car kicking up a huge cloud of dirt behind it.

Baffled, I watched it go. What sort of game was this? Hesitantly, I followed, easily tracking the dust as it drifted through the air.

I knew from my many years of Find that I was quickly losing the scent—Victor must be driving very fast. I gamely picked up the pace, no longer following the dust cloud but focusing instead on the signature smells from the back of his car, where I’d just spent so much time.

I was able to track him when he turned onto a paved road, but when another turn took me to a highway, with cars flashing past at amazing speeds, I knew I’d lost him. So many cars were whizzing by, each one with smells similar to (though not exactly like) Victor’s. Picking out the one scent on which I was doing Find was impossible.

The highway was intimidating; I turned from it and headed back the direction I’d come. With nothing else to do I backtracked along the same scent trail, now faint in the late afternoon breezes. When I came to the dirt road, though, I passed it and kept heading aimlessly up the pavement.

I remembered when I used the trick my very first mother had
taught me and escaped from the kennel when I was a puppy the second time, how it seemed like such an adventure to run out in the open, free and full of life. Then the man found me and named me Fella, and then Mom came and took me to Ethan.

This was nothing like that. I didn’t feel free; I didn’t feel full of life. I felt guilty and sad. I had no purpose, no direction. I would not be able to make my way home from here. It was like when Colonel turned away from me, the day Derek took me to live with Wendi—though no feelings came from Colonel, it was nonetheless good-bye. Victor had just done the same thing, except he had handed me to nobody.

The dust and heat made me pant, my thirst itching at my mouth. When I picked up the faint scent of water, it was the most natural thing in the world to turn in that direction, leaving the road and walking through high grasses that tossed themselves back and forth in the breeze.

The smell of water grew stronger, more tantalizing, drawing me through a stand of trees and down a steep bank to a river. I waded in to my chest, biting at the water, lapping it up. It felt glorious.

With my urgent thirst no longer my only concern, I allowed myself to open my senses to my surroundings. The river filled my nose with its wonderful damp smell, and along with the gurgle of the waters I could hear, very faintly, a duck squawking over some imagined outrage. I padded along the bank, my feet sinking into the soft soil.

And then it came to me with such a jolt I lifted my head in surprise, my eyes wide open.

I knew where I was.

Along, long time ago I had stood on the banks of this very river, perhaps on this very spot, when Ethan and I had gone for our long walk after Flare, the dumb horse, abandoned us. The scent was unmistakable—doing Find all those years had taught me how to separate out odors, categorize and store them in memory, so that now I could instantly remember this place. It helped that it was summer, the same time of year, and that I was young and my nose so sharp.

I couldn’t possibly fathom how Victor might have known this, or what it meant that he had released me so that I would find the place. I had no sense as to what he wanted me to do. Lacking any better idea, I turned downstream and started trotting, retracing the very same steps Ethan and I had taken, those many years ago.

By the end of the day I was hungrier than I could remember ever being, so hungry my stomach cramped. Wistfully I thought of the old woman’s pale hand poking through the fence and dropping little pieces of meat for me to snatch out of midair; the memory made me drool. The riverbank was choked with vegetation and made for slow going, and it seemed that the hungrier I became, the less certain I was of my course of action. Was this really what I should do, follow this stream? Why?

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.