DogTown (19 page)

Dr. Mike gave the go-ahead to have Bruno placed in the “geriatric run” at Old Friends. Bruno would share an “apartment” with the five oldest dogs at Dogtown, all of whom shared his mellow temperament. Each apartment had a comfortable indoor room, a dog door, and an outdoor run. For now, it was home at last.

Dog trainer Ann Allums helped introduce Bruno to each of his new geriatric roommates one by one, so he wouldn’t be overwhelmed. The first dog, Kanani, was a splendid female husky. As soon as he saw her, Bruno instantly perked up, wagging his tail and following her around like a small boy with his first crush. But Kanani haughtily spurned Bruno’s advances.

Next he was introduced to a spunky little male terrier named Mr. Pepper. Jeff, who was watching all this, noticed that Bruno got “all stiff and macho, like a guy walking into a bar” when he was introduced to Mr. Pepper and the other male dogs—a cocker spaniel named Quasimodo, and Clarence, a blind border collie. But when he was introduced to another female, a sweet-tempered shepherd mix named Chili, Bruno went on high alert again, wagging his tail and bird-dogging her around the kennel.

Sly old Bruno, it turned out, was quite the ladies’ man.

When Ann posted a note about Bruno’s move to Old Friends on the Guardian Angel site, more adoring fan mail came pouring in. Bruno was becoming a kind of canine rock star:

Jeff, keeping track of the old boy each day, noticed glimmers of improvement. Bruno’s back end, once listing like an old barn, seemed a little bit more stable. The pneumonia had cleared up. And he was peeing more regularly—“and everybody is kind of happy about that one.”

Ever the optimist, Jeff kept hoping someone would appear at the sanctuary, or see Bruno’s picture online, and decide to adopt him.

“Now that he’s out there in his run, all it takes is one person to come by and fall in love with that guy and take him home,” he said. “It’s got to be somebody who is OK having to say goodbye in a year or two, but there are people like that all over the place. I haven’t seen anything about Bruno that says he’s not adoptable. Of course, I’ve never met a dog that’s not adoptable either. I’m still optimistic—I always am. I think he’s gonna be OK.”

A TURN FOR THE WORSE

Unfortunately, Bruno’s health began failing again not long after he arrived at Old Friends. The vomiting returned. Increasingly dizzy and disoriented, Bruno began to bump into things more than he had before. Dr. Mike decided to move him back to the clinic for observation.

Even so, in the mere week he had been at Old Friends, the sweet-faced cinnamon bear charmed a couple of volunteers to the point that they put in an adoption application for him. They wanted to take him back to their home in Montana. Now the question became: Could Bruno be stabilized enough to make the ten-hour trip to Montana? Dr. Mike had some serious concerns about the long car trip; it seemed to him that the trip from Los Angeles to Kanab might have played a part in Bruno’s decline upon his arrival at Best Friends. The vet wanted to play it safe and monitor Bruno’s condition for a little longer before discharging him into a new home.

At the clinic, Bruno’s condition seemed to improve for a couple of days. Still, “improvement” was relative; he threw up only twice in a couple of days, which was less frequently than he had been throwing up at Old Friends. Then he genuinely did seem to improve, going four straight days without vomiting.

But the hard truth was that Dr. Mike and the veterinary staff had been unable to precisely pinpoint the cause of Bruno’s problems, so they had no way of knowing whether Bruno would live a few more hours, a few more days, or a few more years. Dr. Mike believed Bruno was now probably a good candidate for animal hospice—caregivers who would simply ease his pain as he gradually slipped away.

When Dr. Mike posted Bruno’s medical updates online, Bruno’s fan club enthusiasm seemed to be swelling into a standing ovation:

Bruno enjoyed life at Old Friends, Dogtown’s unit for senior residents, until his health worsened and he returned to the clinic.

Still, as Dr. Mike’s wife, Elissa Jones, wrote in a posting on the site, “Life in a cage isn’t much of a life, so we decided to take him home and foster him. Doing that would get Bruno out of a cage and out of the heat. We’d be able to make him as comfortable as possible and he’d have a veterinarian at his beck and call.” Part of their decision was to assess how Bruno would do in a home and see if the trip to Montana was really an option for him.

The Jones-Dix household was essentially two human lives entangled in the lives of a menagerie of dogs and cats rescued from various heartrending plights. “How’d we get all these animals? Just happened,” Dr. Mike said, looking around at the cats walking across the counter.

Since Nadine had already told them that Bruno got along well with dogs and cats, Dr. Mike and Elissa were not surprised when the big puffy-lion dog effortlessly slipped into their household. They set Bruno up in his own room with a dog bed and a baby gate, so he could have a quiet space away from the rest of the dogs.

But the 20-mile drive to their house from Best Friends, in the desert heat of June, was difficult for him, and when he got “home” he paced restlessly, bumping into things and breathing with difficulty. Both Dr. Mike and Elissa worried that Bruno might not even make it through the night. Mike put food in a dish elevated a few feet off the floor, but Bruno struggled to eat, a long necklace of drool suspended from his mouth. Most of the time he lay on his bed, a big red half-naked lion-bear, not lifting his head or moving much. It was becoming clear that the ten-hour drive to Montana would probably be too stressful to Bruno’s system.

The next day, Bruno seemed to be feeling better. Elissa gave him tiny meals, three times a day, with only a little water, to keep him from vomiting. He was now on multiple medications—anti-inflammatory steroids and drugs for motion sickness and pain. Elissa and Dr. Mike took him for a very short walk, and he seemed to perk up a bit.

Still, Dr. Mike said, “We worry if this is the right thing for him—or are we just keeping him alive for the sake of keeping him alive?”

The hours passed. Bruno seemed to get more and more disoriented, circling aimlessly, occasionally vomiting. The majesty of his bloodline, the Mongolian horse warriors and Chinese noblemen who loved and revered his breed—all that seemed a million miles away. Now the sweet lion-dog was just a shadow of himself, thumping into a door and standing there dumbly, drooling.

Then there was a surprise. Elissa wrote in her post that Bruno “tricked us into having three really great days.” He stopped vomiting. He stopped bumping into things. He approached Elissa and Dr. Mike to be petted, and seemed to really see them. True to form, Bruno even “developed a crush on our elderly female Dalmatian, Dottie, and we took them on several short walks together where they took turns sniffing each other and marking things.” Elissa and Dr. Mike began to think Bruno might actually recover enough to make the trip to a new home in Montana. If that didn’t work, they decided that their home would be Bruno’s last one, “and we told him that, in case he understood,” Elissa wrote.

Bruno didn’t do well in the heat, so they limited his walks to nighttime or early morning, when it was coolest. Then, on Friday night, Bruno inexplicably began to spiral downward again. He seemed to be having trouble breathing. He also began to show possible signs of bloat, an abdominal swelling caused by gas or swallowing air. Dr.

Mike knew that the only real treatment for bloat was abdominal surgery, and there was no way old Bruno could withstand that. Dr. Mike made the merciful decision to put Bruno to sleep to end the old boy’s suffering.

“We spent time with Bruno petting him and talking to him and assuring him that he was loved as we helped him to ease over the Rainbow Bridge,” Elissa wrote, referring to a place “just this side of heaven” where companion animals are said to go when they die, and across which they can communicate with their human companions.

And not long after that, the old cinnamon bear shed his tumble-down body and all his pain and passed over the Rainbow Bridge. He stopped breathing. His body grew still. It was over.

“I don’t know what Bruno was like in his prime,” Elissa wrote. “I don’t know what happened in Bruno’s life before he ended up on death row in a shelter for being old and ‘unwanted.’ I do know that blessings surrounded him after that…. At the end, he was in a home, surrounded by love. Those who spent time with Bruno felt blessed to be with him. I know that I did.”

Elissa’s account of Bruno’s last days brought an outpouring of grief from those who had followed his story on the Guardian Angel website:

SAYING GOODBYE TO BRUNO

Lenny Domyan is the caretaker at Angels Rest cemetery, just a short distance up the road from Dogtown. With brawny forearms illustrated with tattoos, Lenny is an older man whose white goatee gives him a slight resemblance to Colonel Sanders. He has done many “placements” at Angels Rest, where there are thousands of other graves, all marked with the names of cherished companion animals—dogs, cats, horses, birds, rabbits, potbellied pigs: Magic, Apollo, Eclipse, Bobby Magee, Woofie, Two Bits, Goldfinger, Hercules, Cookie Monster, Rocco, Rex, Chew-bacca, Lilly, Tico, Sundance….

Lenny lowered the tailgate of his pickup truck, where Bruno’s body lay, covered with a white sheet. He ran his hand softly over the startlingly inert form.

“Not to worry now, honey,” he said, in a surprisingly gentle voice for such a big man. With a black magic marker, he wrote “BRUNO” on Bruno’s green, now empty collar. Then he picked up Bruno’s shroud-wrapped body, holding it against his chest, and walked toward the freshly dug grave. The body, and the grave, were the size of a child.

Bruno’s green collar rests on his marker at Angel’s Rest, the animal cemetery at Best Friends.