The Mountaintop School for Dogs and Other Second Chances (5 page)

“She'd be sent to the jail, and you know it,” said the woman at the table. “And you know what a soft spot I have for the huge ones. It was a miracle I noticed what she was up to and took it away from her before she started on the blade.”

I stopped listening. I did that with sugar? Tasha ate a food processor? The Sanctuary had a jail? I was being accused of looking down on
other people?

I turned away from the kitchen. I was wearing my new L. L. Bean fleece-lined moccasin slippers, so I was able to slink away shadow-quiet. My head was low. I didn't know that the boy from the Jeep was in the lobby until I almost collided with him. He was dressed for outdoors, in that ranger jacket. On the chest was the insignia of the Sanctuary. The small white dog made of stars was eye level with me.

When I'd talked to him before, in the vehicle, I hadn't noticed how tall and broad he was. I definitely noticed now. I wanted him to leave me alone.

“I was hoping you'd be up,” he said.

“I'm not up. I'm the opposite. I'm going to my room. I don't want to be—”

He interrupted me in a not unfriendly way. “Wait. Can I ask you a question?”

Something was sweet about him, I thought, in a
Lord of the Rings,
hobbity way, regardless of his size. Something about him felt safe.

“Okay. Ask me a question.”

“Can you walk on snowshoes?”

I was quick to answer yes, because what could be hard about walking on snowshoes? Did I need to pack? Was I finally going where I was supposed to go, where I'd paid to be?

No, I didn't need to pack. I just needed to dress warmly. I felt I'd go anywhere with him. Otherwise, I'd be up in the bunkroom with a phone that didn't work, trying to call the world I'd left behind even though I didn't really want to be there either, and I'd be crying.

And twenty minutes later I was flat on the ground out in front of the inn, with my arms out, like I was making a snow angel, but being unclear on the concept, I was doing it face-down. The snow was so deep, the walls of it around me began to cave in, which meant I was getting buried.

The snowshoes the boy lent me had not fallen off. I'd felt so proud of myself for figuring out how to put them on, and now all I wanted to do was get rid of them so I could stand up. The boy seemed to read my mind. I was aware of him squatting by my feet, reaching down to undo the clamps. It was complicated. The snowshoes had crisscrossed each other in my fall. I was as good as caught in a snare, and it didn't help that my companion appeared to be happy.

He was saying, “Oh, my God, this is awesomely, stupendously perfect.”

In the moment before he got me released, he threw out his voice at full volume, so that even the echoes were loud, and in turn made other echoes, zooming around like invisible pinballs.

“Tasha!” he cried. “Come! Come find!”

He wasn't taking off the snowshoes to be my friend. He was taking them off so there wouldn't be anything poking up telltale in my chamber of all that snow. I heard a deep bark from somewhere nearby, then silence, until he called out again.

“Tasha! Come right now and find! You
come!
”

But nothing was happening except that my face had gone numb, and I'd crossed the line from feeling cold to feeling frozen. I stood up and shook myself off.

“Sorry about this,” said the boy.

“That's okay.”

“No, I mean I really am sorry.”

“And I mean it's really okay.”

I hardly knew Tasha, but I could tell she'd never be useful as a search dog. Together, the boy and I turned to look at her in that shine of white and light, so unreal to me, and so beautiful, I felt we were seeing the light of a star that wasn't ours to begin with, like we were astronauts, in our parkas and hoods and boots and thick gloves, and we were standing on a faraway planet that happened to have an old inn with a kitchen, where a snowbank made a window low enough to look inside.

Tasha was up on her back legs, with her paws on the sill. If I didn't know she was a dog, I'd think she was a young, hungry bear. Her face was close to the glass. Her tongue was extended. She was a Rottweiler with a tail, and I remembered, from the breed book:
In order to conform to standards of the American Kennel Club, breeders have the tails of Rottweilers “docked” in the first few days after birth, with variations on size of the stump.
Docking has been banned in many countries, but not in the United States.
For Rottweilers not intended for show, docking is still advised. These are highly emotional animals and notorious tail-swingers. Owners of undocked “Rotties” frequently cry “ouch!” when being brushed in the legs by their pet, not to mention the pain of losses when objects are swept off a coffee table!

Docking is a way to say amputate without saying it. I wondered if Tasha's owner pushed her out of that car because she'd knocked a vase off a table. I wondered if, given the choice, Tasha would pick everything that happened to her over being docked.

“I have a tail!” she was saying at the window. It was a black, thick pendulum going back and forth in hyperdrive. She knew it was baking day. The steam of her breath was on the glass, along with rain-like streamers of drool.

They wouldn't be letting her into that kitchen. She didn't know that yet. I wished I could mind-message her. You're on the outs, I wanted to tell her. And believe me, I know how you feel.

Meanwhile, I had to get inside to pee, but I realized I didn't know the boy's name. So I asked him.

“On the mountain they call me Giant George,” he answered. “In case you don't know, that's the name of the dog who used to be the biggest one in the world. Somebody else topped him a little while ago, but he used to be
king.
He set a Guinness record. He went on
Oprah.
He's a Newfie and he's totally famous.”

“I knew that,” I said. “Wait for me here. I'll be right back. I have a ton of questions for you.”

I wasn't surprised about the name. Something was Newfie-ish about him, combined with hobbity. I was feeling a little glow as I plowed my way forward, quoting to myself about Newfies.
Besides their size, Newfoundlands are
notable for their loyalty, the value they place on companionship, and their gentle, caring, easygoing natures.

“Hey, Evie!”

He had waited until I was about to go into the inn before calling to me.

“Giant George is a Great Dane.”

I acted like I didn't hear him. When I went back outside, I was returning to emptiness. It had started to snow again, hard and thick and fast. The surface held no sign of tracks: no snowshoes, no paw prints.

There was only me. I reached for a shoulder, cupping my hand around my jacket sleeve at the top of my arm. Then I went for the other one. If anyone happened to be watching me, I wouldn't need to feel ridiculous. I totally looked like I felt like standing there getting snowed on and was keeping myself warm. I made patting motions on my arms, like I was a dog and a person combined. I wasn't mad at Giant George for leaving me. Great Danes have issues with slobbering, I had read in the breed book. They are giants with the mind-set of lap dogs. They're always trying to get onto people's laps, which can
crush
you.

Retracing my steps to the door, I reminded myself of Hank in the pen, the same path over and over.

Suddenly I remembered a counselor in one of my mandatory group talks. I was supposed to say something about
getting over my old self
like a mountain I had to climb.
That counselor was forever taking time off to scale peaks somewhere, so everything was compared to mountain climbing. She didn't care that no one else sitting in that circle had a background in large-scale outdoor activities. It was mountain this, mountain that, and I was using up my speaking time by talking about books I'd read containing that word in the title, or if not in the title, then a mountain was somewhere inside. I was doing a good job putting together a list, as a way, I had felt, of showing my group mates the reality that my personal past contained an awful lot of reading. And the counselor stopped me when I'd only got to
H,
for
Heidi.
She had looked at me as if she felt that, if we were on a climbing team together, I would be the one who made sure everyone fell off and perished. So I decided to stop talking at all in that group. I didn't know I had memorized the one thing she said to me when she stopped me at the
H.
Or maybe she had branded me with it.

“Evie,” she had said, “I think you should train yourself to pick a different way to do your climbing.”

So those were the words that came to me when I was going back inside and thinking of Hank. Well before I reached the door, I found myself sticking one foot in untrodden snow, high as a little mountain. I felt stupid about hacking out a new path. I felt like a little kid doing something a grown-up said to do, which I didn't even have to, because there wasn't a grown-up paying attention to me. I felt like a kid
having to be her own grown-up.

Inside the doorway, I shook myself off. In the kitchen they were still making biscuits. A table in the lobby held a tray with my breakfast: coffee, packets of nondairy creamer, a bowl of canned peaches, a glass of orange juice, a bowl of crunchy cereal. Under the cereal spoon was a slip of paper. The handwriting, in pencil, was not the same as the writing on the dog notes. The writer was Mrs. Auberchon. The note said, “Sorry to ask you to eat cereal without milk, but I am temporarily out of milk.”

I picked up the bowl of cereal, sniffing and looking. It was granola, still warm from the oven: oats, molasses, vanilla, cinnamon, ginger, peanut butter. I meant to just give it a taste, but I ended up wolfing it. The orange juice was from concentrate, but it wasn't overly watered. I downed it, then downed the coffee. I even ate the peaches, slimy and limp as they were. Then I went upstairs to change out of my wet clothes.

The top book on my pile caught my eye. On the cover was a group of dogs, different kinds, purebred and not, sitting pretty on perfect grass in a lush, leafy park. They looked like a bunch of preschoolers who never spent one second being hurt by anyone in any way.

The other covers were pretty much the same. I looked them over with what I felt were brand-new eyes. I opened each one to check the contents, the indexes. Nothing was anywhere about dogs in a shelter being scheduled to no longer be alive, or persons involved in dogfighting, or dogs who were terrified of sticks, or muteness as a result of being chained in a yard night and day with no shelter.

I gathered up the books and went quietly down to the wood stove. In the kitchen they didn't hear me. An almost-spent log was burning in a skimmer of narrow flames. There was plenty of room for the books. I wasn't sure what to do about the controls, so I ignored them. I'd never put anything in a wood stove before. Some smoke escaped, but it wasn't a lot, and set off no alarm.

I crept upstairs and looked outside. It was snowing even harder. I didn't feel wasteful or destructive or anti-printed-matter, strange as it was to be someone who thought it was a good idea to burn books. Soon, I felt, I'd have new ones from the Sanctuary—or at least one, perhaps as thick as the Bible. Nothing was on the website about a training manual, but surely there'd be some sort of text. Maybe there'd be blank pages for notes, maybe not.

I wondered what Shadow was doing. I wondered what Hank was doing. I wondered what Josie was doing. I wondered if Tasha, paws on the kitchen window, had thought about smashing that glass to give herself a better chance at insideness. I told myself I needed to remember always what her face was like, and her drool as well, in those moments when she was purely, blissfully hopeful.

Then I found myself with the urge to start setting things down. It wasn't okay with me to have loose sheets of dog notes just lying around. I couldn't let another minute go by without doing something about getting organized.

It occurred to me that I should keep some kind of personal log about what I was learning, with entries, of course, in alphabetical order, like in a dictionary or maybe an encyclopedia. I opened my laptop. I made a list of vocabulary words—basic words I had to learn all over again, now that I could connect them with my first four dogs.

I felt as if I'd landed here from another planet and had to get to work right away on my language skills. I was sort of on automatic. I didn't know what the first word would be until I typed it.

A
BANDON
.
TO TURN
away on purpose from someone you were supposed to never turn away from. Bad verb. Bad word. Bad everything.

Aggression.
I think Hank growled at me when I came a little close to the pen because I wasn't approaching him the right way. I mean, dogs are
animals.
Probably in his position I'd have done the same thing, like, get away from me or you'll really be sorry. Probably he thought the one with the aggression was me, just simply for being a human. I think he picked up on how I was watching him like, oh, God, this creature is a total obsessive-compulsive, and that is
terrible.
I should have let him know I admired him for being up on his feet and not curled in a ball of himself in a corner like a quitter who gave up on his life. But it's a good thing I backed off. I might not be typing this because of missing some fingers. It wouldn't have been like a nip from Josie.

Note to self: aggression in small dogs is totally different from aggression in big ones. It's like the difference between, say, getting into a substance you don't put into yourself with a needle and getting into needles,
which no one ever gave me one tiny bit of credit for never doing.

Anxiety.
The state of expecting the wrong things to happen to you, based on previous learning and experience. Probably, all dogs who came out of a household that went through a divorce are automatically anxious about pretty much everything, if the divorce just kept going on and on, and the two people doing the divorcing were so busy with the divorce, they basically forgot they even had a dog in the first place. Or, if not “forgot,” they thought all they had to do was provide things like healthy food and somewhere nice to go to the bathroom, and also good grooming.