A Dog's Purpose

{ FIVE }

At once, everything was both strange and familiar.

I could clearly remember the loud, hot room, Spike filling the air with his fury and then abruptly falling into a slumber so deep it was as if he’d opened a gate with his mouth and run away. I remembered becoming sleepy, and then there was the sense that much time had passed, the way a nap in the afternoon sun will span the day and suddenly it will be time for the evening feed. This nap, though, brought me not just to a new time but to a new place.

Familiar was the warm, squirming presence of puppies on either side of me. Familiar, too, was the shoving clamber for a turn at the teat and the rich, life-giving milk that was the reward for all the pushing and climbing. Somehow, I was a puppy again, helpless and weak, back in the Den.

But when I took my first bleary look at the face of my mother, she wasn’t the same dog at all. Her fur was a light color, and she was larger than, well, than Mother. My brothers and sisters—seven of them!—shared the same light-colored fur, and when I examined my forelegs I realized that I matched the rest of the litter as well.

And not only were my legs no longer dark brown—they stretched out from me in perfect proportion to the rest of my body also.

I heard a lot of barking and smelled many dogs nearby, but this wasn’t the Yard. When I ventured from the Den, the surface beneath my pads was rough and hard and a wire fence abruptly ended my exploration after half a dozen yards. It was a cage with a wire top and a cement floor.

The implications of all this made me weary, and I stumbled back to the Den, climbed up on top of a pile of siblings, and collapsed.

I was a little puppy again, barely able to walk. I had a new family, a new mother, and a new home. Our fur was uniformly blond, our eyes dark. My new mother’s milk was far richer than what had come from my first mother.

We lived with a man, who came by with food for my mother, which she gulped down quickly before returning to the Den to keep us warm.

But what about the Yard, and Senora, and Fast and Coco? I could remember my life very clearly, and yet everything was different now, as if I had started over. Was that possible?

I recalled Spike’s outraged barking and how, as I fell asleep in that hot room, I was seized with an inexplicable question, a question of purpose. This didn’t seem like the sort of thing a dog should think about, but I found myself returning to the issue often, usually as I was just dozing off for an irresistible nap. Why? Why was I a puppy again? Why did I harbor a nagging feeling that as a dog there was something I was supposed to do?

Our enclosure didn’t offer much to look at, and there was nothing fun to chew on except each other, but as my brothers and sisters and I became more aware, we discovered there were more puppies in a kennel to the right: tiny, energetic little guys with dark markings and hair that stuck up all over the place. On the other side was a slow-moving female, all alone, with a hanging belly and distended teats. She was white with black spots, and her coat was very short. She didn’t walk around much and seemed pretty uninterested in us. About a foot of space separated the two kennels, so all we could do was smell the little puppies next to us, though they looked like they’d be fun to play with.

Straight ahead was a long strip of lawn that beckoned with sweet odors of moist earth and rich, green grass, but we were prevented from going out there by the locked door to the cage. A wooden fence encircled both the grassy area and the dog cages.

The man wasn’t anything like Bobby or Carlos. When he ventured into the kennel area to feed the dogs, he didn’t speak much to any of us, radiating a bland indifference so at odds with the kindness of the men tending the dogs in the Yard. When the puppies in the kennel next to us rushed over to greet him, he pushed them away from the dinner bowl with a grunt, letting the mother have access to her food. We were less coordinated in our attack and usually didn’t manage to tumble our way to the cage door before he’d already moved on and our mother let us know we were not to share her meal.

Sometimes the man would be talking when he moved from cage to cage, but not to us. He spoke softly, focused on a piece of paper in his hands.

“Yorkshire terriers, week or so,” he said one time, looking in at the dogs in the cage to our right. He stopped in front of our pen and peered inside. “Golden retrievers, probably three weeks yet, and got a Dalmatian ready to pop any day.”

I decided my time in the Yard had prepared me to dominate the puppies in my family, and was irritated they didn’t feel the same way. I’d maneuver to grab one the way Top Dog had grabbed Rottie, and then two or three of my siblings would jump on top of me, not understanding the point of the whole thing at all. By the time I’d fought them off, the original target of my attentions would be off wrestling with someone else, as if it were all some kind of game. When I tried a menacing growl, though, I sounded ridiculously nonthreatening, my brothers and sisters joyously growling back.

One day the spotted dog next to us drew our attentions—she was panting and pacing nervously—and we instinctively hung close to our mother, who was watching our neighbor intently. The spotted dog ripped up a blanket, shredding it with her teeth, and circled around several times before lying down with a gasp. Moments later, I was shocked to see a new puppy lying by her side, covered in spots and cloaked in a slippery-looking film, some kind of sac that the mother immediately licked off. Her tongue pushed the little puppy over, and after a minute it groggily crawled toward its mother’s teats, which reminded me that I was hungry.

Our mother sighed and let us feed awhile before she abruptly stood up and walked away, one of my brothers dangling along for a second before dropping off. I jumped on him to teach him a lesson, which wound up taking a lot of time.

When next I glanced over at the spotted dog, there were six more puppies! They looked spindly and weak, but the mother didn’t care. She licked them, guiding them to her side, and then lay quietly while they fed.

The man came and entered the cage where the newborns lay sleeping, looking them over before turning and walking away. Next he opened the door for the furry-looking puppies in the kennel to the right of ours and released them into the grassy area!

“No, not you,” he said to the mother, blocking her way as she tried to follow. He shut her in and then put bowls of food down for the puppies, which they climbed in and licked off of each other—these idiots wouldn’t last a day in the Yard. The mother sat behind her cage door and whimpered until her brood had quit feeding, and then the man let her out to join her pups.

The hairy little dogs came over to our cage door to sniff us, finally going nose-to-nose with us after living next door for these past few weeks. I licked at the goop on their faces while one of my brothers stood on my head.

The man left the puppies running free while he departed out a gate in the wooden fence that was exactly like the one Carlos and Bobby always accessed to enter the Yard. I watched jealously as the puppies ranged up and down the tiny patch of grass, sniffing hello to the other caged dogs and playing with each other. I was tired of being inside the pen and wanted to get out and explore. Whatever was my purpose in my new life, this didn’t feel like it.

After a few hours, the man returned, carrying another dog who looked exactly like the mother of the hairy puppies who were running free, except that he was a male. The man shoved the mother back into her pen and dropped the male in with her before shutting the gate, locking them in together. The male seemed pretty glad to see the mother, but she snarled at him when he jumped on her from behind.

The man left the fence gate open behind him, and I was surprised at the feeling of longing that swept through me as I peered at the tiny sliver of outside world visible on the other side of the fence. If I were ever running free in the grass, I knew I would head right out that open gate, but naturally the puppies who currently had that option didn’t do anything about it; they were too busy wrestling.

The mother raised her paws up on the cage door and cried softly as the man methodically rounded up her puppies and carried them out the gate. Soon they were all gone. The mother dog paced back and forth in her cage, panting, while the male in the cage with her lay there and watched. I could feel her distress, and it unsettled me. Night fell, and the mother dog let the male lie with her—they seemed to know each other, somehow.

The male was only in there for a few days before he, too, was taken away.

And then it was our turn to be let out! We tumbled out joyously, lapping up the food that was set out for us by the man. I ate my fill and watched my brothers and sisters go crazy, as if they’d never seen anything so exciting before as a bunch of dog food bowls.

Everything was wonderfully moist and rich, not at all like the dry and dusty dirt in the yard. The breeze was cool and carried with it the tantalizing scent of open water.

I was sniffing the succulent grass when the man returned to release our mother. My siblings bounded over to her, but I didn’t because I’d found a dead worm. Then the man left, and that’s when I started thinking about the gate.

There was something wrong with this man. He didn’t call me Toby. He didn’t even talk to us. I thought of my first mother, the very last time I saw her, escaping the Yard because she couldn’t live with humans, not even with someone as loving as Senora. But the man didn’t love us at all.

My gaze focused on the doorknob in the gate.

There was a wooden table next to the door. By climbing up on a stool I was able to get on the table, and from there I was just able to stretch out and put my mouth on the metal knob, which instead of being round was a strip of metal, a handle.

My tiny teeth weren’t very useful in getting a purchase on the thing, but I did my best to manipulate it the way Mother had the night she fled from the Yard. Soon I lost my balance and toppled to the ground, the gate still locked. I sat and barked at it in frustration, my voice a tiny yip. My brothers and sisters raced over to jump on me in their usual fashion, but I turned from them in irritation. I was in no mood to play!

I tried it again. This time I put my front paws on the knob to keep from tumbling to the ground, and as I did so it fell away beneath me, so that my whole body hit the lever on my way down. I landed on the sidewalk with a grunt.

To my astonishment, the gate edged ajar. I shoved my nose into the crack and pushed, and it swung wider. I was free!

I eagerly scampered out into the open, my little legs tripping over themselves. A dirt path lay right in front of me, two tracks dug into sandy soil. I instinctively knew that was the way to go.

After I’d run a few feet I stopped, sensing something. I turned and looked back at my new mother, who was sitting just inside the open gate, watching me. I remembered Mother back in the Yard, glancing once at me before heading back out into the world. My new mother wouldn’t be joining me, I realized. She was staying with the family. I was on my own.

Yet not for a moment did I hesitate. I knew from past experience that there were better yards than this, with loving people who would stroke my fur with their hands. And I knew that the time for suckling at my new mother’s teat was at an end. It was just how it was supposed to work—a dog eventually separated from his mother.

But mostly I knew an opportunity was in front of me that was irresistible, a whole new world to be explored with long, if somewhat clumsy, legs.

The dirt track eventually led to a road, which I decided to follow, if for no other reason than the fact that it led straight into the wind, which was bringing me wonderful new scents. Unlike the Yard, which had always been parched, I smelled damp, rotting leaves, and trees, and pools of water. I skipped forward, the sun in my face, happy to be free, off on an adventure.

I heard the truck coming long before I saw it but was so busy trying to catch an amazing winged bug I didn’t even look up until the door slammed. A man with wrinkled, tanned skin and muddy clothes knelt down, his hands out in front of him.

“Hey there, little fella!” he called.

I regarded him uncertainly.

“You lost, fella? You lost?”

Wagging, I decided he must be okay. I trotted over to him and he picked me up, holding me high over his head, which I didn’t appreciate very much.

“You’re a pretty little fella. You look like a purebred retriever; where did you come from, fella?”

The way he was speaking to me reminded me of the first time Senora called me Toby. I instantly understood what was happening—just as the men had pulled my first family from the culvert, this man had taken me from the grass. And now my life would be what he decided it would be.

Yes, I decided. My name could be Fella. I was thrilled when he sat me down inside the front of the truck, right beside him. The front seat!

The man smelled like smoke and had an eye-watering tang to him that reminded me of when Carlos and Bobby would sit out in the Yard at a small table and talk and hand a bottle to each other. He laughed when I tried to climb up to lick his face, and continued to chuckle as I squirmed around in the narrow places of the truck, taking in rich, strange odors.

We bumped along for a while, and then the man stopped the truck. “We’re in the shade here,” he told me.

I looked around blankly. A building with several doors was directly in front of us, and from one of them came strong chemical smells exactly like those coating the man.

“I’m just going to stop for one drink,” the man promised, rolling up the windows. I didn’t realize he was leaving until he’d slipped out and shut the door behind him, and I watched in disillusionment as he entered the building. What about me?

I found a cloth strap and chewed on it for a little while, until I got bored and put my head down to sleep.

When I awoke, it was hot. The sun now came full force into the truck, the cab airless and humid. Panting, I started whimpering, putting my paws up so I could see where the man had gone. There was no sign of him! I dropped my feet, which were literally burning from the windowsill.

I had never felt such heat. An hour or so went by as I paced back and forth across the scorching front seat, panting harder than I ever had in my life. I began to quiver, and my vision was swimming. I thought of the faucet in the yard; I thought of my mother’s milk; I thought of the spray from the hose Bobby used to break up dogfights.

Blearily I noticed a face staring in the window at me. It wasn’t the man; it was a woman with long black hair. She looked angry, and I backed away from her, afraid.

When her face vanished, I lay back down, nearly delirious. I didn’t have the energy to pace anymore. I had an odd heaviness in my limbs, and my paws were beginning to twitch of their own accord.

And then there was a hard crash, rocking the truck! A rock tumbled past me, bouncing off the seat and falling to the floor. Clear pebbles showered down on me, and a cool kiss of air swept in over my face. I lifted my nose to it.

I was limp and helpless when I felt hands slide around my body and raise me into the air, too exhausted to do anything but hang slackly in her hands.

“You poor puppy. You poor, poor puppy,” she whispered.

My name is Fella, I thought to myself.