A Dog's Purpose

{ TWENTY-SIX }

My new mother had a big, black face and a warm pink tongue. I stared up at her numbly the first time I realized it was all happening again—it didn’t seem possible, not after being Ellie.

I had eight other brothers and sisters, all of them black, all of them healthy and full of play. For the most part, though, I preferred to wander off by myself and ponder what it meant that I was a puppy once more.

It made no sense. I understood how I would never have been with Ethan if, as Toby, I hadn’t learned how to open a gate, and from my days in the culvert learned that there was nothing to fear on the other side of the fence. With Ethan I learned about love and companionship, and felt I was truly accomplishing my purpose, just by accompanying him on his daily adventures. But Ethan also taught me how to rescue from the pond, and so when I was Ellie and learned how to Find and Show I was able to save the little boy from the tunnel of water. I would not have been so good at work if I hadn’t had the experience of being Ethan’s dog—Jakob’s cold distance would have been incomprehensible and painful to me.

But now what? What could possibly happen now that would justify my rebirth as a puppy?

We were in a well-kept kennel with a cement floor, and twice a day a man came in and cleaned it out and took us out into a yard to romp in the grass. Other men and women spent time with us, lifting us and looking at our paws, and while I felt joy coming from them, none radiated that special love that I’d had with Ethan and with Maya and Al.

“Congratulations, you’ve got a fine litter here, Colonel,” one of them said, holding me up in the air as he spoke. “Fetch top dollar.”

“I’m worried about that one you’ve got in your hands, there,” another man replied. He smelled like smoke, and the way my new mother responded to him when he came into the kennel let me know he was her owner. “Doesn’t seem to have much energy.”

“You have the vet look at him?” The man holding me flipped me over, running his thumbs under my lips to expose my teeth. I passively allowed this; I just wanted to be left alone.

“There doesn’t seem to be anything wrong. He just goes off by himself and sleeps,” the one called Colonel replied.

“Well, they can’t all be champions,” the first man said, setting me down.

I felt unhappiness from Colonel as he watched me trot away. I didn’t know what I could have done wrong, but I imagined I wouldn’t be here long anyway. If previous experience had taught me anything, it was that people who had a litter of puppies liked them, but not enough to keep them.

I was wrong, though. A few weeks later, most of my brothers and sisters were taken away by people, leaving just three of us left. I felt a sad resignation from my new mother, who had stopped nursing us but who still lowered her nose affectionately when any of us approached her to lick her face. She had apparently been through this before.

Over the next several days, people came to visit us and play games, like putting us in pillowcases, jangling keys in front of us, and tossing a ball past our noses to see what we would do. None of this struck me as a very rational way to behave around puppies, but everyone seemed very serious about the whole thing.

“Lot of money for one so small,” a man remarked to Colonel.

“Sire’s a two-time national field champion; mother’s placed in state six years in a row, won twice. I think you’ll get your money’s worth,” Colonel said.

They shook hands and then it was just my mother and a sister I’d named Pounce because she always leaped on me as if I couldn’t see it coming. With her other brother gone, Pounce was on me relentlessly, and I found myself wrestling with her in self-defense. Colonel took note of my more active relationship, and I felt something like relief coming off him.

Then Pounce was taken away by a woman who smelled like horses and I was all alone, which I have to admit was how I preferred it.

“Have to lower the price, I guess,” Colonel remarked a few days later. “Shame, that.” I didn’t even raise my head or run over to him to try to convince him not to be disappointed in me, which he apparently was.

In truth, I was feeling heartsick. I just couldn’t understand what was happening to me, why I was a puppy again. The idea of going through training, of learning Find with someone other than Maya or Jakob, of living another life, simply defeated me. I felt like a bad dog.

I didn’t race over to the fence to see people when they visited, not even when they had children—I didn’t want to do that again, either. Ethan was the only child I would ever be interested in.

“What’s wrong with him? Is he ill?” I heard a man ask one day.

“No. He just prefers to be off by himself,” Colonel answered.

The man came into the kennel and picked me up. He had light blue eyes and regarded me kindly. “You’re just a mellow fellow, is that it?” he asked me. I sensed an eagerness inside him, and somehow knew I would be leaving the kennel with him that day. I wandered over to my new mother and gave her a farewell lick on the face. She seemed to know it, too, and nuzzled me in return.

“Give you two fifty,” the man with the blue eyes said. I felt a sharp surprise in Colonel.

“What? Sir, this dog’s paternity—”

“Yeah, I read the ad. Look, it’s for my girlfriend. She’s not going to take him hunting; she just wants a dog. You said you’d make a deal. Now, I have to figure, if you’ve got a three-month-old puppy and breeding dogs is what you do, there’s some reason people don’t want this one. I don’t think you want this one, either. So I can go on-line and adopt a Lab for nothing. I figure, this one has all the papers and the pedigree, I’ll go two hundred and fifty bucks. Anybody else lining up to buy this dog? I don’t think so.”

A little while later, the man was loading me into the backseat of his car. He shook hands with Colonel, who was letting me leave without so much as a farewell pat on the head. The man handed Colonel a small piece of paper. “If you are ever looking for a good deal on a luxury automobile, give me a call,” the man said cheerfully.

I sized up my new owner. I liked that he was letting me be a front-seat dog, but when he gazed over at me I felt nothing like affection coming from him but rather a complete indifference.

I soon found out why: I would not be living with the man, whose name turned out to be Derek. My new home was with a woman named Wendi, who screamed and jumped up and down when Derek brought me into the house. Wendi and Derek immediately started wrestling together, so I found myself exploring the apartment in which I now lived. There were shoes and clothes scattered everywhere, and boxes with dried food stuck to the insides sitting out on a low table in front of the couch. I licked these clean.

Derek didn’t radiate any particular affection toward Wendi, either, even though he hugged her as he was walking out the door. Whenever Al used to leave the house, the quick rush of love he felt toward Maya always made me wag my tail, but this man wasn’t like that at all.

Wendi’s love for me was instant but confusing, a jumble of emotions that I didn’t understand. Over the next several days she named me Pooh-Bear, Google, Snoopdog, Leno, and Pistachio. Then I was Pooh-Bear again, though she soon just stuck with Bear and its variations: Barry-Boo, Bear-Bear, Honey-woney Bear, Cuddle Bear, and Wonder Bear. She would hold me down and kiss me all over and squeeze me as if she couldn’t get enough of me, and then the phone would ring and she’d drop me to the floor to answer it.

Every morning Wendi rummaged through her belongings, her feelings wrapped up in a roiling panic, saying, “I’m late! I’m late!” She would bang out the door and then I’d be alone all day, bored silly.

She put newspapers on the floor, but I couldn’t remember if I was supposed to pee on them or avoid them, so I did a little of both. My teeth were so sore my mouth was watering, so I wound up chewing on a couple of shoes, which sent Wendi into a screaming fit when she saw it. Sometimes she forgot to feed me and then I had no choice but to dive into the trash can for something, and this, too, caused screaming.

As far as I could see, life with Wendi had no purpose whatsoever. We didn’t train together; we didn’t even walk together much—she would open the door and let me run around in the yard at night, but hardly ever during the day, and only then with an odd, furtive fear, as if we were doing something wrong. I became so frustrated, so full of pent-up energy, that I wound up barking, sometimes for hours straight, my voice ringing off the walls and back at me.

One day there was a loud knock on the door. “Bear! Come here!” Wendi hissed at me. She locked me in her bedroom, but I could easily hear a man speaking to her. He sounded mad.

“Not allowed to have a dog! It’s in your lease!” I cocked my head at the word “dog,” wondering if I might be the source of the man’s anger. I hadn’t, as far as I knew, done anything wrong, but all the rules were different at this crazy place, so who could say?

The next time Wendi left for work she broke the pattern, calling me over and sitting me down. She seemed completely unimpressed that I knew how to sit on command without being taught. “Look, Bear-Bear, you can’t bark while I’m gone, okay? I’ll get in trouble with the neighbors. No barking, okay?”

I could feel sadness at the edges of her feelings and wondered what it was all about. Perhaps she was bored all day, too. Why didn’t she just take me with her? I loved car rides! I barked out my pent-up energy all afternoon, but I didn’t chew any shoes.

A day or so later, Wendi opened the door with one hand and pulled a piece of paper off the outside of the door with another. I raced over to her, my bladder bursting, but she didn’t let me out. Instead she looked at the paper and then started shouting angrily. I had no choice but to squat on the kitchen floor, and she smacked me on the bottom with an open palm and then opened the door.

“Here, you might as well go out; everybody knows you’re here anyway,” she muttered. I finished my business in the yard. I was sorry I had made the mess in the kitchen, but I simply hadn’t had an option.

The next day, Wendi slept in late and then we got in the car and went for a long, long car ride. I was a backseat dog because of all the things piled on the front seat, but she did lower the window so I could poke my nose out it. We pulled up in the driveway of a small house with several vehicles in the yard—I could tell by the smell of them that they hadn’t moved in a long time. I lifted my leg on one of them.

An older woman opened the door.

“Hi, Mom,” Wendi said.

“Is that it? It’s huge. You said it was a puppy.”

“Well, I named him Bear; what did you think?”

“This isn’t going to work.”

“Mom! I have no choice! I got an eviction notice!” Wendi yelled angrily.

“Well, what in the world were you thinking, anyway?”

“He was a gift from Derek! What was I supposed to do, take him back?”

“Why would he get you a dog when you can’t have dogs in the apartment?”

“Because I said I wanted him, too, okay, Mom? Are you happy? I said I wanted a dog. God.”

The feelings the two women had toward each other were so complex, there was no way I could sort them out. Wendi and I spent the night in the tiny home, both of us a little afraid: there was a man named Victor who came home when it was dark, and he was so full of rage it made everything feel dangerous and crazy. While Wendi and I slept in a narrow bed in a cramped back room, Victor yelled in another part of the house.

“I don’t want a dog here!”

“Well, it’s my place and I’ll do what I want!”

“What are we supposed to do with a dog?”

“That’s a stupid question; what does anyone do with a dog?”

“Shut up, Lisa; just shut up.”

“It will be okay, Barry-Boo. I wouldn’t let anything happen to you,” Wendi whispered to me. She was so sad I licked her hand in reassurance, but that just made her cry.

The next morning, the two women stood outside and talked next to the car. I sniffed along the door’s edge, waiting to be let inside. The sooner Wendi and I left this place, the better.

“God, Mom, how can you put up with him?” Wendi said.

“He’s not so bad. He’s better than your father.”

“Oh, don’t start.”

They stood silently for a minute. I gave the air a sniff—it carried with it the sour fragrance of the garbage stacked up next to the house, which, frankly, smelled delightful. I wouldn’t mind digging around in there, someday.

“Well, call me when you get home,” the older woman finally said.

“I will, Mom. Take good care of Bear.”

“Yeah.” The woman put a cigarette in her mouth and lit it, blowing smoke out sharply.

Wendi knelt beside me, and her sadness was so strong and familiar I knew what was coming. She stroked my face and told me I was a good dog, and then opened the door and slid inside without letting me in. I watched the car drive away without surprise, though I wasn’t at all sure what I had done. If I was such a good dog, why was I being abandoned by my owner?

“Now what?” the woman standing next to me muttered, puffing her cigarette.