Toby's Story Read online

  “Hmmm,” he said. “I don’t see anything.” And he put me back down on the grass.

  The car had clearly not finished playing, because it started moving jerkily forward again. I went back to chasing it, but it was not as much fun as before, because I had to keep stopping to gnaw at my feet, trying to get that itch to go away.

  That night, I lay with my mother and brothers and sisters, all warm and comfortable together. But I couldn’t sleep, not for long. My feet itched so much that they burned, and I kept squirming and waking up and even whimpering a little.

  I couldn’t understand how my brothers and sisters slept so soundly. Didn’t their feet itch, too?

  * * *

  Walt would often let us out of the pen after that. Titus and Timothy and Tess and Tamara and Tabitha were always happy to run over the soft grass and bark at the chickens and sometimes try to teach that car who was boss. (It never learned.)

  I wanted to run with them. I wanted to be the one to teach that car its manners or bite a falling leaf or chase down a butterfly. But I didn’t always feel like it. My feet never stopped itching. Sometimes I could ignore it, but other times I couldn’t, and I would have to lie down and chew on them to try to make things better.

  One day when I was lying in our pen, nibbling at one of my front paws, some new people arrived. A man and a boy got out of a big car (not one of the kind that are good to chase) and walked over to us.

  Walt was with them, and he opened up the gate and let my brothers and sisters out into the yard. The car was there, waiting for them, and it zoomed ahead while they barked with excitement and tore after it, tails waving.

  I did not feel like chasing the car. I had not gotten much sleep the night before, since I had to keep waking up to chew on my feet. I was too tired to chase. I almost felt too tired to be happy.

  My mother came over and nudged me with her nose. I could smell and feel her concern, and I licked her cheek. But it did not make my feet feel any better.

  “What’s wrong with that one?” I heard the boy say.

  “I don’t know,” Walt said, and he sounded puzzled. “He’s not sick, as far as I can tell. He just doesn’t seem all that lively.”

  The man and the boy watched all my brothers and sisters chase the car. Tabitha stopped chasing and ran over to the boy to seize one of his shoelaces and wrestle with it fiercely. The boy sat down in the grass, laughing, and Tabitha jumped up to lick his face.

  “This one!” the boy said to his father.

  “Think she’ll make a good hunting dog?” the father asked.

  Walt chuckled. “Never seen a beagle yet that wasn’t,” he answered. “They all love to chase down anything that moves. It’s bred into them.”

  The man and Walt talked a little more, and then the boy scooped up Tabitha in his arms and held her snugly as they walked back toward their car.

  I lifted my head and watched them go. My mother barked once and then sat down next to me.

  Tabitha was going with this boy, I realized. She would not be coming back.

  My sister had been part of my family, but at that moment, I understood that things had changed. She belonged to a new family now. It was a little sad, but it was right, too. Dogs belonged with human families. Human families needed dogs.

  I couldn’t help wondering whether this new family would have wanted me if I’d chased the car like Tabitha.

  The same thing happened again and again in the next few days. People drove up in big cars and watched as my brothers and sisters chased the little car through the grass. Sometimes I would leave the pen with them, but I didn’t have the energy to chase the car. It felt better to lie in the shade and nibble at my feet when the itching got too bad.

  The new visitors talked with Walt. Lots of them mentioned hunting. “Birds,” they’d say. “I need a good bird dog.” Or “Got to have one who can go after rabbits.”

  Often, they’d pick up a puppy and leave.

  After a man and a woman had left with Tess, Walt came to sit next to me with a sigh.

  “I don’t know what I’m going to do with you, Toby,” he said, rubbing behind my ears. “You’re a cute little guy for sure, but nobody around here is going to pay for a beagle who doesn’t want to hunt.”

  Titus was next to go. Then Timothy left with a family who had two little girls, and finally Tamara vanished in the arms of a tall, gangly teenage boy.

  Walt waved good-bye to the boy who’d taken Tamara and then came and put me back in my pen with my mother.

  “Toby boy,” he said, and I could hear sadness in his voice. “I can’t even give you away for free. I’d hate to take you to a shelter, but this is a working ranch, you know. Everyone here has a job. I can’t afford to keep an animal who doesn’t do something useful.”

  I knew he was sad, and I wished I could do something about it. I licked at his hands and then lay down in a patch of dirt with a sigh. I was tired.

  My mother came and nudged me with her nose. She walked a few steps away and looked back at me.

  I thought she wanted me to do something. What was it?

  She came back to nudge me again. This time she ran away. Once again, she stopped and looked back.

  I knew what she wanted now. Every dog knows the signal for Chase Me! Was she trying to tell me that if I would only run, I could belong to a family, too?

  But I was too busy to run just then. One of my back feet itched and burned. I needed to lick it and bite it, as if the itch were an enemy I could drive away if I were fierce enough. I couldn’t chase my mother.

  After a few moments, my mother returned to my side. She lay down next to me, curling her body around mine. It felt good, and I leaned into her. She licked the top of my head.

  I loved being with my mother. I loved her closeness and her smell and her warmth. But I knew, deep down, that I should belong to a human family, just like my brothers and sisters.

  What if I never found my human family? What if nobody wanted me?

  3

  It was a few days after that that I heard a car door slam. I was dozing in the shade of the small house where only my mother Sadie and I lived now, and I looked up to see Walt walking toward our pen with a tall woman and a girl beside him.

  “I saw your sign out front that said ‘Dog Free to a Good Home,’” the woman was saying to Walt. “But … oh dear. A beagle?”

  “He’s so cute!” the girl cried. “Oh, look at him!”

  I looked at her. She had dark brown hair that curled around her face and freckles scattered across her nose and cheeks. I wondered how they’d taste.

  “He’s adorable, Mona,” the woman said. “But a beagle’s not the right breed for us, I’m afraid. They have so much energy! They need to run all day. That’s not going to work.”

  “Oh…,” the girl said sadly. She was staring at me through the wire of the pen.

  I stared back at her. I swished my tail back and forth hopefully. Was this my family, come to get me at last?

  “Well, Toby’s not your usual beagle,” Walt said. “Sweet little guy, very friendly, but he doesn’t seem to want to run or chase much of anything, so I can’t sell him off as a hunting dog like I did his brothers and sisters. I’d hate to have him put down—”

  The girl, Mona, gasped.

  “—but I don’t have room on this place for a dog that just wants to lie around,” Walt finished up.

  “A dog that wants to lie around is just what we need!” the woman said.

  Mona’s dark, wide eyes seemed to get even wider. “Really, Mom?”

  Walt looked hopeful. “It doesn’t bother you that he’s a beagle who doesn’t run?”

  “Well, it’s hard to explain,” Mona’s mother answered. “But I do believe he’s going to be perfect. We’ll take Toby!”

  And that is how I left Walt and the Ranch and my mother and found myself riding along in the back seat of a car, held close in Mona’s arms. She felt warm and smelled excellent—sweat from her skin, something delightfull
y salty and sweet on her breath, berries in her curly hair. I squirmed so I could get my nose into every wrinkle of her shirt and every crease of her neck. I licked her freckles (which did not taste like much after all) and her mouth.

  She laughed. “Mom, he’s so friendly! He’s going to be perfect!”

  “Let’s hope so,” her mother answered from the front seat.

  The car had glass windows, and when I was done smelling and tasting Mona, I wiggled over to put my paws up on one of them and see what was outside. Everything was moving! Trees and bushes and other cars went past in a bewildering blur. I had no idea the world moved so quickly!

  Then the car stopped, and the world stopped with it. Holding me snugly, Mona wiggled out of the car. We were outside a very large building. I was used to seeing Walt come in and out of his house, but this building was much bigger.

  When we went inside, I discovered something remarkable. The building was full of people!

  Did all buildings have this many people? There was a sort of table in front of us, with a woman sitting behind it. She was laughing in an astonished way as Mona put me down on the floor.

  The cool tiles felt good on my itchy feet. I was tempted to lie down and give the pads of my paws a good chewing, but there was so much to see and do! For now, I ignored the itching and kept moving.

  A long hallway ran off in one direction, and another in the opposite one. There were doors along each hallway—and people, too. So many people!

  Some of the people were sitting in chairs that had big wheels on them. Some were walking slowly, leaning on long sticks. Others seemed to be hurrying as if they had important things to do.

  I ran along the hallway, sniffing each new friend eagerly, with Mona right behind me. They smelled … interesting. Not like Walt. Walt had smelled of mud and sweat and food and other animals. Most of these people smelled of something unusual, something I had never smelled before. I could not decide if I liked it or not. It was not a smell of the outside world that I was used to. Really, all that it smelled of was clean.

  Who would want to be clean when dirty smells were so much more interesting?

  A few of the doors were open, and when I peeked inside, I saw beds with more people! It was all so overwhelming that I ignored the signals coming from my bladder until they got so powerful that I had to squat right where I was.

  “Toby! Not here!” Mona gasped.

  She snatched me up before I even got started and rushed me down the hallway and out through a different door from the one we had come in. We were in a yard with concrete sidewalks and a smooth lawn. At the far side of the lawn was a tall wooden fence with a few trees and bushes growing next to it.

  Mona put me down in the grass so I could finish what I’d been doing.

  Once I was done, she scooped me up again and cuddled me while I licked at her chin. “You’re going to be a great therapy dog, Toby. I just know you will,” she told me.

  I didn’t know what her words meant, but I liked the tone of her voice. I could hear love and approval in it. I loved her, too. I was pretty sure that Mona, and maybe her mother, had just become my human family.

  “Listen now, Toby,” Mona said, and she sat down on the grass with me in her lap. Her voice sounded serious, and I was a little tired after all the excitement. I plopped down on her legs and nibbled at her fingers just a little so she would know that I liked her as much as she liked me.

  “The people here, they need a dog like you. They’re old, Toby.” She dropped her voice a little, and I could tell she was talking just to me. “Too old to live by themselves anymore, so they come here. And my mom helps take care of them. She’s a therapist. There are other people who work here, of course. All the nurses and orderlies, and there’s Fran; she’s the boss. But, see, people can’t do everything. People can give the patients their medicine and help them get into wheelchairs and stuff like that. But they can’t really make them happy. That’s what you can do, Toby. You can make people happy. And I’ll help you, okay? We’ll be a team. You and me.”

  I liked Mona very much. She tasted delicious, and she was very good at scratching along my spine and behind my ears. On my second day in my new home, she brought me a collar with a tag on it that rang like a bell when I shook myself and jangled when I ran.

  And the best thing about Mona was this: she talked to me all the time. I didn’t understand her words, but I was delighted by her tone of voice. It told me that she loved me and trusted me and that she thought I was important. Out of all the people in my new home, she was my favorite.

  But I liked all the people, and I met more and more of them as the days went by. There were the people in the chairs and the people in beds. I visited them regularly. Some fed me treats, which was excellent. Some petted me and talked to me, calling me by my name. “Toby, come,” they’d said. “Here, Toby.” “Where’s Toby?” “Good dog, Toby.”

  I liked hearing my name over and over, in so many voices. I liked having so many people to greet each day. When I was tired or my feet needed a good chewing, I’d lie down beside a chair or a bed, and sometimes Mona or her mother would pick me up and put me on a lap or on a soft blanket next to someone who was lying down. I’d take a snooze there, only waking up if my feet itched so badly that I could not stay asleep.

  Since I was tired a lot, it was good that my new house had so many laps and so many beds.

  “Good dog, Toby,” Mona’s mother said one day, stroking me as I lay on a bed next to a woman with white hair and very soft skin that gave off a smell of flowers.

  Another woman had come into the room and stood there with folded arms. She had gray hair, cut short, and was short and thin herself, with a frown on her face.

  “I was skeptical about this whole therapy dog idea, Patsy,” she said. I was starting to understand that Mona’s mother had two names: Mom to Mona, and Patsy to everybody else. It was confusing, but people are like that. They hardly ever do things the simplest way.

  “But I have to admit, you’ve got me half-convinced,” the other woman went on. “That thing isn’t half as much trouble as I thought it would be.”

  “He’s perfect, Fran,” Mona agreed, rubbing my ears. “He just wants to lie around—and that’s what we need him for! I think we can start some real training very soon.”

  The second woman, Fran, stood watching me for a little while longer. She stood the way another dog does when he wants someone to know he’s in charge—very straight, as tall as she could. Her voice sounded in charge, too. She talked quickly and firmly and a bit louder than Patsy. I understood that she was the boss, and I lowered my head a little and wagged my tail at her to show her that I would not try to question her leadership.

  When the white-haired woman began very quietly snoring, Mona came and took me outside to the lawn. After I’d left a puddle soaking into the dirt, I flopped over to gnaw at one of my back paws, which was itching fiercely.

  Someone inside pushed the door open. A tall boy came out. I could tell he was young, not a man yet. Puppies don’t look or smell like grown-up dogs, and young humans are the same.

  The boy had brown hair, lighter than Mona’s, that flopped into his eyes, which were squinting a bit in the bright sunlight.

  “Hey, a puppy!” he said, and I could hear the pleasure in his voice. He came to kneel beside us. “Can I pet him?”

  “Sure,” Mona said. “That’s his job, being petted! Want to hold him?” She scooped me up and dumped me in the boy’s lap.

  My foot was still itching and I was ready for a nap, but I knew I should greet this new person. I got my feet on his chest and licked at his face, tasting something salty and delicious on his mouth that he must have eaten for breakfast. He laughed and used both hands to scratch my back and rub my ears. Once I was done tasting him, I lay down in his lap and closed my eyes.

  Mona and the new boy talked a little while his hands stroked my back.

  “So … are you visiting somebody?” I heard Mona ask.

  “Y
eah, my grandfather. He’s moving in,” the boy said. “What about you? Do your grandparents live here or something?”

  “No, my mom. I mean, my mom doesn’t live here. She works here. She’s a therapist. And I come on the weekends a lot. I help out with Toby.”

  “That’s this little guy’s name? Toby?”

  I thumped my tail sleepily when I heard my name.

  “It starts with a T, just like mine. I’m Tyler.”

  “I’m Mona,” Mona said. I wagged a bit for her name, too. There was a moment where neither of them talked, although it felt like both of them wanted to.

  “So, um, Toby sure seems calm for a beagle,” the boy said at last.

  “Yeah, he is.” Mona sounded relieved to have something to say. “That’s why we got him. He’s going to be a therapy dog.”

  “Cool,” the boy said. “And you’re training him? You must be really good at it. I mean, they don’t let kids train dogs usually, I guess.”

  Mona laughed. I wagged again. “Oh, no, I’m not a real trainer or anything. I’ve just read some books and stuff, and I like dogs. I want to do that when I grow up, though. Train dogs. I love dogs.”

  “Me, too. Wish I had one at home. My mom says maybe someday. But I guess it’s better not to have one right now. We’re going to be coming up here on weekends a lot, visiting my grandfather, making sure he’s settled in okay.”

  “That’s good.” Mona reached a hand out to pet me, too. I sighed. “Some of the people here, they don’t get a lot of visitors. It’s really sad for them. Toby’s going to help with that. Dogs are great company.”

  “Yeah, for sure. Hey, can I take Toby to meet my grandfather?”

  “Sure you can. He loves new people.”

  “Um.” The boy seemed to hesitate. “Maybe you could come, too?”

  Even half-asleep as I was, I felt a funny sort of heat come over Mona, and she seemed not sure what to say. But when I half opened one eye to peek at her, she was smiling. “Yeah. Okay. Sure,” she answered. “You carry Toby.”