A Dog's Promise Read online

  “Uh, no.”

  “That’s good to hear.”

  “She ain’t friendly, though.”

  “She’s got a litter. They get protective.”

  Mother was growling more loudly. Her teeth were on display now.

  “Hey there. Just hold still,” Smooth Face soothed.

  “Look out!”

  Her nails scrabbling, Mother turned to the exposed side of the den and in a flash leapt over, vanishing. Instantly, my siblings reacted, swarming in the same direction.

  “Well, I guess I could have predicted that,” Smooth Face chuckled. “See how skinny she was? She hasn’t had a home for some time. She’s not going to trust a person no matter how gently I talk.”

  “Big, though.”

  “Mostly malamute, as far as I can tell. These pups have something else in them, though. Dane?”

  “Hey, thanks for taking the bullet outta the gun, I didn’t know howta do that,” Hairy Face said.

  “I removed the clip, too. I can’t believe he handed it to you with a round in the chamber. That’s dangerous.”

  “Yeah, well, he’s my boss, so I guess I won’t be complainin’. You, uh, won’t tell anyone I didn’t follow his instructions? Wouldn’t wanta have this get back ta him.”

  “Tell him you did what he said. It explains why there aren’t any bullets left.”

  My siblings reacted in various ways as the men lowered their hands into the den. Some cowered, but others, like Heavy Boy, were wagging and submissive.

  “Can I see the puppies?” I looked up at this, a third voice, pitched high.

  “Sure, Ava, here.” Smooth Face lifted a small human off the ground. It was, I realized, a little girl. She clapped her hands. “Puppies!” she squealed in her high, delighted voice.

  Smooth Face put the girl down. “Time to get them in the crate.”

  He deftly scooped me up. I was placed in a basket with my littermates, who all had their forepaws on the sides, noses raised, trying to see.

  The little girl’s smiling face appeared over the edge of the basket, gazing down at us. I stared up at her, curious about all the different smells wafting from her—sweet and spicy and flowery.

  “Okay, Ava, let’s get these little guys inside where it’s warm.”

  The basket shifted and the world was once again unstable, made worse by the absence of our mother. Several of my siblings squealed in alarm, while I concentrated on trying to stay out of the way as Heavy Boy came tumbling by.

  Suddenly the air was warmer. The new den stopped moving. The little girl reached in and I found I welcomed her touch as she lifted me up to her face. Her light eyes stared at me from very close, and I felt an impulse to lick her skin, though I did not know why.

  “We have a problem, Ava,” Smooth Face said. “We can bottle feed them, but without a mother I am not sure they’ll survive.”

  “I’ll do it!” the little girl piped in immediately.

  “Well, I know that. But we’ll be late getting home tonight, and that’s not going to make your mother happy.”

  The little girl was still gazing at me, and I stared rapturously back. “I want to keep this one.”

  The man laughed. “We probably can’t, Ava. Let’s get going with the bottles.”

  Every experience was utterly new. When the little girl sat holding me on my back, pinning me between her legs, I squirmed in discomfort, but then she lowered a small object toward my mouth and when I smelled the tiny drop of rich milk oozing from it I took it in my mouth like a teat and sucked hard and was rewarded with a meal rich and sweet.

  In the den with Mother, night fell as a gradual process, but in this new place it came in a single instant, with such swift abruptness I felt several of my siblings twitch in alarm. Anxious without our mother, we were restless and took a long time before we dozed off. I slept on top of Heavy Boy, and it was much better than the other way around.

  The next morning the little girl and the man returned and once again we were given nourishment while lying on our backs. I knew my littermates had fed because they all carried the smell of the dense milk on their lips.

  “We have to get the mother to come back, Ava,” Smooth Face said. “We won’t be able to bottle feed these little guys as much as they need, otherwise.”

  “I’ll stay home from school Monday,” the little girl replied.

  “You can’t do that.”

  “Daddy…”

  “Ava, remember how I explained that sometimes we pick up an animal and we can’t save them because they are sick, or because they have been badly mistreated? It’s like these puppies are sick. I have other animals to take care of and I don’t have anyone to help me right now.”

  “Please.”

  “Maybe the mother will come back. Okay, Ava? Hopefully she’ll miss her babies.”

  The little girl, I decided, was named Ava. She reached for me a short time later, and her hands made me feel safe and warm. She carried me out into the cool air, cuddling me to her chest.

  I smelled Mother before I saw her. Suddenly Ava drew in a sharp breath.

  “Are you the mommy?” she asked in a small voice.

  Mother had edged out of some thick trees and was creeping hesitantly toward us across the grass. She lowered her head when the girl spoke, her distrust obvious with every uncertain step.

  Ava set me down, leaving me by myself in the grass. I saw my mother watch warily as the little girl retreated until she was standing at the door to the building.

  “Daddy! The mother came!” Ava called shrilly. “It’s okay, girl,” she urged in softer tones. “Come see your baby.”

  I wondered what we were doing.

  { THREE }

  Ava patted her thighs with her palms flat. “Please come, Mommy Dog! Please. If you don’t come save your babies, they will die.”

  Though I didn’t understand, I heard the anguish layered through her words. This tense situation, I decided, called for a puppy. I turned my back on my mother, making a conscious choice. I loved my mother dog, but I knew in my heart I belonged with humans.

  “Mommy Dog, come get your little boy!” Ava called. She scooped me up and eased through the door to the building, moving backward down a hallway. Mother crept right to the threshold, but stopped suspiciously, not budging.

  Ava set me on the floor. “Want your baby?” she asked.

  I did not know what to do. Both my mother and Ava were brittle with anxiety. I could feel it crackling off them, it was in my mother’s sour breath and came as a scent off the little girl’s skin. I whimpered, wagging, confused. I began inching toward Mother and that seemed to decide it. Mother took a few steps inside, her eyes on me. I flashed to a memory of her leaping into the den, Heavy Boy’s nape in her teeth, and knew what was coming. Mother darted for me.

  Then the door banged shut behind her. The noise seemed to terrify Mother. Her ears back, she darted back and forth in the narrow hallway, utterly panicked, then dashed through a side doorway. I saw Smooth Face Man looking in the window, and for some reason I wagged at him.

  When he dropped from the window I followed Mother’s scent into a small room. There was a bench at the far end of the space and Mother cowered under it, panting, her face tight with fear.

  I sensed the little girl and the man behind me in the doorway.

  “Don’t go any closer, Ava,” said the man. “I’ll be right back.”

  I was going to run to Mother, but the little girl gathered me up. She nuzzled me and I wiggled in delight.

  Mother didn’t move, was hunkered down, hiding. Then the man reappeared, trailing a strong odor of my siblings, and put our cage on the floor, popping open the door. Heavy Boy, followed by the rest of my littermates, poured out, trampling over one another. When they spotted Mother they stampeded her in an uncoordinated rush. She eased out from under the bench, ears up, staring at Ava. Then the wave of puppies was upon her, shrieking and squealing, and Mother flopped down by the bench, allowing her puppies to nurs
e.

  The girl put me on the floor and I ran over to join my family.

  “That was so smart, Ava! You did it exactly right,” the man praised.

  The man was, I learned, called Dad by Ava, and Sam by all the other people in the building. This was far too complex of a concept for me, and I eventually just thought of him as Sam Dad.

  Ava wasn’t in the building all the time, or even every day. I nonetheless regarded her as my girl, belonging to me and nobody else. There were other dogs sharing our big room, dogs to see and smell and hear in their cages nearby. One of them was a mother dog like ours; the scent of her milk wafted through the air, and I heard the peeps and squeals of another litter, out of sight in a cage at the other end of the big room. I also detected a different sort of animal, coming to me as a strong and alien scent from another part of the building, and wondered what it could be.

  Life in the metal den with the rattling roof seemed long ago and far away. Mother’s milk was suddenly richer and more plentiful, and her breath was no longer fetid.

  “She’s gaining weight even with the nursing; that’s good,” Sam Dad told Ava. “When she’s weaned them, we’ll spay her and find her a new forever home.” Mother always shied away from Sam Dad but after a time went willingly to Ava, who called Mother “Kiki.”

  Ava addressed me as Bailey, and eventually I understood that was who I was, I was Bailey. Heavy Boy was Buddha. All of my siblings had names, and I spent the days playing with them in our cage and out in a grassy yard with high wooden walls.

  None of my littermates understood that Ava and I shared a special relationship, and they would crowd her when she opened our cage door. I finally decided to rush to the opening the moment the little girl entered the big room, to be ready if she was there to let us out.

  It worked! She picked me up, while all the others remained teeming at her feet and probably feeling jealous. “Well, Bailey, you’re so eager, do you know what’s happening?”

  She carried me because I was the special one. My siblings trailed after us down the hallway. She pushed open the door and set me down and I jumped on Heavy Boy Buddha. “I’ll be right back!” Ava sang.

  We were old enough now that we no longer tripped over our paws when we ran. Heavy Boy Buddha leaped on a hard rubber ball, so we all leaped on him. It was satisfying to realize I wasn’t the only puppy who resented being crushed by our brother.

  The door opened again and Ava astounded me by setting down three new puppies! We all rushed to one another, sniffing and wagging and climbing up to chew on each other’s ears.

  One puppy, a girl, had a black, pushed-in muzzle and a brown body with a splash of white on her chest—her two brothers had white marks on their faces. Her fur was short and when we were nose-to-nose, it seemed as if all the other puppies in the yard faded away, not present even when one of them careened into us. When the black-faced girl dog ran the perimeter of the yard, I ran right with her.

  The mingling of the two puppy families became routine, and Ava called the girl dog Lacey. Lacey was close to my age, with a muscular but compact frame and bright black eyes. We sought each other out and played together in the yard with exclusive devotion. In ways I could not understand, I felt I belonged more to Lacey than to Ava. When I slept, Lacey and I wrestled in my dreams; when I was awake, I raised my nose in an obsessive hunt to isolate her scent from those of all the other animals. My chief frustration with my otherwise marvelous life was that no one thought to put Lacey and me in the same cage.

  When Mother began evading our pleading approaches to her teats, Sam Dad set out small bowls of mushy food, which Heavy Boy Buddha seemed to think he could only eat if he was standing in it. This new circumstance, this food, was such a wonderful development I would dream about it as often as I dreamed of Lacey.

  I was overjoyed when Lacey and I were finally put in a cage together, inside what Sam Dad called “the van.” It was a high-sided metal room with dog cages stacked on top of each other, though the interior of the van was redolent with that same mysterious, absent animal. I didn’t care: Ava had observed how much Lacey and I loved each other and had rightly concluded we needed to be together always. Lacey rolled on her back and I mouthed her throat and jaw. Lacey’s stomach was mostly white and the fur there was as dense and short as on her back, as opposed to my siblings, who had bushy gray hair and a face mostly white with tracings of gray between the eyes and around the snout. I supposed, when I thought about it, I probably appeared the same. Lacey’s ears were so soft and warm, I loved to nibble them gently, my jaw quivering with affection.

  “Will there be cats at the adoption event, Daddy?” Ava asked.

  “Nope. Just dogs. Cats are in two months—May is the start of what we call kitten season.”

  In the van we were subjected to the same torsion and pull that I remembered from the day we met Sam Dad and Ava. It went on so long that Lacey and I fell asleep, my paw cradled between her jaws.

  We awoke when, with a lurch, the jostling stopped. The side of the van opened up and admitted a flood of dog smells!

  We were all whimpering, eager to run free and sniff everything this new place had to offer, but that was not to happen. Instead, Sam Dad moved each cage, one at a time, out the door. When it was our turn, Lacey and I flattened to the floor, made dizzy by the way Sam Dad carried us. We were placed on some sandy ground, still in the cage. Across from us I saw Heavy Boy Buddha and two of my brothers, and realized that all the dogs from the van were now here, their crates arrayed in a rough circle. The canine odors were even more rampant and available now. Lacey and I sniffed, and then she climbed on top of me and it turned into a long wrestle. I was aware of humans young and old darting around the kennels, but Lacey absorbed most of my attention.

  Then Lacey shook me off and I saw what she was staring at: a girl not much older than Ava, with completely different features—Ava’s eyes and hair were light, her skin pale, but this girl had black hair and dark eyes and a darker cast to her skin. She smelled very much like Ava, though—sweet and fruity.

  “Oh, you are the prettiest baby. You are so beautiful,” the girl whispered. I felt the adoration coming off her as she poked her fingers through the wires and Lacey licked them. I pushed my way to those fingers for my share of the affection, but the girl was only focused on Lacey.

  Sam Dad crouched down. “That’s Lacey. She’s obviously mostly boxer.”

  “She’s the one I want,” this new girl declared.

  “Ask your parents to come over, and I will let her out for you to play with,” Sam Dad offered. The little girl skipped off. Lacey and I exchanged baffled expressions.

  Very soon a man around Sam Dad’s age approached, followed by a boy older and bigger than Ava. I was wagging because I had never seen a boy before: it was like a male version of a girl!

  “Are these two from the same litter? The female looks smaller,” New Man observed. The boy stood with his hands in his pockets, hanging back. I had never before met anyone who didn’t want to play with puppies.

  “No. We’re thinking the male’s father might be a large breed of some kind, maybe great Dane. Pup’s probably ten weeks old and already pretty big,” Sam Dad replied. “The mother is mostly malamute. The girl there is from a different litter; she’s a boxer mix. Her name is Lacey.”

  “It’s a big dog we’re needing.”

  “Well, unless by big you mean tall, like an Irish wolfhound, you’re not going to get much bigger than a malamute with some Dane in him. Not stockier, anyway. Look at his paws,” Sam Dad noted with a chuckle.

  “Your rescue is in Grand Rapids? A bit of a haul.”

  “Yes, we drove up with some of our bigger dogs. Up here people like large dogs; in the city they like them small. When I head back I’m filling the rescue-mobile with Chihuahuas and Yorkies and other small breeds from shelters around here.”

  I fell on my back so that Lacey would attack my neck. An older woman joined the new man and smiled into the cage, but I was to
o busy being mauled by Lacey to pay her much mind.

  “Like I said,” New Man continued, “it’s the bigger dogs we’re interested in. It’s for my other son, Burke. He was born with a spine problem. The doctors want to wait until he’s older to operate, so he’s in a wheelchair. We need to get a dog to help him around, pull his chair, all of that.”

  “Oh.” Sam Dad shook his head. “There are organizations that train companion animals. It’s hard work. You should contact one of them.”

  “My son says the trained dogs should go to people who have no hope of walking again. He refuses to consider taking a companion dog out of the system.” New Man shrugged. “Burke can be sort of … stubborn about things.”

  The boy with his hands in his pockets snorted and rolled his eyes.

  “That’s enough, Grant,” New Man said. The boy kicked at the dirt.

  “You want to have your son come meet the male? His name is Bailey.”

  New Man, the older lady, and the boy all looked up sharply. Lacey and I caught the sudden motions and froze, wondering what was happening.

  “Did I say something wrong?” Sam Dad asked.

  “It’s just that my family has a history with dogs named Bailey,” New Man explained. “You, uh, mind if we changed his name to something else?”

  “It would be your dog. That’s fine. You want to bring your other son over? Burke?”

  No one said anything for a moment. The older woman touched a light hand to New Man’s shoulder, saying, “He’s … he struggles with people seeing him in the chair right now. He didn’t used to mind, but this last year has been difficult. He’ll be thirteen in June.”

  “Ah, the end of the preteen years,” Sam Dad observed dryly. “I’ve heard about them. I’ve got a few more years before I have to worry—Ava’s only ten.”

  “I think I can make the command decision, here,” New Man declared. “I assume there’s a fee?”

  “Fees and forms,” Sam Dad replied cheerfully.

  The new people went away, talking together. Suddenly the little girl with the dark hair came running back, followed by two adult humans.