A Dog's Courage--A Dog's Way Home Novel Read online

  After dinner, Lucas and Olivia and I crawled into the small room where we slept when we were on Jeep car rides. This was our second night and, if past behavior was any guide, we would soon be driving back home to sleep on our bed inside our house.

  I didn’t mind where I slept, as long as I was with my boy. I fussed to get the soft blankets just right, but eventually settled in between Lucas and Olivia. As I did so, a warmth rose up from within me, because I was with the people who loved me and I loved them. Since the moment I first met Lucas, I knew the two of us belonged together. The reason I never gave up on my long trek back home was because I was his dog. On my travels I met several people who were nice to me and wanted to take care of me, but there was only one Lucas.

  As often as I dreamed of Big Kitten, I dreamed of my boy, running with me, or feeding me treats.

  Not long after Lucas zipped the door closed, I heard something rustling in the plants outside in the night and raised my head and gave a low warning growl.

  “Bella, no barks, okay?” Lucas murmured sleepily.

  “Lucas, no snores, okay?” Olivia replied.

  Lucas chuckled in the dark. “I’ve read that wives often pretend that their husbands snore, just so the poor guys will feel guilty.”

  “I’ve read that when men snore, their wives will dump water on them just to make the poor guys feel wet,” Olivia countered.

  Lucas propped himself up on an elbow. “You snore sometimes and I’ve never complained.”

  “That’s because your snoring drowns mine completely out.”

  “Well, see how lucky you are?”

  Olivia laughed. “This thing you do where you pretend to be really dumb is pretty funny.”

  “Glad I amuse you.”

  “Maybe sometime in the future you could pretend to be smart. Like for my birthday, maybe,” Olivia teased. “Just one day. The rest of the year you can go back to playing dumb.”

  They were grinning at each other. Lucas reached over me and touched Olivia’s shoulder, and I wagged because his arm was resting on my back. “Hey.”

  “Hey what.”

  “I love you, Olivia Ray.”

  “I love you, Lucas Ray.”

  I heard a rustling sound and growled again.

  “Bella, no snores,” Lucas intoned.

  “No snores, Bella,” Olivia agreed.

  I wondered what they were telling me.

  “I have a surprise for you tomorrow,” Lucas remarked after a long moment of silence.

  Olivia stirred. I opened my eyes but didn’t otherwise react. “Surprise? What is it?” she demanded.

  “Well, clearly, I can’t say—that’s the nature of a surprise. Surely someone has told you that before.”

  “Does it rhyme with ‘whirl wecklass’?”

  “Go to sleep, Olivia.”

  “How about ‘wuby wing’?”

  Lucas laughed. “Go to sleep. You’ll find out tomorrow.”

  Two

  The next morning, we left the small room with the soft sides still standing and took a car ride in the Jeep. This meant bumpy roads, the vehicle swaying, and wonderful, wild odors streaming in through the open windows. To me a car ride is a car ride and they are all wonderful, but I did understand that when we were in the Jeep it was for a different, more adventurous experience.

  I sat in the back seat while Lucas drove and Olivia was buckled in next to him in the front. They were talking, but I heard no words I recognized. Trying to understand what people are saying is not generally rewarding for a dog. I’ve found it’s much better to stick a head out the open window and watch for animals to bark at. Any dog I see out walking requires that I challenge them. They don’t usually respond, but they will stare at me in amazement as I pass.

  Cats don’t pay any attention, but I bark at them as well. I love cats and often try to bark them into a good mood, which never really works. I sometimes bark at squirrels, but I’d rather chase them. Birds I ignore, because who cares about birds during a car ride?

  Olivia reached her hand out to touch Lucas on the neck. They smiled at each other. I felt love flowing between the two of them, and I wagged.

  Olivia was not living with Lucas when he and I first met. Her scent only gradually came to mingle with his, as if she were an outside cat getting used to living with people a little at a time. My mother cat was like that—she cowered from humans when we all lived under that house, but now there was a woman she trusted and lived with.

  I had not seen my mother cat in a long time, but the last time we met, she was happy.

  “You know, I would have been fine to cook you a breakfast,” Olivia told Lucas.

  He smiled at her, “I know you would. But this restaurant in Frisco has the most amazing cinnamon rolls.”

  Olivia laughed at him. “How are cinnamon rolls part of your diet plan?”

  He shrugged. “So maybe it’s a cheat day.”

  “Maybe?” Olivia snorted. Then she drew back. “Wait a minute. Is that my surprise? Cinnamon rolls?”

  “Um … ‘minnamon molls’?”

  Olivia swatted him playfully on the shoulder.

  Lucas grinned at Olivia. “What, are you saying you aren’t surprised? It isn’t better than a ‘wuby wing’?”

  “I think maybe I need to explain the nature of a surprise for your wife,” she informed him loftily. “Cinnamon rolls are a surprise for you.”

  Lucas shook his head. “No, I already knew about them.”

  I did not spot any dogs until we bumped our way down a steep road and entered what I could smell was a town. Then I saw many dogs, a lot of them off their leashes, running and playing. Lucas kept saying, “No barks,” which I took to mean that he didn’t understand the rule about dogs seen from the car. I had to bark.

  There are a lot of things people could learn from dogs, but they are usually too busy to pay much attention.

  When we stopped and jumped out, I was only slightly disappointed when Lucas snapped the leash onto my collar with an audible click. This town was a place where some dogs could run free and some dogs had to be tethered. Come to think of it, most places are like that.

  I was delighted to lead Olivia and Lucas down the sidewalk as the summer sun coaxed wonderful odors from the cement surface. I sat with them at an outside table with a big cloth providing shade overhead.

  I patiently waited for bacon to fall to the sidewalk under my feet, knowing that if I stared intently enough at Lucas, he would not be able to resist.

  “No begging, Bella,” Lucas warned me.

  I wagged because if he was talking to me, bacon must not be far behind.

  Moments before it was upon us, I heard a gathering roar coming hard out of the hills. Across the street I saw a dog on a leash jerk its head upright, and knew he sensed it, too. Something big was approaching: a huge, unsettling change. When the howling wind slapped us, Lucas and Olivia both jumped in surprise and a piece of paper Lucas held in his lap went flying. I watched with interest as it danced down the sidewalk, almost worth chasing, except I knew from experience that most paper was tasteless.

  “Whoa!” Lucas exclaimed as things rattled and cloth snapped. “Out of nowhere!”

  A glass fell over and a sweet liquid ran off the table and onto the cement. I licked at it. Lucas and Olivia jumped to their feet.

  “Grab everything!” Olivia urged.

  A small piece of bread bounced down and I was on it instantly, crunching in gratitude while my people gathered things from the table. As I chewed, the cloth over our heads jolted and banged and then lifted straight up into the air.

  This interested me. I had never seen anything like it, and wondered why Lucas had done it.

  “The umbrella!” Olivia cried.

  I watched as the big cloth thing, now upside down, smashed into the sidewalk and started to skitter down the street. Lucas turned as if to pursue it, but then stopped. Within moments, it tumbled and bounced and then vanished around the corner, chased by grit and sand and
small bits of paper.

  The wind was whistling and shrieking with such intensity that I couldn’t sort out all the smells that were gusting at me. I wagged, though, when a nice woman stepped through a door and out to talk to me. She was the one who had brought Lucas his bacon earlier, so I thought of her as a friend. The door slammed with a forceful bang behind her.

  “Do y’all want to come inside?” she asked, raising her voice to be heard.

  I heard the question, but not the word “bacon,” so I wasn’t sure if she was addressing me.

  Olivia blinked in the swirling dust. “Is it okay? We have Bella.”

  I looked up at the sound of my name. The woman smiled, reaching for the plates on the small table. “This is Frisco. Everyone loves dogs and nobody complains,” the woman assured Olivia. “Last November, one of the locals entered his dog in the contest for mayor, and we had to do the election over because the dog won.”

  Whatever she was doing sent another small piece of toast skittering across the sidewalk. I strained at my leash, but it remained out of reach.

  “Do you want me to go get the umbrella?” Lucas offered.

  “It flew down the street and made a right turn on red,” Olivia added.

  The woman shook her head. “I have two daughters. Every snowboarder in town has a crush on ’em. They see my umbrella blowing by, they’ll grab it. Probably there’s a fistfight going on right now to see which one gets to bring it back.”

  Another woman came out to help take plates, but I was too preoccupied with staring at the fallen toast to greet her properly. Bacon-bringing-woman wrestled with the other cloth covers that were still standing on poles in the centers of empty tables nearby. Lucas stepped forward to help, lifting them and collapsing them.

  “Thanks—just set them there against the building, I’ll send someone to get them,” she advised.

  Lucas placed the cloth things, now folded skinny, up against the wall. Then he, Olivia, and I followed the woman into the building.

  I was astonished. Were we really going to leave the toast lying on the sidewalk?

  Once inside, it was instantly less noisy than out in the wind. The sweet smells all around me were quite intriguing—perhaps something in here would help me get past the tragedy of the lost toast. People were sitting, and talking, and chewing, and much of what they were eating was food a dog would be interested in. I wondered if any of them knew that.

  Lucas smiled his thanks as Bacon-bringing-woman led us to a table and the woman carrying plates set them down. “Wow,” Lucas marveled, “huge wind.”

  Bacon-bringing-woman nodded. “That’s the Rocky Mountains,” she agreed cheerfully. “One minute, absolutely still. The next, it’s like you have a hurricane. We call it ‘windshield season’ because you have to call the auto glass people every year around this time.”

  She left, trailing the faint odor of bacon behind her. Some food remained on my boy’s plate, though, and in response I did Sit with such dedicated rigidity that Lucas eventually took notice. “Hey, are you going to finish your omelet?” he asked Olivia.

  “You mean after that surprise ‘minnamon moll’ you’re still hungry?”

  “I think Bella might be interested in some of the cheese.”

  I cocked my head. Aside from my name, there was a word in there that I both recognized and treasured. Lucas leaned forward and reached his hand out to Olivia’s plate. “Hey, Bella,” he crooned softly. “Would you like a t-i-i-iny piece of cheese?”

  T-i-i-iny piece of cheese! I focused on his fingers, nearly trembling, as they descended slowly, the delicious bouquet of cheese pouring from his hand. My nose was twitching and I was licking my lips. Finally, the morsel of deliciousness came all the way down within reach. As gently as I had ever done anything in my life, I took the t-i-i-iny piece of cheese from between his fingers, my mouth exploding with the flavor.

  T-i-i-iny piece of cheese was one way that I knew Lucas loved me.

  There was no more bacon, though.

  It was a very friendly place, with people stopping to coo over me as they passed our table. Most of them offered a hand to sniff and I easily detected sweets and meats. I knew from experience, though, that they wouldn’t be giving me any treats. They weren’t that friendly.

  Humans possess the power to conjure up food items of remarkable delicacy, yet they actually spend little time eating. It’s one of the most baffling things about people—they can produce treats at will, yet they seldom think to do so.

  After a time, Bacon-bringing-woman came and took away all the plates.

  “Hey, let’s go check out that museum,” Lucas suggested.

  “Don’t you want to get back to our campsite?”

  “We’ll hike,” he agreed, “but I’ve never been in there and neither has Bella.”

  “You think dogs are allowed?”

  “In a town where dogs run for mayor?”

  When we left the restaurant, I immediately swerved to the table beneath which I had last seen my toast, but it was gone.

  I loved my boy, but he had taken me inside without regard for the food on the ground, and now some other undeserving creature had snatched up my treat.

  I was sure Olivia and Lucas were as devastated over the loss as I was, but we had someplace to go, so I tugged at my leash as we crossed the street. I did not know where we were headed, but I would strongly lead Lucas there nonetheless.

  He pushed open a door and we entered an old, musty-smelling, creaky building. Odors wafted toward me, strange and never before encountered. I wagged, not understanding what we were doing, but happy we were doing it.

  It turned out to be one of those places where Lucas and Olivia wanted to walk slowly and stop often and talk to each other. So I did a lot of Sit, and I scratched behind my ear, and I yawned, and I wondered if it would be good dog behavior if I flopped down on the floor for a nap.

  There were tall boxes made of wood and glass, and Lucas and Olivia kept stopping and staring at them. “That’s so beautiful,” Olivia admired, touching a finger to the glass.

  There was something inside the box, but from where I sat, I couldn’t tell what it was.

  “Though grey wolves are not officially reestablished in Colorado, there have been a number of sightings that suggest they’ve made their own way into the state from Wyoming and other places where they’ve been reintroduced,” Lucas said. “This specimen was shot and killed outside Monarch in 1939.”

  “I love it when you use your NPR voice,” Olivia mocked gently.

  Lucas grinned at her. “I just thought it would be easier for you to understand if I read it to you than if you read it to yourself.”

  “Well, most of it was completely over my head, of course, but maybe you could mansplain things to me in simpler words,” she teased. “For example, do you know what stuffed animals are stuffed with?”

  “Of course,” Lucas replied smugly.

  “What?”

  “They’re mostly stuffed with … stuff.”

  Olivia laughed.

  We would move forward a little bit, then stop, and then start again, like a male dog marking territory. This is the type of behavior a good dog puts up with.

  Finally, Lucas pulled me around the corner of one of the boxes and I stopped absolutely still. The fur on my neck rose as a sensation like a shiver moved along my spine. I stared in disbelief.

  There, standing in front of me, eyes glittering and teeth visible in a partial snarl, was my old friend.

  Big Kitten.

  Three

  Lucas chuckled. “Bella thinks that cougar is real.”

  “If I saw it out of the corner of my eye, I’d probably have a heart attack. I mean, it’s kind of freaky how alive it looks,” Olivia admitted.

  I heard my name but did even not glance at Lucas. My attention was focused on the creature in front of me. In every way it looked like Big Kitten, and even smelled a little like Big Kitten. She was posed in a familiar stance, so cat-like and powerful. What
often seemed to me a cautious posture in housecats was always, for Big Kitten, a languid, serene confidence. As her hunting companion I never felt threatened by her athletic limbs or great, deadly claws. But now I saw a terrible menace in her posture, aggressively making a stand in a human dwelling.

  It was Big Kitten. And yet, as I stared, I realized it wasn’t her at all. This creature stood motionless and did not track my movements with her eyes. An involuntary growl found its way out of my throat as I faced this unnatural apparition. What was this Big Kitten–like thing that was at once her and not her? I did not understand and I felt vulnerable and afraid. Big Kitten seemed unnaturally different, and I wondered if Olivia and Lucas could be in jeopardy.

  “It’s okay, Bella,” he whispered to me. “It’s just taxidermy. It’s not real. It can’t hurt us.” Lucas stepped forward and put his hand on the Big Kitten thing, stroking its forehead as if it were a dog. The thing did not react, didn’t lift its head and purr as I knew Big Kitten would if Lucas touched her.

  What had happened to her? She was as still as death, but she didn’t smell dead. She didn’t smell alive, either. Mostly, she smelled like this dusty, dry room. My eyes told me this was my friend, but my nose told me nothing at all.

  Lucas beckoned to me. “It’s okay, Bella. Come see.”

  I knew the word “come.” I took several cautious steps forward, still feeling the tension in my every limb. I was ready to flee or fight, bite or bark.

  Neither Lucas nor Olivia seemed at all frightened, though, so I finally approached the frozen cat close enough to thoroughly sniff it up and down its length. Was this really Big Kitten?

  Olivia petted the cat-thing on the head as well. “You don’t think about how huge these creatures are until you see something like this.”

  “These felids, you mean,” Lucas corrected. Olivia smiled.

  I picked up odors of human hands and chemicals and, very faintly, something that had once been alive but now was as stiff as a corpse long dead by the side of the road. I looked up at Lucas and wagged, completely confused. This might have been Big Kitten at one point. If so, something had changed her so absolutely she was now a not-cat, a not-animal. My fur still a ridge along my spine, I growled again.