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

  Lucas bent down and ran a reassuring hand along my back. “It’s okay, Bella, it can’t hurt you. Look; there’s a deer.”

  I followed Lucas across the room to where a tall and motionless deer stared without seeing into the room. It smelled much the same as the Big Kitten thing. Next, Lucas led me to what had once been a fox.

  We were in a place where animals looked as if they were alive, standing and staring alertly, but they were not.

  I did not like this place.

  Lucas and Olivia walked very slowly, talking quietly. I followed them because I was a good dog, but I kept my eye on the not-Big-Kitten thing. I could not shake the sense that at any minute, she would break from her frozen posture and come to me and rub the top of her head against me and purr, as she had done so many times when we were traveling together.

  During my time with Big Kitten in the mountains, I had missed Lucas so much that, even now, it was unpleasant to recall those days of anxiety and hunger. But now, in this room, it was Big Kitten I missed. I wondered if she ever missed me too; if she’d searched the mountain wilds for her dog, the way I always sniffed for my Big Kitten.

  A man on the other side of the room was setting things on a shelf, and I saw him sit down abruptly, as people sometimes will. He put a hand over his face and slumped forward a bit, as if he were getting ready to sleep. Even from this distance, I picked up some unhappiness in him. Something was wrong with the man.

  He looked like he needed a good dog, and I trotted over to him, trailing my dropped leash, to see if my presence might make him happier. This is something I’m very good at—providing cheer to sad people.

  As I drew right up to him, his face collapsed into a deep frown that didn’t alter as I approached. Everything changed for me in that moment: I recognized the sharp tang of his sweat and the unmistakable odor on his breath.

  Alarmed, I sat at his feet and whined, but no one paid attention—not even him. So, I barked.

  “Bella,” Olivia called from across the room. “No barks!”

  No Barks could not apply here. I was doing as I had been trained. I continued to bark. I was letting everyone know that there was something very wrong with this man.

  “Bella,” Lucas asked me as he and Olivia walked over, “why are you barking?”

  I now held my boy’s focus, so I took the next step. I put both paws on the man’s knees and barked right in his face. The man did not respond normally to that. He only blinked at me in confusion.

  “Sit!” Lucas commanded.

  I sensed the alarm in his voice and knew I had done the right thing. I did Sit. Lucas bent forward and put a concerned hand on the man’s shoulder. “Are you all right, sir?”

  The man nodded. “Yeah. Sorry. Just got a little winded.”

  “Have you ever had a seizure? Do you have any form of epilepsy?”

  The man shook his head. “Not that I know of. Seizure?”

  Lucas nodded in confirmation. “My mother used to have them on a regular basis. Bella always sensed when one was coming on and would signal, like she did just now. There is a high pitch to her bark that we all learned to recognize. We eventually got her trained and certified as a seizure-detection dog. Her signal’s to put her paws up on a person and bark that high bark. Are you sure you’re okay?”

  The man rubbed his chest. “Tell you the truth, I’m having some pretty bad acid reflux lately. I’ve been taking antacids, but they haven’t been helping.”

  “Does the heartburn get worse when you exercise?” Lucas asked.

  The man nodded. “Sure does. Not that I get much exercise. Been meaning to join a gym.”

  “Sir, I am a first-year resident at Denver Medical. I have to say you are presenting like a cardiac patient, and Bella’s signal might mean something’s going on.” Lucas turned to Olivia. “I think it would be a good idea if you called 911,” he observed calmly.

  Olivia nodded and walked away briskly, pulling out her phone.

  “Bella,” Lucas commanded, “you stay.”

  I did Stay, not understanding what we were doing. That same sharp tang was still in the air, more intense than ever. Lucas knelt to peer into the man’s eyes. “I’m going to get my medical kit out of my Jeep. You rest here, all right? I’ll be right back.”

  The man nodded. I watched in alarm as Lucas left the room and then left the building. I was on Stay, but none of this made any sense to me. I did not like it when my boy was out of my sight. Olivia was across the room, still talking to her phone. I whined anxiously, trying to tell her: We need to follow Lucas!

  Moments later my boy was back. I wagged happily, relieved to see him. I also anticipated a treat because of the perfect Stay I was maintaining. Quickly, though, I picked up on his urgency. His movements were hurried as he set a big bag next to the man’s chair. Lucas rummaged around inside as if looking for dog treats, but when he pulled his hand out, he held nothing except a small packet. My boy ripped it open and pulled out a tiny object, and my nose immediately confirmed that, whatever it was, I wouldn’t want to taste it. Lucas put his hand on the sitting man’s shoulder, and the man glumly raised his head.

  “Sir? I want you to chew this aspirin, okay?”

  The man was still sad and still emitting the same acute odor. But I knew my training and I wasn’t supposed to be barking now.

  I wondered if I was still on Stay. I looked to Olivia for guidance, but she continued holding her phone to her face and did not glance my way.

  “Aspirin? Won’t that make my reflux worse?” the man objected. “I was told not to take any aspirin.”

  Lucas shook his head. “No, it’s all right. I don’t think this is reflux, sir. Chew it slowly, please.”

  The man nodded. “It seems like a lot of bother.” He reached out a hand and Lucas handed him the uninteresting treat. The man popped it in his mouth and began chewing, a dour expression on his face.

  I had the sense we were all waiting for something. I glanced back at not-Big-Kitten, feeling almost guilty that, due to these human affairs, I had neglected to check on her. But she had not moved and was still staring vacantly at nothing.

  “How do you feel now?” Lucas asked. “Any change?”

  The man swallowed and shrugged. “Feeling kind of punky now.”

  “Punky?”

  The man’s gaze drooped and became as vacant as the not-Big-Kitten’s.

  “Sir!” Lucas shouted urgently. The man slumped forward and Lucas reached out and grabbed him under his arms and lowered him to the floor. My boy turned, his face taut with tension. “Olivia!”

  Olivia ran across the room, holding her phone. “They’re coming!”

  Lucas was lying with the man now, his head on the man’s chest, kind of like how I sleep with Lucas at night.

  Olivia stared.

  “It’s 1:35 PM and I am starting CPR,” Lucas announced. Olivia put a hand over her mouth and Lucas began pushing on the man’s chest. He was speaking, but not to me. “One, two, three, four…”

  I decided the command to Stay was no longer operative. I eased over to stand next to Olivia because I was afraid and did not understand. She dropped her hand down and smoothed it over the top of my head and I felt safer.

  I glanced in the direction of the door because I heard a loud and familiar noise building in the distance. Sometimes when we are enjoying a car ride, a vehicle will approach us very quickly, making a sound just like this—a high, warbling wail. Moments later, two big trucks pulled up—I could see them out the front windows of the building. The second of the two vehicles was enormous; its wailing cut off abruptly. People jumped down from the truck and opened the door, their footfalls heavy as they charged into the room, carrying boxes. Lucas stood up and backed away from the man on the floor. Two men rapidly snapped open their boxes while a woman knelt and began pressing the sleeping man’s chest, mimicking my boy’s actions.

  “He coded at 1:35. I’ve been doing compressions since,” Lucas reported.

  Olivia put he
r phone into her pocket. “That didn’t take them long at all.”

  Lucas picked up my leash. “Good you called when you did. Let’s give them room.”

  Apparently, we were now going for a walk because we left the place with the man on the floor and the weird not-animals, and stepped out into the sunshine where some men and two women were standing by the big truck and the even bigger truck. I noticed bright lights flashing silently on the roofs.

  I started wagging in joy. I pulled on my leash, dragging my boy toward a heavy man with darker skin, a very good friend I had not seen in a long time.

  Lucas laughed in surprise. “Mack? What are you doing here?”

  Four

  Mack turned and I registered, not for the first time, how much bigger he was than Lucas. Not taller, just thicker. His face opened up in a wide grin, and even that was bigger.

  “Lucas! And my favorite girl, Bella.”

  Mack was one of my old, dear friends, but I no longer saw him on a regular basis for reasons only humans might know. I still accompany Lucas to Work every so often. I go to a big room where everyone knows my name. Often the other person in our family, Mom, is there too. Mom will lead me to rooms to see people. Work is where I first met Mack. He was a sad man who needed me.

  I am a good dog who provides comfort to the men and women who congregate at Work, sensing when they are sad and need special attention. Mom, too, needs my attention sometimes, and I have also learned to let her know when something is wrong, when her skin suddenly flashes hot with a smell similar to the lying-down man in the room of not-animals.

  Mack knelt down to see me.

  “You live up here now, Mack?” Olivia asked.

  Mack stroked my fur. “Sure do.”

  About the time Lucas and Olivia moved to a new house and took me, but didn’t take Mom with us, Mack stopped showing up at Work. His absence was immediately apparent. I noticed the lack of his scent at once, and his odors gradually faded from soft chairs and couches. Humans come and go and dogs have to adjust, but as long as I never had to say goodbye to Lucas, I accepted this as just being part of life.

  Mack was still giving me that broad grin. I wagged because he was happy. When I first met him, he had been a sad and quiet man, but over time he seemed to gain strength. I jumped up to lick his face.

  “Oh, you pretty girl, Bella,” he praised. He was telling me he loved me; I could feel it in the soft stroking of his hands. “I miss our conversations, Miss Bella.” He held his face in position so that I could lick both cheeks. “Okay, Bella. Okay,” he sputtered as I planted a kiss directly in his mouth, “that’s enough.” He stood up. “Man, it’s good to see you two.”

  They all hugged. I wagged.

  “I had no idea you had moved to Summit County,” Lucas said.

  Mack was still grinning. “It wasn’t long after your wedding. I drove up to Frisco for a weekend and stayed the summer. Got a job cutting down all the trees hit by the pine beetle. Acres and acres of lodgepoles, all of ’em dead and ready to burn. The county realized they needed to be better prepared for forest fires, and some positions opened up with the department.”

  Lucas gestured to the two trucks, then to Mack. “It makes me feel good to see you like this, Mack—working for Fire and Rescue, I mean.”

  Mack nodded. “I know what you’re saying. Far cry from being inpatient at the VA, isn’t it? Part of me thinks that as much help as I was getting at the hospital, with Bella the amazing super support dog and the twelve steps and Doctor Gans, I really needed to break away, get a change of scenery. I came up here and, well, obviously I’m not a soldier anymore, but fighting fires seemed like the closest civilian thing to it. I applied almost a year ago, but they just put me on as a regular in the past thirty days.”

  “Long time to wait for a call back,” Olivia observed.

  Mack shrugged. “Well, up to then, I’d been a volunteer in training, so I was working and learning the job. I can’t tell you what it means to me to be doing this, to have a regular job, helping people. Speaking of … how’s your mom?”

  Lucas nodded. “Better than ever. She’s out of state attending a school for training therapy dogs. She says she wants to do it more than anything.”

  “Because of Bella,” Olivia added.

  “You’re a good dog, Bella,” Mack said softly.

  It was nice to have everyone talking about me. I decided a good Sit was in order and waited patiently for Lucas to notice.

  “So, catch me up. You still in medical school?” Mack asked.

  Lucas shook his head. “Graduated. Now I’m doing my residency at Denver Medical. And Olivia’s a full-on vet tech. She works for an animal rescue outfit. I thought my schedule was impossible, but as long as there’s one more pet to save, she doesn’t stop.”

  “Your schedule is impossible,” Olivia mock-scolded him.

  The door to the place with the not-animals opened and the three people trundled out the lying-down man on a rolling bed. He was wearing a plastic cup on his face and a machine on his chest. For a moment, no one spoke. I kept doing Sit.

  Olivia pulled her phone out. “Mack, give me your number. We come up here camping all the time. We’ll be in touch.”

  “That would be great.”

  I watched curiously as the rolling bed was loaded into the big boxy truck that was parked behind the huge truck near us. This was a day of many events that a dog could only observe without comprehending.

  Mack and Olivia stood with their phones pointed toward each other.

  “Hey, Mack, let me know what winds up happening. To the guy, I mean,” Lucas requested. “It’s the first time I’ve done CPR on anything other than a mannequin.”

  “You okay?” Olivia asked him.

  Lucas shrugged. “Yeah. I mean, I just went with my training and wasn’t really thinking. But now I just want him to survive.” He gave them a half-smile. “I know what I’m saying sounds a little strange.”

  “No problem,” said Mack. “I’ll follow up. And I don’t think it’s strange at all. I think that’s how it goes. The paramedics talk about that sort of thing, how running code blue on somebody makes you feel responsible or something. Well, my ride’s leaving, I’d better go.”

  He hugged everybody, especially me. I licked him in the face, loving him, glad that we had finally reconnected and hoping we would see him soon. I sensed, though, that he would not be coming back to sleep with us in the soft-sided room. He would be leaving with his friends. This is what people do—get in vehicles and drive away, sometimes with dogs, sometimes without.

  When the two trucks rumbled off, they no longer made the hideously loud wail, though I heard one of them start up again once it rounded the corner. Far in the distance, a dog answered the truck with a lone, thin howl.

  Olivia put her hand on my Lucas’s shoulder. “You sure you’re okay?”

  My boy lifted his shoulders and let them drop. “I’ve just never had the experience of having someone’s life literally in my hands.”

  “Let’s take a minute, let Bella run around in the park,” she suggested.

  We walked toward the clean, powerful smell of a river rushing loudly under a bridge, and then we walked along the stream until we came to a grassy, open area. Lucas unclipped my leash. I stared up at him. “Well, go on, silly,” Lucas urged with a smile.

  I put my nose down, inhaling the dog and people smells from the grass, then froze in utter shock. A squirrel was quietly bounding along, stopping every so often to dig in the dirt, seemingly oblivious that there was a dog right here!

  I crept forward, head low, confident I would catch the creature this time. I was so focused I did not notice a small dog, belly close to the ground, racing across the field.

  The squirrel raised himself up on its two back legs and stared at this other looming threat. I made my move, my nails digging in the dirt. The squirrel unfroze and launched himself toward the bushes on the riverbanks. He clung to a set of low branches, which bowed under his w
eight. He sagged closer to me. I could still catch him!

  The small dog reached the base of the bush at the same moment, but it was too late. The other dog was male and immediately lifted his leg, even as the squirrel leapt nimbly to a thin tree and scrabbled up to the top.

  How lifting a leg was supposed to do any good at all was something only a male dog could understand. I sniffed the area to be polite, but did not engage when the small dog play-bowed.

  Big Kitten understood how to hunt. This dog clearly didn’t. When I flushed prey, Big Kitten would remain motionless, tracking with her eyes, and not waste energy bounding after something she couldn’t catch, even if we were hungry. Whereas this dog had blundered right into the middle of my stalking advance. I obviously would have caught the squirrel if it hadn’t been for the little male dog interfering.

  Another dog, also male, ran over from where his people released him from his leash, and that made it okay to play with the little dog. The three of us chased one another, stopping only so the males could mark a shrub or a big rock. Then someone threw a ball and we chased that, though once the big male had it in his mouth, there was nothing left to do but return to Lucas and Olivia.

  Lucas snapped my leash onto my collar and we walked back to where we had met up with Mack, but he and the loud trucks had not returned, so we climbed into the Jeep for … a car ride!

  I sat in the back seat, my head out the window, smelling animals on the wind—odors that in no way resembled the smell of the animals not-alive in that odd room with the glass boxes.

  I did not believe the big, frozen cat was Big Kitten after all. I had made the mistake of trusting my eyes and not my nose. I felt better now—I liked to think of Big Kitten out in the wild and not standing rigid in a dusty room with a sick man lying on the floor. Though now, as hard as I tried, I couldn’t find her scent anywhere in the air currents.