The Mountaintop School for Dogs and Other Second Chances (15 page)

Hank had expanded his pacing technique to include loops, which meant circling whatever he planned to clear. For now, he only wanted to learn a good way of getting the other dogs to like it when he jumped over them. He was saying, is there such a thing as an Olympics for dogs? If there is, don't think I'm training for anything but hurdles.

Tasha was telling me she was impressed I'd made it to the top of the mountain, but in case I'd forgotten, she was still a Rottweiler, which meant she could do whatever she wanted. Would I never mind all this stuff about learning? However, she loved it when I sang to her at the inn. That was a memory she'd decided to keep. So please, would I stroke her polka dots, and make like Julie Andrews in
The Sound of Music,
and just sing to her?

Shadow was depressed. He was telling me he didn't want anyone to send out applications for him to SAR programs, because he was sure he'd never get accepted, and anyway, he'd probably flunk the requirement of basic obedience. He would never overcome having spent his childhood outdoors on a chain. Yes, he'd been able to learn that he couldn't pee or poop indoors. Yes, he was using his voice again. Yes, those were victories, but he was sure there could never be more. He felt he was too disadvantaged to keep learning. And, sorry about this, but following the example of Josie, he wanted nothing to do with me, as if we'd never known each other at all.

Obedience.
I do not agree that a trainee should have to obey any old thing the runners of the program insist on, due to their feeling that Evie, you can't teach obedience to a dog unless you know what it feels like yourself. (To be continued.)

Patience.
Working on it.

Pity.
Never have. Not for abused rescued dogs, if you're the one who has to train them. Totally say no to it,
no matter what happened to them.
Pity's too easy. It rushes all through you like a drug, and then you don't feel anything but the rush. This is easier than sitting down with the dog and wondering, like an actual question you would like to have answered: so, what's it really like inside that fur?

Probation.
What I was on in the inn, not that I knew it.

Real.
You cannot be fake with dogs. They watch you. They X-ray you. They scan you. They try to smell your bum and your crotch. They stick their noses in your ears. One minute after they meet you, they know things about you that you don't know yourself. On a website I didn't spend time on, just before I found the one with the Heidi's-grandfather trainer, I saw a banner with a slogan urging people to have dogs. It said, “Get real. Get a dog.” I didn't know then that I needed to take that literally.

Sayings.
You can't rely on just words with a dog. You can't just let out a saying that, to a human, represents an important or hoped-for thing, such as “I love you.” A human who is hearing those words might be okay with just having the words, because maybe the human thinks the only thing love is, is when someone says so. But maybe the human—for example, me—is not so okay with that anymore.

You can tell a dog “I love you” over and over, every single day, and absolutely, 100 percent of the time, the dog isn't going to look at you with the eyes of someone who feels loved by you, just because you said so, even if you said so in a very nice way. The dog is going to look at you like, what the fuck? What is this person talking about? What do I have to do to get this person to love me?

Seven.
They're making me start my training with three new dogs on top of my starter four? Me and seven dogs? And I'm the only trainee they have?

Terrier, Scottish.
The seventh, last dog on my roster. Female, age approximately nine, which makes her the eldest. Her name is Dora. She'll join later, when she's out of the infirmary. I don't know anything about the surgery she had.

Zip it!
A good thing to say to a noisy, disruptive dog. Much better than, “Shut up! Or I'll take you outside and push you off this mountain!”

D
APPLE, THE NEW
spotted hound, was a local, from the village.

I'd seen the notes on her. I'd thought from the notes that she was an ordinary mixed breed, not that I'm saying there's anything ordinary about dogs made of mixes—or in fact, any dog at all.

“Dapple. Female,” said the notes.

 

Treeing Walker Coonhound/Hound Mix. Age approximately three. Was delivered without collar or identification by anonymous person who left quickly, providing zero information. Underweight. Sensitive to light; may have vision issues. Highly nervous. Unsocialized. Fearful. Passive. Withdrawn. Not on medication. Will be monitored closely. Decision was made not to crate or confine. Showed zero prior experience with collar and leash, but after several attempts, became willing. Shows delight in outdoors and snow.

 

On the afternoon Dapple was kidnapped from the Sanctuary grounds, I was telling Boomer my troubles in the front room.

That's where Giant George found me. I was sort of in Boomer's crate with him. Mostly I was lying curled up on the floor at his open door, his paws on my shoulders, his golden mane all over my face, his big old shaggy head on top of mine. He was totally there for me. I felt partly like a scullery maid in a British import on PBS, bringing my woes to the butler, and partly like the cub of a lion.

It was my first time finding out what it's like to be held in the arms of someone who has no arms. I felt his breath in my hair, along with some drool. I felt his sleepy, Zen-like quiet, his jaw against my skull, his paw pads on the other side of my bones and skin and sweatshirt. He was good at holding. He was doing a better job with me than I'd ever done with myself.

What was I telling him? I was telling him about my classroom failures, and how maybe I could switch to washing pots and pans for the Sanctuary staffers, and spend the rest of my time picking up poop and cleaning crates and kennels, things like that, because I didn't want to leave, but obviously, as probably everyone else knew already, I wasn't going to make it as a trainer. Plus I was telling him how weird it felt to be a student in a training program where no one was actually teaching me—at least, not in an organized, normal way. I didn't even have a textbook! The only stuff I had in writing was the stuff I composed on my own!

I decided to put a positive spin on my entire situation. I found myself describing to Boomer something I'd read in my yoga period, about a young monk-in-training in a Buddhist monastery, maybe eight or nine centuries ago. The student monk was mystified about the way he was left on his own so much. The only instructions he received were given to him in questions, like “Why aren't you glad to be washing the rice pots today?” The student monk became despondent. He wondered if his teachers, who weren't acting like teachers, had despaired of him, finding him unworthy, inadequate, stupid, a loser. Then one day, after an elderly big-deal monk asked him to sweep fallen leaves off one of their outdoor meditation patios, he spoke up. What, the student wondered, would that teach him? What did dead leaves have to do with his program of training? Shouldn't he at least have something in mind while his hands did the sweeping? Some Zen thing to ponder? Something profound and also practical, in terms of his future? And the teacher-monk answered him, of course, with a question, a long one: “Why would anyone want to think of anything except fallen leaves while sweeping fallen leaves, and why would anyone think fallen leaves are not profound, and why would anyone need a teacher for anything that needs to be discovered from fallen leaves?”

I explained to Boomer that in order to feel a little calmer about the reality of my own training and future, I was mentally changing “fallen leaves” to “Sanctuary dogs.” It was a leap of imagination, I explained. He seemed proud of me, although I had the feeling I'd lost him when I mentioned rice pots. He probably took it literally. He was such a food guy, he was probably imagining I'd magically produce one, so he could lick it.

“Evie, you have to get up.”

I hadn't heard Giant George come in. He was geared for outside, in his Sanctuary ranger jacket. He looked down at me with a solemn, worried expression. I thought he felt sorry for me for hanging around Boomer and acting like such a baby.

“We have to re-kidnap Dapple,” he said.

“What?”

“We have to go to town and rescue Dapple.”

Boomer's ears went right up. I could feel the little buzz from his brain-jolt of recognition. He knew what the look on Giant George's face was saying, and why that somber, edgy tone was in his voice. He knew the word
rescue
. I could tell it was high on his personal vocabulary list, along with his words about eating, being comfortable, being a golden, doing his job.

Rescue.
It had happened to Boomer, or he wouldn't be here. The only thing known about his old life was that he'd been found as a stray when he was still a very young guy. There weren't any notes on him. But I'd picked up the awareness that he wasn't the type of stray who gets accidentally lost one day and no one could be found to reclaim him. He was the type of stray who escaped a bad home. He had waited for a chance to break free, having figured out that whatever was being done to him was just plain wrong. I don't know how I knew this about him. I just knew it.

Maybe he had ESP with Dapple. Maybe he knew she didn't have a chance to turn herself into a stray.

I felt Boomer nudging me away from him, like a lion telling his cub to grow the hell up. The other crates in the room were empty except for one, open-doored, where Alfie the greyhound had curled himself up in the shape of a crescent moon. He was ignoring us. I looked at the suede of his fur, his skinny triangle of a face, his big eyes like a drawing of an alien by a child, maybe a drawing I'd done myself. I was always drawing aliens, and all of them were supposed to come to life and hang around with me. I used to think the reason they didn't was that I hadn't figured out the right words to say to them.

No eye contact, Alfie was telling me, turning his head. If he sensed the vibrations of the alarm Giant George had brought in, he kept it to himself. But being near Boomer made me feel confident.

I'll get to you later, Alfie, I messaged him. If you think you're not coming to life, you are
wrong.

Now I was up on my feet. About an hour before, I'd seen one of the staffers pass by a window with Dapple on a leash, headed through deep snow for the easier walking on the road. I'd only looked long enough to see which of the four women she was. I'd stopped thinking of them as four strangers, but I was still in the process of undoing the way I was branded with them from my first Sanctuary supper: the Dark Gray One, the Forest Green One, the Light Gray One, the Navy Blue One. Unfortunately for me, they didn't wear the same colors all the time.

I'd seen that the one walking Dapple was Light Gray, and now she was surrounded by the other three in her room. She had walked much farther down the road than they usually did.

Giant George was told she'd broken no bones when she fell. She was a little deaf, and wasn't wearing her hearing aid. She had not heard the approaching car until it was nearly upon her. She didn't recognize the driver, a woman, or the passenger, a man. She wouldn't have connected them to Dapple. But when Dapple dropped her tail and went limp and shaky on her leash, she understood, too late, who they were.

The leash was a long one. She didn't have time to pull Dapple toward her. The man had jumped out of the car, had taken hold of Dapple by the collar, yanking the leash from her hand. Giant George was calling her Margaret. So I could change her name from Light Gray. She had lost her balance and fallen sideways. She was seventy-six. It was lucky the road was snowy.

Margaret. Staffer, female. Seventy-six. Hard of hearing. In her room, distraught, angry, frantic, blaming herself, refusing comfort,
and what was happening to Dapple right now?

The car with Dapple had gone down the hill in reverse. The walls of snowbanks were too high for a turnaround. Dapple hadn't wanted to get into that car. You can't call police or the sheriff on a case of having dog owners take back their dog from the place the dog was brought from being kidnapped from home.

Rescue.
Flashing in me was the thought of Dalmatians and Cruella De Vil. But that was all right. It took off the edge. It made me feel brave, like maybe I could actually do this.

“We have a description of the car and the guy,” said Giant George. “The driver, not so much. It only took a call to Mrs. Auberchon to find out where we're going.”

Boomer came out of his crate. He licked Giant George's hand, then mine, like he was wishing us good luck. I went over to Alfie to say bye, hoping maybe he'd do the same. He had closed his eyes. He wasn't asleep. I knew he was faking. I squatted and reached in the crate to pat him. He pretended he didn't feel it, and I wondered if he was afraid someone would show up to grab him and put him back on a track. Maybe he thought being rescued was a temporary thing, like being brought outdoors to do his business.

I said to Giant George, “The first thing you did was call Mrs. Auberchon?”

“She knows everyone. Get your coat, and hurry.”

“Wait. Is Mrs. Auberchon coming with us?”

“Evie, no,” he said, looking at me the same way the dogs looked at me in class, as if mystified about why I kept saying things that were stupid. “Mrs. Auberchon's busy with Dora in the infirmary.”

“Wait. She came up? I thought she never does.”

“She didn't. She doesn't. Oh, never mind. Get your
coat.
”

I gave no further thought to Mrs. Auberchon. Five minutes later when I went down the front steps, I found the Jeep warming in neutral, Giant George at the wheel. I remembered he couldn't drive in the outside world. I mentioned this as soon as I was in.