The Mountaintop School for Dogs and Other Second Chances (7 page)

He'd been sentenced for an hour, and longer if he didn't calm down, she learned, reading the most recent entry. He was there because a new volunteer failed to put away the broom being used in an area Hank had entered.

“Bite sustained on hand which was holding the broom. Injury far from serious, but volunteer will not be returning,” Mrs. Auberchon read in the report. “The broomstick was also attacked. Wood splinters were removed from his teeth.”

Mrs. Auberchon took a sip of her tea. When she first started with this, it was an experiment she'd agreed to try. She was the only Warden the Sanctuary ever had. In the early days they used long-range walkie-talkies, which were trouble, because sooner or later there'd be static to hurt the dogs' ears, as if the noise were part of a punishment. But then came computers, cameras, speakers, mikes, magic.

She said, “Hello there, Hank.”

He paused, but only for a second. He didn't look up at the shelf her voice was coming from. Sometimes they did. It was always easier when they did, especially when they knew her. But she and Hank had never met.

“Hank,” she said, “I'm here to tell you, you're not alone. I'm sorry I'm late, but it couldn't be helped.”

Hank took a swipe at the door, and Mrs. Auberchon said, “Cut it out. That door's not doing anything but staying closed, at least for now. It's time to be quiet. I want you to sit. Sit, Hank.”

He took two steps and stopped abruptly when she repeated the command in a much firmer way. He dropped to the floor to lie down. Close enough.

“Good,” said Mrs. Auberchon. “Good dog. Good strong dog.”

He was panting hard with anxiety. She often sang with the radio while doing chores, as long as no one else was around, but she'd never worked up the nerve to sing to a dog. She didn't know if anyone might be listening in, which meant the fear that someone—a human—could make fun of her for having no pitch, or no sense of melody, or whatever people said of people who were awful at singing. But she had a pile of books, stacked like a tower beside the tower of her desktop. Some she'd bought herself, some were left by guests, some were brought down from the mountain. What they had in common was that they didn't have people in them, except now and then as minor characters.

The one she wanted was near the bottom of the pile, after
Black Beauty,
Watership Down,
The Story of Ferdinand,
Charlotte's Web, Animal Farm.
It was
The Hobbit.

“I'm going to read to you, Hank,” said Mrs. Auberchon, opening the book.

“‘In a hole in the ground,'” she read, getting right to it, “‘there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.

“‘It had a perfectly round door like a porthole . . .'”

A pop-up box in the corner of the screen startled Mrs. Auberchon. It came with an icon. Only one person messaged her this way. The icon was a Great Dane.

AWESOME CHOICE, MRS. AUBERCHON. PLS. READ THE WHOLE THING. I'M ON DUTY TILL MIDNIGHT.

That boy!

“George, don't interrupt me again, or I'll pick a different book and make sure it's one you don't like, thank you very much,” said Mrs. Auberchon, without changing the tone of her voice, like she was reading the next sentence of the story.

He's the one who gave her the hobbit books. He didn't like it when anyone called him George and left out the Giant, but honestly, a Great Dane? A Great Dane my foot, she was always telling him. If he had to have a dog for a symbol, he'd be better off picking something big and shaggy, like a Newfoundland. She had no idea what his name really was, but that wasn't unusual. So many of them chose new ones, just as the rescues without a past were given names when they arrived. What was Hank's name in his old life? It wasn't as if he could tell her. It wasn't as if he'd choose to remember.

There was nothing more from that boy. Hank turned to his side. He was closer to the heat vent. Mrs. Auberchon's eyes went back to the page, and she took up where she'd left off, all voice, talking and talking and talking.

I
LEFT ANOTHER
voice message for the Sanctuary. This time I stuck up for myself. I was forceful. I said I
wasn't having a good time down here.
I said I expected a reply
momentarily,
with information about going up the mountain to take
the
training course I had paid for in full.

I sat on my bunk to wait for the call back. I kept the door open in case someone from the Sanctuary came looking for me in person. I sat cross-legged, my back straight, my hands on my thighs, as I'd learned to do in a yoga class at the program I used to be in.

The yoga was supposed to be a break from spending all my time on those websites about careers, but I didn't last with it, although I'd done a lot of reading to prepare. After the first class I was asked to never return. I was a failure at following directions about the right way to breathe and how to be quiet and still. And people around me complained that they didn't like how I watched them, which wasn't fair, when I was only trying to follow examples. No one had told me you're not supposed to look at anyone in a roomful of people doing yoga.

My problem with quiet and still, I was told, was that I wasn't being quiet and still from the inside out.

But I didn't want to waste what I knew. I kept my position on the bunk for maybe five minutes, which was five minutes too long, and also boring. I couldn't add to my new log because I didn't know anything new. I couldn't get in touch with anyone from my life of before, because, if I called my former program, all I'd need to say would be “Hi, it's Evie,” and before those words were out of my mouth, any one of those counselors would know from the tone of my voice, like in an auditory X-ray, that I was feeling a little agitated, like I was calling for help, not just to say hi and also talk about abused rescued dogs and how I was stuck in the inn, which I couldn't remember even telling anyone about, because of being so excited and nervous when I was leaving. If I tried to explain my situation, what would it sound like to a counselor? It would sound like, shit, Evie's
back to her previous self.
I couldn't call home because which one should I call first? Who wouldn't ask me first thing if I'd already called the other one? And then my little agitation would change like a washing machine from wash on gentle to a spin so fast, you could pull out the plug and the whole thing would keep shaking.

So I went online to look at dog training websites.

I kept clicking until I hit one that felt like a good place to settle in. It featured a trainer who was about to retire. In his photo he wore a suit and a tie, but he reminded me of the grandfather in
Heidi.

If my counselor hadn't stopped me when I reached the letter
H,
I would have told my group something personal and very specific. I would have confided that, when I was five years old,
Heidi
was the best book ever written. I was certain of that, even though it was the first book I read on my own that contained more words than pictures. If anyone in the group thought I was mistaken about how old I'd been, like five is automatically too young for all those pages, I wouldn't have gotten mad. I wouldn't have been surprised. I'd just say I could never be confused about something as important as my first book, which had
thrilled
me. Maybe I would have talked about what it was like when I didn't know how to stick up for myself when my parents and also stepparents got together with me, like a court of four judges, to discuss how wrong it was for someone in kindergarten to say a book had been read when the book, objectively, was on a whole other level. Maybe I had looked at the words, they said, but looking at words wasn't reading. Did I understand the difference between pretend and real? Did I understand that if I seemed to have a problem with pretend and real, they would call in a child psychologist? They loved me, they said, and I must promise I'd never pretend I'd done something I wasn't able to do. I must promise to never tell another lie. I must wait until I was nine or ten to read things like
Heidi.

It wasn't as if I had a lawyer. All those evenings, I'd been turning the pages of
Heidi,
rapt and excited, and no one noticed? I hadn't read that book in only rooms where I was alone. I hadn't been quiet about it. I'd sounded out words aloud. I'd exclaimed things like
oh no
and
oh yay
at the top of my lungs. I couldn't figure it out. How could they say, “We love you, Evie,” and not know such an important thing about me?

If I'd known ahead of time that you're supposed to be, like, nine or ten to read that book, I never would have told anyone I'd read it. But I think I'll always remember how it felt to fall asleep calmly, happily, my head full of goats and a girl who fit in somewhere, and also the Alps.

I was happy to find the old trainer. I wanted to connect with him through an email, to thank him, and let him know I was putting him in my log. But at the end of his last posting was a black-bordered box containing his obituary.

He had posted data he collected through his long career in dog classes. He'd also been trained as a statistician. His specialty was teaching the type of classes where you actually train the humans, not the animals. Maybe, like the grandfather in
Heidi,
he was inclined to be pessimistic about people, not that I had the feeling his data was skewed by emotions. The last thing he wrote was a question. He asked,
Please can more people be nicer to dogs?

D
ATA, PEOPLE
, in training classes with their dogs.
I learned that 31 percent of people in training with their dogs were observed in the act of punishing them, either during the class or afterward, for failing to meet their expectations. Forms of punishment included shouting at close range, slaps of varying force, and surprise yanks on collars or leashes. There was no difference in the number of these episodes in classes where the trainer spoke out against physical punishment, or outright forbade it. But people who brought electronic devices to administer shocks as training enhancements were never allowed to use those devices. They had to be left at the door, like guns at a security check.

I learned that 38 percent of dog owners in training classes felt anger, frustration, or bitterness toward the breeder, pet store, or shelter the animal was acquired from, as in, “What I received for a pet is not what I had in mind.” The most common complaints were (1) the animal's bad behaviors, such as chewing and leash pulling, had not been disclosed; (2) the owner had been conned into believing the animal would arrive in the home housebroken; and (3) the owner had not been warned (when the dog was acquired as a puppy) what the size of the grown dog would be.

I learned that 40 percent of dog owners who described themselves as “happier in my life in general, due to having a dog,” nevertheless felt strongly that the dog was not a member of his or her family, because families are people and a dog is not a person.

I learned that 52 percent of dog owners admitted to feelings of disappointment and hopelessness due to observations that other people's dogs were doing better than theirs. Of this group, slightly less than half admitted to having these feelings frequently. Of the “frequently” group, more than half answered no to the question “Do you think you could adjust your needs and expectations about your dog?”

I learned that 56 percent of owners in first-time training had to be instructed/reminded to smile at their dogs, especially when their dog felt awful about screwing up some command or routine.

I learned that 88 percent of owners in all levels of training, including puppy classes, answered no to the question “Would you be inclined to turn in your dog to a shelter if you felt your dog hadn't met your expectations?”

And I ended this lesson by wondering, what about that other 12 percent?

Devices, electronic.
Of course I had to look these up. It led me right away to “invisible fences” and “shock collars.”

I watched a few videos of people putting on a shock collar to see what it felt like. I saw that they were shocked by the shock, and they were shocked even more that
it really did hurt, and in a really bad way.

I learned that representatives of dog-shocking companies who go out to the home of new shockers don't like to let the dog owners see them at work, training the animal to get used to the invisible fence, because sometimes it takes an awful lot of zaps before the animal figures out what's going on. I discovered that people whose dogs have shock devices, who did not observe the dog being zapped by a company rep, were far more likely to have positive feelings about the whole thing than people who watched, or people who did the conditioning themselves.

After that, I watched a video about a Weimaraner whose owners bought a house in a new development where invisible fences were already installed, as part of the package. The device collar was waiting for the dog on the kitchen counter, with a brochure explaining “the answer to all your worries about safe, humane containment.” The owners didn't know anything about invisible fences. They'd always lived in buildings in a city. The look of the prongs on the collar made them nervous, but they were willing to give it a try.

They were a middle-aged husband and wife, a little smaller than average, both of them, sort of like my parents. The first thing I thought of when they appeared on my screen was, if they split up, and both remarried soon afterward, would they become the husband and wife of people who were taller and bigger than their original spouses? And if they did, would their dog be in the same position I was, always looking up baffled, because the new wife was such a tower, and the new husband was twice the size of the original one? And the original couple would seem to
shrink?