Mom’s car was down the street, and the boy was leaning out of it, calling, “Bailey!” I took off as fast as I could, in hot pursuit. The car’s taillights flashed brightly and Ethan was out on the street, running to me. “Oh, Bailey, where have you been?” he said, burying his face in my fur. “You are a bad, bad dog.”
I knew being a bad dog was wrong, but the love pouring out of the boy was so strong, I couldn’t help but feel that in this case, being a bad dog was somehow good.
It wasn’t long after my adventure at Todd’s house that I was taken on a car ride to see a man in a clean, cool room. I realized I’d been to a similar place before. Dad drove Ethan and me to the place, and from Dad’s attitude I got the sense that I was somehow being punished, which hardly seemed fair. If anyone belonged in the cool room, in my opinion, it was Todd. He was mean to Linda and he kept me apart from my boy—it wasn’t my fault I had been a bad dog. Nonetheless, I wagged and lay quietly when a needle was slipped into my fur behind my head.
When I awoke I was stiff, sore, and itchy, with a familiar ache low in my belly, and I was wearing a stupid plastic collar, so that my face lay at the bottom of a cone again. Smokey clearly felt this was hilarious, so I did my best to ignore him. In fact, nothing felt better than lying on the cold cement floor of the garage for a few days, my rear legs splayed.
After the collar came off and I was back to my old self, I found that I was less interested in pursuing exotic odors outside the fence, though if the gate was left open I was always happy to explore the neighborhood and see what all the other dogs were up to. I stayed away from Todd’s end of the street, though, and if I saw him or his brother, Drake, playing in the creek, I usually shied away from them, slinking into the shadows the way my first mother had taught me.
I was learning new words every day. Besides being a good dog, and sometimes a bad dog, I was being told more and more that I was a “big” dog, which to me mostly meant that I was finding it harder and harder to arrange myself comfortably on the boy’s bed. I learned that “snow,” which sounded so much like “no,” but was shouted joyously, meant that the world was coated in a cold, white coat. Sometimes we went sledding down a long, steep road, and I usually tried to stay on the sled with Ethan until we crashed. And “spring” meant warm weather and longer days and that Mom spent all weekend digging in the backyard and planting flowers, the dirt smelling so wonderful that when everyone went to school I dug the flowers up, chewing the bittersweet blossoms out of a sense of loyal obligation to Mom, though I eventually spat them all out.
That day I was a bad dog again, for some reason, and even had to spend the evening out in the garage instead of lying at Ethan’s feet while he worked on his papers.
Then one day the kids on the big yellow bus were so loud I could hear them shrieking five minutes before the thing stopped in front of the house. The boy was full of joy when he burst out and ran up to me, his mood so high that I ran around and around in circles, barking extravagantly. We went to Chelsea’s house and I played with Marshmallow, and Mom was happy when she came home, too. And from that time on, the boy didn’t go to school anymore and we could lie in bed quietly instead of getting up for breakfast with Dad. Life had finally gotten back to normal!
I was happy. One day we took a long, long car ride and when we were done we were at the “Farm,” a whole new place with animals and smells I’d never before encountered.
Two older people came out of a big white house when we pulled into the driveway. Ethan called them Grandma and Grandpa and Mom did, too, though later I also heard her call them Mom and Dad, which I dismissed as mere confusion on her part.
There were so many things to do on the Farm that the boy and I spent the first few days on a dead run. An enormous horse stared at me from over a fence when I approached, though she was unwilling to play or do anything but look blankly at me, even when I climbed under the fence and barked at her. Instead of a creek there was a pond, big and deep enough for Ethan and me to swim in. A family of ducks lived on its banks and drove me crazy by taking to the water and paddling away when I approached, but then the mother duck would swim back toward me whenever I grew tired of barking at them, so I’d bark some more.
In the scheme of things, I put ducks right down there with Smokey the cat when it came to their value to the boy and myself.
Dad left after a few days, but Mom stayed with us on the Farm that whole summer. She was happy. Ethan slept on the porch, a room on the front of the house, and I slept right with him and no one even pretended the arrangement should be different. Grandpa liked to sit in a chair and scratch my ears, and Grandma was always slipping me little treats. The love from them made me squirm with joy.
There was no yard, just a big open field with a fence designed to let me in and out at any point I desired, like the world’s longest dog door, only without a flap. The horse, whose name was Flare, stayed inside the fence and spent the day eating grass, though I never saw her throw up once. The piles she left in the yard smelled as if they’d taste pretty good but were actually dry and bland, so I only ate a couple of them.
Having the run of the place meant I could explore the woods on the other side of the fence, or run down and play in the pond, or do just about anything I pleased. I mostly stuck close to the house, though, because Grandma seemed to be cooking delicious meals almost every minute of every day and needed me to be on hand to taste her concoctions to make sure they were acceptable. I was glad to do my part.
The boy liked to put me in the front of the rowboat and push it out in the pond, drop a worm into the water, and pull out a small, wriggling fish for me to bark at. He would then let it go.
“It’s too little, Bailey,” he always said, “but one of these days we’ll catch a big one; you watch.”
Eventually I discovered (much to my disappointment) that the Farm had a cat, a black one, who lived in an old, collapsing building called the barn. She always watched me, crouched in the darkness, whenever I took it into my head to go in there and try to sniff her out. This cat seemed afraid of me and therefore was a major improvement over Smokey, just like everything at this place.
And one day I thought I saw the black cat in the woods and took off in hot pursuit, though she was waddling slowly and, as I got closer, revealed that she was something else entirely, a whole new animal, with white stripes down her black body. Delighted, I barked at her, and she turned and gave me a solemn look, her fluffy black tail held high up in the air. She wasn’t running, which I figured meant she wanted to play, but when I jumped in to paw at her, the animal did a most curious thing, turning away from me, her tail still in the air.
The next thing I knew, a plume of horrid smell enveloped my nose, stinging my eyes and lips. Blinded, yelping, I retreated, wondering what in the world had just happened.
“Skunk!” Grandpa announced when I scratched at the door to be let in. “Oh, you’re not coming in, Bailey.”
“Bailey, did you get into a skunk?” Mom asked me through the screen door. “Ugh, you sure did.”
I didn’t know this word “skunk,” but I knew that something very odd had occurred out there in the woods, and
