it was followed by something odder still—wrinkling up his nose at me, the boy took me out into the yard and wetted me down with a hose. He held my head while Grandma carted up a basket of tomatoes from the garden and squeezed the tart juices all over my fur, turning it red.
I couldn’t see how any of this helped matters any, particularly since I was then subjected to the indignity of what Ethan informed me was a bath. Perfumed soap was rubbed into my wet fur until I smelled like a cross between Mom and a tomato.
I had never been so thoroughly humiliated in my life. When I was dry, I was consigned to the porch, and though Ethan slept out there with me, he kicked me out of his bed.
“You stink, Bailey,” he said.
The assault on my person thus complete, I lay on the floor and tried to sleep despite the riot of odors wafting around the room. When morning finally came I ran down to the pond and rolled in a dead fish that had washed up onshore, but not even that helped, much—I still smelled like perfume.
Eager to figure out what had happened, I went back into the woods to see if I could find that catlike animal and get an explanation. Now that I knew her scent, she wasn’t hard to locate, but I’d hardly begun to sniff at her when the same exact thing happened, a blinding spray that hit me from, of all places, the animal’s rear end!
I couldn’t figure out how to resolve this misunderstanding and wondered if I wouldn’t be better off just ignoring the animal altogether, making her suffer for all the ignominy she had put me through.
In fact, that’s exactly what I decided to do once I trotted home and was put through the entire cycle of washings and tomato juice dunkings again—was this my life, now? Every day I’d be slathered in vegetables, have stinky soaps rubbed into me, and be barred from entry into the main part of the house, even when Grandma was cooking?
“You are so stupid, Bailey!” the boy scolded me while he scrubbed me out in the yard.
“Don’t use the word ‘stupid’; it is such an ugly word,” Grandma said. “Tell him . . . tell him he’s a doodle; that’s what my mother always called me when I was a little girl and I did something wrong.”
The boy faced me sternly. “Bailey, you are a doodle dog. You are a doodle, doodle dog.” And then he laughed and Grandma laughed, but I was so miserable I could barely move my tail.
Fortunately, around about the time that the smells faded from my fur the family stopped behaving so strangely and allowed me to rejoin them. The boy sometimes called me a doodle dog, but never angrily, more as an alternative to my name.
“Want to go fishing, doodle dog?” he’d ask, and we’d shove out in the rowboat and pull tiny fish out of the water for a few hours.
One day toward the very end of summer it was colder than usual and we were out in the boat, Ethan wearing a hood that was attached to his shirt at the neck. And suddenly he jumped up. “I’ve got a big one, Bailey, a big one!”
I responded to his excitement, leaping to my feet and barking. He wrestled with his rod for more than a minute, grinning and laughing, and then I saw it, a fish the size of a cat, coming to the surface right next to our boat! Ethan and I both leaned forward to see it, the boat rocked, and then with a yell the boy fell overboard!
I leaped to the side of the boat and stared down into the dark green water. I could see the boy vanishing from sight, and the bubbles rising to the surface carried his scent to me, but he showed no signs of resurfacing.
I didn’t hesitate; I dove right in after him, my eyes open as I pushed against the water and struggled to follow the trail of bubbles down into the cold darkness.
{ NINE }
I couldn’t see much of anything down there in the water, which pressed against my ears and slowed my desperate descent. I could sense the boy, though, sinking slowly ahead of me. I swam even harder, finally catching blurry sight of him—it was almost like my first vision of Mother, a smeared image in murky shadows. I lunged, jaws open, and when I was right up to him I was able to seize the hood of his sweatshirt in my mouth. I lifted my head and, dragging him with me, rose as quickly as I could toward the sunlit surface of the pond.
We burst up into the air. “Bailey!” the boy shouted, laughing. “Are you trying to save me, boy?” He reached out and snagged the boat with his arm. Frantically I tried to claw my way up his body and into the boat, so I could pull him the rest of the way to safety.
He was still laughing. “Bailey, no, you doodle dog! Stop it!” He pushed me away, and I swam a tight circle.
“I have to get the rod, Bailey; I dropped the rod. I’m okay! Go on; I’m okay. Go on!” The boy gestured toward the shore, as if he were throwing a ball in that direction. He seemed to want me to leave the pond, so after a minute I did, aiming for the small area of sand next to the dock.
“Good boy, Bailey,” he said encouragingly.
I looked around and saw his feet go up in the air, and then an instant later he vanished under the water. With a whimper I turned right around and swam as hard as I could, my shoulders lifting clear out of the pond with the effort. When I got to the trail of bubbles, I followed the scent. It was much harder to get myself down this time because I hadn’t dived out of the boat, and as I was headed toward the bottom of the pond I sensed the boy coming up and I switched directions.
“Bailey!” he called delightedly. He tossed his rod into the boat. “You are such a good dog, Bailey.”
I swam beside him as he pulled the boat over to the sand, so relieved I licked his face when he bent over to haul the boat onto the shore.
“You really tried to save me, boy.” I sat, panting, and he stroked my face. The sun and his touch warmed me in equal measure.
The next day, the boy brought Grandpa down to the dock. It was much hotter than it had been the day before, and, racing ahead of the two of them, I made sure the duck family was out in the middle of the pond where it belonged. The boy was wearing another shirt with a hood, and the three of us trotted to the end of the dock and looked down into the green water. The ducks swam over to see what we were looking at, and I pretended I
