“None of them like it. The question is will she stop struggling and let me be the boss, or will she keep fighting? I got to have a dog that knows I’m the boss,” the man said.
I heard the word “dog,” and it didn’t sound angry—I wasn’t being punished, but I
“Good girl!” he said again.
Then he took a ball of paper and showed it to me, waving it around until I became absolutely tantalized. I felt stupid and uncoordinated, trying to get a bite of the thing with my little puppy mouth when it was right there in front of me, but I couldn’t move my head fast enough. Then he tossed it a few feet away, so I ran over and pounced on it. Aha! Try to get it now!
Then I remembered Ethan and the stupid flip, how happy it made him when I brought the thing back to him. I turned around and trotted back to the man, dropping the ball at his feet and sitting for him to throw it again.
“This one,” the man said to the woman. “I’ll take this one.”
I whimpered when I saw the kind of car ride I was going to be taking—in the back of a truck, locked in a cage very similar to the one that had taken me to the hot noisy room with Spike. I was a front-seat dog; anyone could tell that!
My new home reminded me of the apartment where we went to live after the fire. It was small, with a balcony over a parking lot, but it was down the street from a nice park where the man took me several times a day.
I knew I was far away from Ethan by the smell of the trees and bushes—this wasn’t a wet place like the Farm, with frequent rain, though it was lush with flowers and shrubbery. The air was tinged with a strong smell of automobiles, which I could hear driving in the near and far distance every single hour of the day. Somedays a hot, dry wind blew in, reminding me of the Yard, but other days the air was thick with moisture, which never happened when I was Toby.
The man’s name was Jakob, and he named me Elleya. “It’s Swedish for ‘moose.’ You’re not a German shepherd; you’re a Swedish shepherd, now.” I wagged in noncomprehension. “Elleya. Elleya. Come, Ellie, come.”
His hands smelled of oil and his car and of papers and people.
Jakob wore dark clothes and wore metal objects on his belt, including a gun, so I figured he was a policeman. When he was gone during the day a nice woman named Georgia came over every few hours to play with me and take me for a walk—she reminded me of Chelsea, who had lived down the street from Ethan and me and had a dog named Marshmallow and then later Duchess. Georgia had all sorts of names for me, some of them really silly, like Ellie-wellie Cuddle-Coo. It was sort of like being called a doodle dog—it was my name, but different, delivered with an extra dose of affection.
I was doing my best to adjust to this new life as Ellie, so different from my life as Bailey. Jakob gave me a dog bed very similar to the one I’d been given in the garage, but this time I was expected to sleep in it—Jakob pushed me away when I tried to crawl under the covers with him, even though I could see he had plenty of room.
I understood that what was expected of me was to live with the new rules, the way I’d learned to live with Ethan going to do college. The sharp pain I felt when I thought about how much I missed the boy was just something to get used to: a dog’s job was to do what people wanted.
There was, though, a difference between obeying commands and having a purpose, a reason for being. I thought my purpose was to be with Ethan and that I’d fulfilled that purpose, being by his side as he grew up. If that was the case, why was I now Ellie? Could a dog have more than one purpose?
Jakob treated me with a calm patience—when my little bladder suddenly signaled and let go all in the same rush, he never yelled and ran me out the door like the boy used to; he just gave me such praise for when I went outside that I resolved to get my body under control as soon as I could manage. But Jakob didn’t gush affection the way the boy did. Jakob focused on me in the businesslike fashion Ethan focused on Flare, the horse, and to an extent I liked the sense of direction it gave me—though there were other times I pined for the feel of the boy’s hands on my fur and couldn’t wait for Georgia to come over and call me Ellie-wellie Cuddle-Coo.
There was, I came to feel, something broken inside Jakob. I didn’t know what it was, but I could sense something drawing energy from his emotions, a dark bitterness that seemed to me very similar to what I felt inside Ethan when he first came home after the fire. Whatever it was, it kept Jakob’s feelings toward me in check— whenever he and I did something together, I could feel him evaluating me with cool eyes.
“Let’s go to work,” Jakob would say, and he would load me in the truck and off we’d go to a park for games. I learned “Drop,” which meant to lie down, and I learned that to Jakob “Stay” really meant “stay” and I was expected to remain in the same spot until he told me, “Come.”
The training helped me keep my mind off Ethan. At night, though, I often fell asleep thinking of the boy. I thought of his hands in my fur, the smell of him as he slept, his laugh and his voice. Wherever he was, whatever he was doing, I hoped he was happy. I knew I would never see him again.
Georgia started coming over less often as I got older, but I found that I didn’t miss her, as I became more and more immersed in our work. One day we went to some woods and met a man named Wally, who petted me and then ran away. “What’s he doing, Ellie? Where’s he going?” Jakob asked me. I watched Wally, who was looking over his shoulder at me, waving excitedly.
“Find him! Find!” Jakob told me.
Uncertainly I started trotting off after Wally. What was this? Wally saw me coming after him and dropped to his knees, clapping, and when I caught up to him he showed me a stick and we played with it for a few minutes. Then Wally stood up. “Look, Ellie! What’s he doing? Find him!” Wally said.
Jakob was strolling off, and I ran after him. “Good dog!” Jakob praised.
As intelligent games go, I’d probably put it right up there with chasing the flip, but Wally and Jakob seemed to enjoy it, so I went along with it, especially since afterward we got to play Tug-On-a-Stick, which in my mind beat Find Wally hands down.
It was around the time I started learning Find that a strange sensation gripped me, a restless anxiousness accompanied by an embarrassing odor from my rear end. Mom and Grandma used to complain any time I released fragrant gasses from under my tail, so when I started discharging this smell I knew I was a bad dog. (Grandpa was so offended by bad odors that he’d say, “Oh, Bailey!” even when the smell came from him.)
