I backtracked along the same scent trail, now faint in the late afternoon breezes. When I came to the dirt road, though, I passed it and kept heading aimlessly up the pavement.
I remembered when I used the trick my very first mother had taught me and escaped from the kennel when I was a puppy the second time, how it seemed like such an adventure to run out in the open, free and full of life. Then the man found me and named me Fella, and then Mom came and took me to Ethan.
This was nothing like that. I didn’t feel free; I didn’t feel full of life. I felt guilty and sad. I had no purpose, no direction. I would not be able to make my way home from here. It was like when Colonel turned away from me, the day Derek took me to live with Wendi—though no feelings came from Colonel, it was nonetheless good-bye. Victor had just done the same thing, except he had handed me to nobody.
The dust and heat made me pant, my thirst itching at my mouth. When I picked up the faint scent of water, it was the most natural thing in the world to turn in that direction, leaving the road and walking through high grasses that tossed themselves back and forth in the breeze.
The smell of water grew stronger, more tantalizing, drawing me through a stand of trees and down a steep bank to a river. I waded in to my chest, biting at the water, lapping it up. It felt glorious.
With my urgent thirst no longer my only concern, I allowed myself to open my senses to my surroundings. The river filled my nose with its wonderful damp smell, and along with the gurgle of the waters I could hear, very faintly, a duck squawking over some imagined outrage. I padded along the bank, my feet sinking into the soft soil.
And then it came to me with such a jolt I lifted my head in surprise, my eyes wide open.
I knew where I was.
{ TWENTY-EIGHT }
Along, long time ago I had stood on the banks of this very river, perhaps on this very spot, when Ethan and I had gone for our long walk after Flare, the dumb horse, abandoned us. The scent was unmistakable—doing Find all those years had taught me how to separate out odors, categorize and store them in memory, so that now I could instantly remember this place. It helped that it was summer, the same time of year, and that I was young and my nose so sharp.
I couldn’t possibly fathom how Victor might have known this, or what it meant that he had released me so that I would find the place. I had no sense as to what he wanted me to do. Lacking any better idea, I turned downstream and started trotting, retracing the very same steps Ethan and I had taken, those many years ago.
By the end of the day I was hungrier than I could remember ever being, so hungry my stomach cramped. Wistfully I thought of the old woman’s pale hand poking through the fence and dropping little pieces of meat for me to snatch out of midair; the memory made me drool. The riverbank was choked with vegetation and made for slow going, and it seemed that the hungrier I became, the less certain I was of my course of action. Was this really what I should do, follow this stream? Why?
I was a dog who had learned to live among and serve humans as my sole purpose in life. Now, cut off from them, I was adrift. I had no purpose, no destiny, no hope. Anyone spotting me slinking along the shores at that moment might mistake me for my timid, furtive first mother—that’s how far back Victor’s abandonment had thrown me.
A giant tree that had snapped during the winter and fallen by the water formed a natural hollow on the bank, and as the sun faded from the sky I climbed into this dark place, sore and exhausted and completely puzzled by the changes in my life.
My hunger woke me the next morning, but lifting my nose into the air brought me nothing but the smells of the river and the surrounding forest. I followed the flow of water downstream because I had nothing better to do, but I was moving more slowly than the day before, hobbled by the empty ache in my belly. I thought of the dead fish that sometimes washed up at the pond—why had I merely rolled in them? Why hadn’t I eaten them when I had the chance? A dead fish now would be heavenly, but the river yielded nothing edible.
So miserable was I that when the rough bank gave way to a footpath redolent with the scent of humans I hardly noticed. I ambled lethargically along, only halting when the path rose steeply and joined a road.
The road led to a bridge over the river. I raised my head, the fog lifting from my mind. Sniffing excitedly, I realized I had been here before. Ethan and I had been picked up by a policeman on this very spot and taken for a car ride back to the Farm!
Many years had obviously passed—some small trees I remembered marking at one end of the bridge had grown to be towering giants, so I marked them again. And the rotting planks on the bridge had been replaced. But otherwise, the smells were exactly the same as I remembered.
An automobile rattled by as I stood on the bridge. It honked at me and I flinched back from it. After a minute, though, I hesitantly followed it, abandoning the river for the road ahead.
I had no idea where to go now, but something told me that if I went in this direction, I would eventually arrive in town. Where there was a town there were people, and where there were people there was food.
When the road joined another, the same inner sense told me to turn right, and I did so, though I shrank guiltily away when I sensed a car coming, sliding into the high grasses. I felt like a bad dog, and my hunger only enforced this belief.
I passed many houses, most of them set far back from the road, and often dogs would bark at me, upset by my trespass. Around nightfall, I was slinking past a place with a dog smell when the side door opened and a man stepped out. “Dinner, Leo? Want dinner?” he asked, his voice carrying that deliberate excitement people use when they want to make sure a dog knows something good is happening. A metal bowl was dropped with a loud clang on the top step of a short set of stairs.
The word “dinner” arrested me in my tracks. I stood riveted as a squat dog with enormous jaws and a thick body eased down the steps and did his business a few feet into the yard. The way he moved suggested he was an old dog, and he didn’t smell me. He went back and nosed around in his bowl a little, then reached up and scratched the door. After a minute, it opened back up.
“Are you sure, Leo? Are you sure you can’t eat anything?” the man asked. There was a sadness in his voice that reminded me of the way Al cried in the yard, that last day I spent with him and Maya. “Okay, then. Come on in, Leo.”
The dog groaned but couldn’t seem to pull his back legs up the last step, so with tender gentleness the man
