A Dog's Purpose

and far more substantial than the pain that had settled in his leg.

“It’s just me living here; I don’t know who you’re looking for,” Ethan told me as I examined every corner of the house. “I always meant to get married—came close to it a couple of times, in fact—but it never seemed to work out. Lived with a woman in Chicago for a few years, even.” The boy stood and stared sightlessly out the window, and the sadness in him increased. “John Lennon said that life’s what happens when you’re making other plans. I guess that sums it up, pretty much.” I went over to him and sat, lifting a paw to press against his thigh. He dropped his gaze down to me, and I wagged. “Well, hey, Buddy, let’s get you a collar.”

We went upstairs to his bedroom, and he pulled a box down off a shelf. “Let’s see. Okay, here it is.”

A jangle sounded from the box as Ethan lifted a collar out of the box and shook it. The noise was so familiar I shivered. As Bailey, I had made that same jangling sound whenever I had moved. “This used to belong to my other dog, a long, long time ago. Bailey.”

I wagged at the name. He showed it to me and I sniffed it, picking up the ever so faint scent of another dog. Me, I realized. I was smelling me—it was a very odd sensation.

He shook the collar a few times. “Now that was a good dog, that Bailey,” he said. He sat for a moment, lost in thought, and then looked at me. When he spoke, his voice was rough, and I felt a surge of strong emotions come from him—sadness and love and regret and mourning. “I guess maybe we’d better get you your own collar, Buddy. It wouldn’t be right to make you try to live up to this one. Bailey . . . Bailey was a pretty special dog.”

I was tense when the car ride the next day led us into town—I did not want to go back to the cage, in the place with all the barking dogs. But it turned out we were just picking up bags of food and a stiff collar for my neck, to which Ethan affixed some jingling tags when we got home.

“It says: ‘My name is Buddy. I belong to Ethan Montgomery,’ ” he told me, holding one of the tags in his hand. I wagged my tail.

After several such trips to town, I learned to relax my guard—it no longer felt as though Ethan were going to abandon me. I stopped haunting his side and took to wandering around on my own, stretching my territory out to include all of the Farm, paying special attention to the mailbox and additional places by the road where other male dogs had been.

The pond was still there, and there was still a flock of stupid ducks living on its banks. For all I knew, they were the very same ducks—it hardly mattered; they acted the same when they saw me, jumping into the water in alarm and then swimming back to look at me. I knew there was no point in chasing them, but I did so anyway, just for the sheer joy of it.

Ethan spent most of his day on his knees in a big, moist plot of ground behind the house, and I learned that he did not want me lifting my leg in that area. He talked to me while he played with the dirt, so I listened, wagging when I heard my name.

“Soon we’ll be going to the farmers’ market on Sundays; now, that’s a fun time. My tomatoes fetch a pretty price,” he said.

One afternoon I got bored with the digging in the dirt game and wandered into the barn. The mysterious black cat was long gone—there was no scent of her left anywhere, and I felt a little disappointed, somehow. She was the only cat I’d ever met whom I enjoyed knowing.

No, that wasn’t really true. Though I’d mostly found it irritating, Tinkerbell’s unabashed affection for me had ultimately been gratifying.

In the back of the barn I found a pile of old blankets, molding and rotting. When I pushed my nose into them and breathed deep, though, I could very faintly pick up a familiar, comforting smell. Grandpa. This was where we used to come to do our chores together.

“It’s good for me, to get out, take walks,” Ethan told me. “I don’t know why I didn’t think to get a dog before. I need the exercise.” Some evenings we’d circle the farm on a well-worn path that smelled of Troy the whole way, and others we’d stroll down the road in one direction or the other. I always felt something from the boy when we passed Hannah’s place, though he never stopped or went up to the house to see her. I wondered why I could no longer smell her, and remembered Carly, in the dog park, positively covered in Hannah’s scent.

One such evening, as we passed Hannah’s house, I was struck by something that hadn’t before occurred to me: the pain I could feel burrowed deep inside the boy was very similar to what I had sensed inside Jakob, long ago. There was a lonely grief, the sense of having said good-bye to something.

Sometimes the mood lifted completely, though. Ethan loved to take his cane and smack it against a ball in the yard, sending it flying down the driveway for me to pursue and return. We played this game often, and I would have worn the pads off my feet to keep him so happy. When I caught the ball on a high bounce, snagging it out of the air like a piece of meat dropped through a fence, he would laugh in delight.

Other times, though, the dark swirl of sadness would overtake him. “I never thought my life would turn out this way,” he said to me one afternoon, his voice hoarse. I nuzzled him, trying to cheer him up. “All by myself, no one to share my days with. Made a lot of money, but after a while the job didn’t give me much pleasure, so I more or less quit, and that didn’t give me any pleasure, either.” I ran and got a ball and spat it into his lap, but he turned his face away, ignoring it, his pain so sharp it made me want to yelp. “Aw, Buddy, things just don’t always go as planned.” He sighed. I dug my nose after the ball, shoving it up between his legs, and finally was rewarded with a weak toss, which I pounced upon. His heart wasn’t in it. “Good dog, Buddy,” he said absently. “I guess I don’t feel like playing right now.”

I was frustrated. I had been a good dog, I had done Find, and I was back with the boy. But he wasn’t happy, not the way most people were at the end of Find, when Jakob or Maya and the others would give them blankets and food and reunite them with their families.

That’s when it occurred to me that my purpose in this world had never been just to Find; it had been to save. Tracking down the boy was just part of the equation.

When I lived with Jakob, he harbored this same dark feeling inside. But when I saw him later, when Maya and I were doing school, he had a family—a child and a mate. And then he was happy, happy the same way that Ethan used to be when he and Hannah sat on the front porch and giggled with each other.

For Ethan to be rescued, he needed to have a family. He needed a woman and to have a baby with her. Then he would be happy.

The next morning, while Ethan worked the dirt, I trotted down the driveway and out onto the road. Though the goat ranch was gone, I’d learned new scent markers on my car rides, so that finding my way into town was as easy as touring the back acres of the Farm. Once in town I quickly located the dog park, though I was disappointed Carly