A Dog's Purpose (13 page)

We went a long way into the woods, at one point crossing our own scent, and still the boy plodded on. I grew so weary that when a squirrel darted out right in front of me I didn’t even bother to chase it; I just followed the boy, who I could tell was also getting tired. When the light began to fade from the sky, we sat down on a log and he ate the last of the sandwiches, carefully feeding me a hunk. “I’m really sorry, Bailey.”

Just before dark, the boy became interested in sticks. He began dragging sticks over to a tree that had blown over, stacking them up against the wall of mud and gnarly roots. He piled pine needles on the ground underneath this canopy and stacked more sticks on top. I watched curiously, ready despite my fatigue to chase one if he threw it, but he just stayed focused on his task.

When it became too dark to see, he climbed in on the pine needles. “Here, Bailey! Come here!”

I crawled in beside him. It reminded me of the doghouse. I ruefully remembered Grandpa’s chair, wondering why we couldn’t just go home and sleep there. But the boy soon started to shiver, and I put my head on top of him and eased my belly onto his back the way I used to lie on my brothers and sisters when we were cold.

“Good dog, Bailey,” he told me.

Soon his breathing became deep and he stopped shivering. Though I wasn’t exactly perfectly comfortable, I carefully lay in a position to keep him warm as possible through the night.

We were up when the birds started to call and before it was even fully light were already walking again. I sniffed hopefully at the sack, fooled by the smells, but when the boy let me put my head inside I found nothing to eat.

“We’ll save it in case we need to make a fire,” he told me. I translated this to mean “we need more sandwiches” and thumped my tail in agreement.

The nature of our adventure changed that day. The hunger in my belly grew to be a sharp pain, and the boy cried again, sniffling for about an hour. I could feel anxiety wafting through him, followed by a sullen, lethargic apathy that I found just as alarming. When he sat down and stared at me with glassy eyes, I licked him full in the face.

I was worried about my boy. We needed to go home, now.

We came to a small stream and the boy flopped down on his stomach and we drank thirstily. The water gave the boy both energy and purpose; when we set off again, we were following the stream, which twisted and turned through the trees and, at one point, through a meadow full of singing bugs. The boy turned his face to the sun and increased his pace, hope surging through him, but his shoulders slumped when after an hour or so the stream reentered the dark woods.

We spent that night clinging to each other as before. I smelled a carcass nearby, something old but probably edible, but I didn’t leave the boy. He needed my warmth more than ever. His strength was leaving him; I could feel it ebbing away.

I had never been so afraid.

The next day the boy stumbled a few times while he walked. I smelled blood; his face had been whipped by a branch. I sniffed at it.

“Go away, Bailey!” he yelled at me.

I felt anger and fear and pain coming from him, but I didn’t back away, I stayed right there, and knew I had done the right thing when he buried his face in my neck and cried some more.

“We’re lost, Bailey. I’m so sorry,” the boy whispered. I wagged at my name.

The little stream wandered into a boggy area, losing all definition and making for mucky travels. The boy sank up to his calves, so that his feet made a sucking sound as he pulled them out. Bugs descended on us, landing in our eyes and ears.

Midway across the swamp the boy just stopped. His shoulders sagged, his chin dropping. The air left his lungs in a long, deep sigh. Distressed, I picked my way across the slimy area as quickly as I could, putting a paw on his leg.

He was giving up. An overwhelming sense of defeat was building within him, and he was surrendering to it. He was losing his very will to live. He was like my brother Hungry, lying down that last time in the culvert, never to get back up again.

I barked, startling both the boy and me. His dull eyes blinked at me. I barked again.

“Okay,” he muttered. Lethargically he drew his foot out of the mud and tentatively set it down, sinking again.

It took us more than half the day to cross that swamp. When we picked up the stream on the other side of the bog, it moved water with more purpose, becoming deeper and faster. Soon another trickle joined it, and then another, so that the boy had to make a running start to leap across it when a downed tree blocked his path on one side or another. Each leap seemed to
make him tired, and we wound up taking a nap for a few hours. I lay with him, terrified the boy wouldn’t wake up, but he did, rousing himself slowly.

“You’re a good dog, Bailey,” he told me, his voice hoarse.

It was late in the afternoon when the stream joined a river. The boy stood and looked blankly at the dark water for a long time, then aimed us downstream, pushing through grasses and thickly choked trees.

Night was just starting to fall when I picked up the scent of men. At this point Ethan seemed to be walking without purpose, his feet scuffing numbly in the dirt. Each time he fell, he took longer and longer to get back up, and he registered nothing when I darted ahead, my nose to the ground.

“Come on, Bailey,” he mumbled. “Where you going?”

I think he didn’t even notice when we crossed the footpath. He was squinting in the fading light, trying to keep from tripping, and I sensed nothing from him for several seconds when the grasses underfoot became a well-trod trail of dirt. I could smell several different men—all of them old scents but as clear to me as the track of children up and down the streets back home. Then suddenly the boy straightened, taking in a breath. “Hey!” he said softly, his gaze sharpening on the path.

Now that I had a firm sense of where we were going, I trotted on ahead a few yards, my fatigue lifting with the boy’s rising excitement. Both the trail and the river were bending in parallel to the right, and I kept my nose down, noticing how the man smell was becoming both more strong and more recent. Someone had been here not long ago.

Ethan stopped, so I went back to him. He was standing, staring, his mouth open.

“Wow,” he said.

I realized there was a bridge across the river, and, as I watched, a figure broke out of the gloom and walked along the railing, peering at the water. Ethan’s heart rate ticked up; I could hear it. His excitement, though, faded into a fear, and he shrank back, reminding me of my first mother’s reaction when we would come across men while we were hunting.

“Bailey, be quiet,” he whispered.

I didn’t know what was going on, but I sensed his mood—it was the same thing that had happened at home, the night he got the gun out and poked it into all of the closets. I looked at him alertly.

“Hey!” the man on the bridge called. I felt the boy stiffen, getting ready to run away.

“Hey!” the man shouted again. “Are you Ethan?”

The man on the bridge gave us a car ride. “We’ve been searching the whole state of Michigan for you, son,” he said. Ethan looked down, and from him I sensed sadness and shame and a little fear. We drove to a big building, and as soon as we stopped Dad opened the car door and he and Mom hugged Ethan and Grandma and Grandpa were there and everyone was happy, though there were no dog treats of any kind. The boy sat in a chair with wheels and a man pushed him into the building, and just before he went inside the boy turned and waved at me, and I thought he would probably be okay, though I felt pretty anxious to be separated from him. Grandpa held tight to my collar, so I didn’t have any choice in the matter.

Grandpa took me for a car ride and I was a front-seat dog. We went to a place where they handed Grandpa a delicious-smelling
sack through his window and he fed me dinner right there in the car, unwrapping hot sandwiches and handing them to me one at a time. He ate one, too.

“Don’t tell Grandma about this,” he said.

When we got home I was startled to see Flare standing in her usual place in her yard, regarding me with a slack expression. I barked at her through the car window until Grandpa told me to stop barking.

The boy was only gone one night, but it was the first time since we’d been together that I had slept without him, and I paced the hallway until Dad shouted, “Lie down, Bailey!” I curled up in Ethan’s bed and fell asleep with my head on the pillow, where his scent was the strongest.

When Mom brought Ethan home the next day I was overjoyed, but the boy’s mood was somber. Dad told him he was a bad boy. Grandpa talked to him in front of the gun cabinet. Everyone was tense—and yet nobody so much as mentioned the name Flare, and it was Flare who was the cause of the whole thing! I realized that because no one else had been there they didn’t know what had really happened and were mad at the boy instead of the horse.

I was angry enough to want to go outside and bite that horse, but I didn’t, of course, because the thing was huge.

The girl came over to see the boy, and the two of them sat on the porch and didn’t talk much, just sort of mumbled and looked away from each other.

“Were you scared?” the girl asked.

“No,” the boy said.

“I would have been scared.”

“Well, I wasn’t.”

“Did you get cold at night?” she pressed.

“Yeah, pretty much.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

I alertly followed this exchange, sifting carefully for words such as “Bailey,” “car ride,” and “treats.” Hearing none of them, I put my head down and sighed. The girl reached down and petted me, so I rolled on my back for a tummy rub.

I decided I liked the girl, and wished she visited more often and brought more of those biscuits and gave me some.

Then, before I was ready, Mom packed and we took the big long car ride that meant school was coming. When we pulled in the driveway at home, several of the children came running over, and Marshmallow and I got reacquainted on the lawn, slipping right into our ongoing wrestling match.

There were other dogs in the neighborhood, but I liked Marshmallow the best, probably because I saw her nearly every day when the boy went to stay with Chelsea’s mother after school. Often when I would head out through the open gate on an adventure Marshmallow would be out, too, and would accompany me while we explored the issue of other people’s trash cans.

So I was alarmed to hear Chelsea leaning out of her mother’s car one day, calling, “Marshmallow! Marshy! Here, Marshmallow!” Chelsea came over to talk to Ethan, and before long all the kids in the neighborhood were calling Mashmallow’s name. It was clear to me that Marshmallow had been a bad dog and had gone off somewhere on her own adventure.

Her scent was most recent in the area of the creek, but there were so many children and dogs, I didn’t have a good sense of what direction she’d taken. Chelsea was sad and cried, and I felt bad for her and put my head in her lap, and she hugged me.

Todd was one of the children who were helping to look for Marshmallow, and curiously, her scent was on his pants. I sniffed him carefully, and he frowned and pushed my head away. His shoes were muddy and Marshmallow’s scent was strong there, too, plus other things I couldn’t identify.

“Come on, Bailey,” Ethan said when he saw Todd’s reaction to my examination.

Marshmallow never did come home. I remembered my first mother, running out the gate and into the world without a look back. Some dogs just want to be free to wander, because they don’t have a boy who loves them.

Eventually Marshmallow’s scent faded from the wind, but I never seemed to stop sniffing for her. When I remembered playing with Marshmallow I found myself thinking of Coco, back in the Yard. I would have loved to see Coco again, and Marshmallow, but I was beginning to understand that life was far more complicated than it had appeared to be in the Yard and that it was people who were in charge of it, not dogs. What mattered was not what I wanted; what mattered was that I was there in the woods when Ethan was cold and hungry, keeping him warm at nights, being his companion.

That winter, around the time when Dad put a tree in the living room for Merry Christmas, Chelsea got a new puppy. They named her Duchess. She was relentlessly playful, to the point where I’d get annoyed at her sharp teeth digging into my ears and would give her a quick growl to make her stop. She’d blink at me innocently and back off for just a few seconds before deciding I couldn’t have meant it, and then she’d come right back at me. It was very irritating.

In the spring, the word “go-kart” swept through the neighborhood, and all up and down the street the children were
sawing and hammering on wood, totally ignoring their dogs. Dad would come out to the garage every evening and talk to the boy while he fussed over whatever he was doing. I even went so far as to go into the boy’s closet and bring out the loathsome flip, thinking I could tantalize him with that, but he remained totally focused on playing with pieces of wood that he never once threw for me to chase and bring back.

“See my go-kart, Bailey? It’s going to go fast!”