DogTown (33 page)

A good result.

Next was the petting test. John lavished the old white-faced dog with pets and back scratches, and Mister Bones, although he seemed a little stiff and wooden, clearly enjoyed the attention. John and Pat noticed that he licked his lips a little, which can signal uneasiness. But when John stopped petting, Bones tucked his nose up against John’s side, clearly seeking more affection.

“He likes that!” John said. “He’s cuddling now.”

Another good sign.

The next test, and perhaps the most unsettling for Bones, would check to see if he could remain calm in the presence of an excited child. Since using an actual child for this test would be dangerous, the Dogtown trainers used a reasonable facsimile—a plastic doll about three feet high, fully dressed, with eerily realistic eyes and hair. (“That doll is freaky, dude—I’m scared of that thing!” John said.)

Moments later John came out from behind a corner, walking the doll across the floor and talking to Bones in a high-pitched, singsong voice. “Bonesey! Here, puppy, puppy! Here, Mister Bones! Hey, Mister Bones!
Hoo-hoo-hoo!”

Mister Bones responded with a mixture of fear and curiosity, tentatively trying to sniff the doll, but with his tail tucked partly beneath his legs. He seemed ready to bolt at any moment. But he didn’t. Nor did he lash out with frightened aggression, a response at the core of all his problems. “Bye, Bones!” John squealed, and marched the doll out of the room.

The child test was over, and things were looking bright for Bones.

Now for the ultimate test—another dog. Bones had never been human aggressive, but he had learned to be dog aggressive on the streets to survive. But a lifetime had passed between then and now. Maybe now he had permanently and completely changed.

With Bones leashed to the refrigerator, John brought in Pat’s personal dog, Rollie, on a leash. Rollie was calm, easygoing, and not aggressive toward other dogs. When John took him off his leash in the confined kitchen, Rollie immediately approached Bones. The two dogs both had white muzzles and were about the same size. They approached each other curiously until their noses nearly touched, tails wagging in a stiff, tentative sort of way.

The dogs had met before when they were younger, and it hadn’t gone well. Now that they were both older, there was hope that it wouldn’t explode into a bad situation. At one point Pat put his hand between the two dogs, “kind of as a little safeguard” in case the old boys had some fight left in them. But they both seemed calm, patient, and gentle, like oldsters waiting in the cafeteria line. “In the old days, Bones probably couldn’t get that close to another dog without doing the old alligator snap,” John said. But nothing of the kind happened today. There was no sign of the aggressive streak in the dog who arrived at Dogtown more than 12 years earlier.

“All right, dude!” John howled. “You did good!”

Mister Bones had passed his final exam with flying colors. Maybe these results would make the difference in finally getting him adopted. The trick would be finding someone who welcomed Mister Bones’ maturity.

THE POWER OF TELEVISION

Mister Bones found his match thanks to the
DogTown
television show, which airs on the National Geographic Channel. In 2008, the show’s first season aired and told the moving stories of different dogs at Best Friends, the challenges they faced, and the relationships built with the Dogtown staff. In February 2008, Bones’ quest for an adoptive home was featured in a
DogTown
episode called, appropriately enough, “The Outsiders.” Every dog featured on an episode has his or her own Web page on the Best Friends website where fans can read about their favorite dogs and post messages of support to them. After Bones’ appearance, the Mister Bones Fan Club expanded dramatically. There were so many people following his story online, it was as if the Jersey Girls’ little Mustang convertible had a Fourth of July parade trailing behind:

Three of the Jersey Girls, a group of volunteers who traveled from New Jersey to Dogtown every year to see him, cuddle Mister Bones.

Bones’ online following grew and grew, but it would take until the following summer for his forever family to arrive. By midsummer, in fact, Mister Bones was the only dog from the three
DogTown
episodes that aired in 2008 who had not been adopted. It looked like Bones would be with Dogtown forever, but then along came Sharon.

“MISTER BONES HAS LEFT THE BUILDING!”

Mister Bones had attracted the attention of one special viewer, a special-education teacher from suburban Baltimore named Sharon. She saw Mister Bones on the
DogTown
episode and was, like the Jersey Girls before her, completely smitten by the old boy’s smile and sweet, wizened face. Although Sharon was a self-described “cat person,” with ten cats and two dogs at home, there was something about Bones that touched her to the core. She and her sister Martha, who was a longtime member of Best Friends, arranged a trip to Utah in the summer of 2008, partly to do a short volunteer vacation at the sanctuary and partly because Sharon wanted to meet Mister Bones.

And when Sharon met Bones in person, “I just fell in love with that old dork…he was the love of my life.” Mister Bones apparently felt the same way. Although his manner was slow and dignified as befit an aging “man” of the world, he nuzzled up to her with his grizzled old face as if to ask for some scratches and petting.

Sharon’s original plan was to take a different dog on a sleepover each night of her weeklong stay at Best Friends. But after the first night with Bones, she and her sister were driving through nearby Zion National Park, discussing which dog they should take that night, when they both looked at each other.

“Who are we kidding?” they both said at once. “We’re taking Bones!”

They wound up taking Bones home every night of their stay. Sharon and Martha loved everything about him, from his crazy smile to his “water dance” to the odd little wart on his forehead. Completely smitten, Sharon called her husband, Larry, back in Maryland. “Don’t tell me—you want to adopt another cat,” Larry said, knowing his wife well.

“Uh, no…” Sharon said. “I want to adopt another dog.”

“A dog? We’ve got two already!”

“He’s the sweetest old guy, and his name is Mister Bones.”

“Well,” Larry grumbled, “come home and we’ll talk about it.”

By which Sharon knew Larry meant, OK, let’s do it.

In the following days and weeks, good wishes and joy poured in to the Best Friends website, where periodic postings kept Mister Bones’ fans up to date on the latest developments:

Getting Mister Bones back to Maryland would be a bit of a challenge. Dr. Mike decreed that Mister Bones was too old and too weak to fly. (He was by now, after all, almost 15 years old, which amounts to something like 100 in human years.) He was also taking multiple medications—for arthritis, for anxiety, and for his thyroid.

Sharon and her sister decided they’d have to fly back out to Utah, rent an SUV, and drive Mister Bones cross-country back home to Maryland. But a trip like that would cost, they estimated, around $3,000, for airfare, SUV rental, and gas (which at the time was close to four dollars a gallon).

Sharon tried raising the money by tapping in to her own network of animal rescue friends, but without too much success. It was only when she contacted Joyce and the rest of the Jersey Girls that money started raining down from heaven. Within 28 days, Mister Bones’ oldest and most loyal fan club had raised $3,150, more than enough to send Sharon and Martha out to Utah to bring Mister Bones back—at last—to his forever home.

When the two women came back to Dogtown to pick up Mister Bones in October 2008, there was a sense of celebration that electrified the whole staff, volunteers, and visitors. Little posters and banners were posted everywhere, including a particular favorite: “Mister Bones has left the building!”

On the Best Friends website there was also an outpouring of unalloyed joy:

A crowd of well-wishers gathered at Dogtown to see the travelers off. Thomas Foyles, the self-described misfit and Bones’ longtime caregiver, stopped in and spent a long time saying goodbye to Mister Bones. Their parting was very emotional, Sharon said. In fact, she was a little surprised that so many people, men included, suddenly seemed to have developed runny noses and the sniffles. The calmest one in the room, in fact, seemed to be Mister Bones, whose serenity suggested that he knew the outcome of all this would be a happy one. When it came time to climb into the rental car, Bones clambered aboard (with a bit of assistance), seemingly eager and happy for the next adventure of his life.

When Sharon, Martha, and Mister Bones stopped for lunch in Kanab before leaving on their trip, a couple of complete strangers came up to introduce themselves. They’d seen Mister Bones on TV and wanted to meet him in person. They were thrilled to learn he’d been adopted. There was no getting around it: The old boy had become a star.

In 2008 Mister Bones finally found a loving home in suburban Baltimore with Sharon and her husband Larry.

The two women hung signs in the window of the rented SUV that said “Bones On Board,” and they drove straight through, nonstop, to Mr. Bones’ new home outside Baltimore. It took three days, with one woman driving while the other one slept.

Along the long road home, Mister Bones handled the transition beautifully. When he wasn’t sleeping (and snoring—loudly), he spent most of the trip contentedly gazing out the window at the world passing by. Sharon called him “the most wonderful dog in the world.”

Over the preceding months, Sharon and Larry had renovated the upstairs of their house, so that their preexisting menagerie of cats and dogs could stay downstairs. Even though Bones had done well in his behavioral assessment with Rollie, it was still important to minimize the risk of any altercations between Sharon’s other pets and Mister Bones. She and Larry went to great lengths to give Bones his own space, where he could be the lord of the upstairs and have private access to an enclosed outdoor run. There was one exception to the upstairs-downstairs rule: One of Sharon’s cats, a tailless Manx named Mama Kitty, ventured upstairs one day and climbed over the baby gate to strike up a friendship with the geriatric gentleman on the second floor. After that, the two were major pals. Bones loved his new digs and appreciated the wonderful facilities as well as the showers of affection from Sharon, Larry, and Mama Kitty. It was good to be home at last.