The dirt track under my feet was incredible! It smelled of rubber tires, and of all the animals who had crossed it, and of damp rain from a few nights ago. I trotted along it happily, my short tail wagging. I snapped at a dragonfly that whizzed in front of me. I tromped through a puddle. I found a fantastic stick and dragged it with me until my neck started to hurt. Then I dropped it and dashed forward because I’d smelled something new. An empty cup! No, not empty. There was something sticky and sweet left inside it. I licked it carefully clean. Then I kept going.
After a while, the dirt track led me to a road of stuff that was as hard underfoot as the concrete inside my cage. I sniffed it and patted it gingerly with one paw. Then I decided to follow it, mostly because by doing that I’d head straight into the wind, which was bringing me wonderful new smells every second. Damp, rotting leaves! Trees! Pools of water! Squirrels! Mice! Worms!
Full of excitement, I set off on my adventure, but stopped. Something was quivering in a clump of leaves ahead of me.
Carefully, I stalked the moving thing, creeping closer and closer. Then whatever it was exploded right out of the leaves and buzzed straight at my face! A bug! I’d never seen one like that before. I jumped back and barked at it, to let it know I wasn’t food. It turned and flew along the road, and I chased it. I’d show that bug who was the boss!
I heard the truck behind me, but I didn’t stop until the bug flew straight up into a tree. Not fair! I barked in frustration. Then I realized that I couldn’t hear the truck’s growly engine behind me anymore.
A door slammed. I turned. The truck had stopped by the edge of the road, and a man with wrinkled tan skin and muddy clothes got out. He knelt down and held out his hands.
“Hey, there, little fella!” he called.
I looked at him uncertainly. What kind of a person was this? What would those hands be like? Would they push me aside, like the first man I had known? Or would they be patient and gentle?
“You lost, fella? You lost?”
I wasn’t sure about the hands yet, but the voice was kind. And he was talking right to me. The first man had never done that. And he’d never kneeled down so that he was close to my level, either.
This man seemed okay. I trotted over to him.
He picked me up in hands large enough to reach all the way around me. And those hands were gentle. I was relieved, even when he lifted me up over his head for a moment. I didn’t care for that, but he lowered me almost at once and held me cradled against his chest. He smelled of smoke and mud and sweat and the outdoors. It was delicious.
“You’re a pretty little fella. You look like a purebred retriever. Where did you come from, fella?”
I licked the man’s chin, which was rough with whiskers. He laughed.
Yes, I decided. My name could be Fella. I could stay with this man. I could be his dog, do what he told me, go where he went. That was what I was supposed to do, wasn’t it? Stay with a person? I was pretty sure that was true. It felt right.
The man took me over to his truck and plopped me in the front seat. He climbed in next to me. I liked this! I liked it even better when he started the car and amazing new scents came pouring in through the window, open just a crack at the top.
I tried to put my front legs up on the window and get my nose as close as I could to that cool rush of air. It was fun, even though I toppled over every time the car hit a bump or made a turn. The man laughed and reached over to steady me with that warm, big, gentle hand.
Then he made a sharp turn that dumped me on the floor of the truck. That was okay. It smelled interesting down there, too. The truck screeched to a stop, and the man looked over at me.
“We’re in the shade here,” he told me. I propped my feet up on the seat of the truck and looked at him. Then I hopped up and looked out the window. We were next to a building with several doors. The man nodded at one of the doors, next to a dark window.
“I’ll only be a few minutes,” he told me, rolling up the windows. “You’ll be fine.”
I didn’t realize he was leaving until he got out and shut the door behind him. Hey, wait a minute! What about me? Wasn’t I his dog now? Wasn’t I supposed to go wherever he did?
I watched the man go inside the building, and then I plopped myself down on the seat to wait. I found a cloth strap and chewed on it for a while, but it wasn’t very tasty. Bored, I settled down for a nap. The sun had shifted and was now coming in through the window, nice and warm on my back.
When I awoke, the sun was more than warm. It was hot.
The air in the truck was damp and tasted stale. I started panting. Then I started whimpering. I put my paws up on the window so I could see if the man was coming back. No sign of him! And the glass in the window was hot enough to burn against my paws. I dropped back down to the seat, pacing back and forth. The panting wasn’t doing much good. I wasn’t getting any cooler.
Everything inside the car seemed to be getting blurry and fuzzy around the edges. I lay down on the seat, thinking of the bowls of water the man used to bring us, of the puddle on the dirt track, of cool, fresh smells on the breeze.
My tongue was hanging out until it touched the cloth seat, but each gulp of hot air inside my mouth only made things worse. My whole body began to tremble.
I couldn’t get up to peer out of the window again. All I could do was lift my eyes to the glass.
There was a face staring in! I couldn’t see it clearly, and I couldn’t smell it at all. But surely it was the man. He would open a door. He would get me out!
The face vanished.
I slumped with disappointment, feeling so heavy that it seemed I could sink into the soft cloth of the seat. My paws were starting to twitch all by themselves.
Then there was a stupendous crash. The whole truck rocked on its wheels. A stone bounced into the seat next to me, and clear, shiny pebbles scattered over my back. I lifted my head, and a cool kiss of air swept through the broken window and over my face.
Hands slid around me. They were not the hands of the man; they were smaller, and smoother, and even more gentle. I couldn’t move as I was lifted toward a worried face framed by long black hair. A woman’s face.
“You poor puppy. You poor, poor puppy,” she whispered.
My name is Fella, I thought to myself.
* * *
The next thing I knew, I was lying on soft grass while cool, clear water trickled all over me, from my nose to my tail. The woman stood over me, holding a plastic jug. Nothing had ever felt so good.
I shuddered with pleasure and lifted my mouth to lap and bite at the sweet stream.
“That’s right, puppy. That’s right,” the woman encouraged me.
A man stood nearby—not the one who had left me in the truck. A different man. He was watching me closely.
“Do you think he’ll be okay?” the woman asked.
“Looks like the water is doing the job,” he answered.
I felt worry from both of them, and affection, and care. These were the kind of people I had set out into the world to find. I rolled over on my back so that the water would wash over my hot tummy, and the woman laughed.
“Such a cute puppy!” she said. “Do you know what kind it is?”
“Looks like a golden retriever,” the man answered. “And, uh, he’s a boy.”
“Oh, puppy,” the woman murmured.
Yes, I could be Puppy, I could be Fella, I could be whatever they wanted. When the woman swept me up in her arms, not even caring about the big wet splat my soaking fur made on her blouse, I kissed her face until she closed her eyes and giggled.
“You’re coming home with me, little guy,” she told me. “I’ve got someone I want you to meet.”
She took me away from the truck and into a car, holding me on her lap while she drove. I leaned into her, sniffing. She smelled clean, like soap, and sweet, like flowers, and there was an animal odor on her clothes, one I’d never smelled before. Now and then she took a hand down from the steering wheel to stroke me. Very nice.
She stopped the car once and left me inside, which made me pace and whimper, but she left a window open an inch or so, and in a moment she was back. I cuddled up on her lap again while she drove, until, feeling better, I heaved myself off to explore. Two streams of clean, cold air flowed out of some vents into my face, and I sniffed them and shook my head, sending water splattering off my ears. The woman laughed.
The cold air on my wet fur was actually beginning to make me shiver, so I climbed down to the floor, where it was a little warmer. There was a carpet down there, soft and rough at the same time, and I was ready to curl up for another little nap.
I woke up when the car stopped. The woman reached down with those soft hands and picked me up. I blinked sleepily at her.
“Oh, you are so cute,” she whispered. As she held me against her chest, I could feel her heart beat. She was excited. I yawned and shook off the last traces of my nap. After she let me down, I squatted and peed in the grass. Then I was ready to face whatever had this nice woman so worked up.
“Ethan!” she called. “Come here! I want you to meet someone.”
I looked up at her curiously. We were in front of a big white house. I wondered what I’d find here. Would there be cages? Other dogs? A big yard with a wooden fence?
The front door of the house banged open and a human being came racing out. A new kind of human being. I’d never seen one like this before.
He jumped down the cement steps and landed on the grass. His hair was dark like the woman’s, but cut short, above his ears. He was smaller than she was. His head didn’t come up to her shoulder.
He stared at me. I stared back. He was, I realized, a young human. A child. A male one. His mouth broke into a huge grin and he spread out his arms.
“A puppy!” he sang.
We ran to each other. He flopped down to pick me up, and I could not stop licking him. He could not stop giggling. We rolled together in the grass.
I hadn’t known that there was such a thing as a boy in the world. But now that I’d found one, I was sure that there could not be anything better. He smelled fascinating, of sweat and soap and mud and something meaty that he’d been eating, and also of the same animal I’d smelled on the woman’s clothes. I burrowed my nose into his hair and under the collar of his shirt and sniffed and sniffed.
A boy! I think this was what I had been looking for when I stepped out of that yard. A boy like this.