The Mountaintop School for Dogs and Other Second Chances (23 page)

But then came the
but
. The woman started talking about what she meant when she talked about connection. It was more complicated, she said, than a feeling, or having personal details in common. A dog she adopted had to connect to who she was. When you walk a dog on a sidewalk, or go to the park, she said, you are saying something about your basic identity.

The woman could tell that Josie couldn't express the right thing about her identity. So there really wasn't a connection. She was sorry, but she was sure that people were getting in line to try to be lucky enough to have her. She was such a cute dog, very sweet.

Giant George said we should be glad Josie didn't go to her, only to be returned, or put into a shelter, which we'd never know, as our connection to her would be severed.

No word on Dapple. No photos from the adopters of Hank, or even a message.

Giant George told me he felt a connection with the sled pups. The guy in Alaska who had them now had promised to keep in touch, but all he'd sent was a two-minute video of youthful huskies romping in snow and knocking each other over. They were too far away to be recognized.

And Giant George asked me, “Which one of the dogs do you have the most connection to, Evie?”

“I don't play favorites,” I answered.

“Okay, but who is it? It's Tasha, right? Was I right about you being a Rottweiler?”

“That's actually none of your business,” I said.

Dogs, fighting.
No one advised me to do homework on pit bulls who've been rescued from lives of fighting. So I was putting it off. I was out of the loop, out of a club I wasn't invited to be a member of. That club was the Network.

Then I came upon Giant George watching something on his laptop. He was sitting with it on the floor in a hall. I could tell he wanted to be private, but I looked anyway. On his screen, a man of about forty was talking, perhaps in an interview, perhaps with a member of his family, or a close friend. Something was very intimate about it. The man was white and rugged, in a Clint Eastwood sort of way. His eyes were liquid, brimming. His face was a face of raw, awful sorrow.

“I loved that dog,” I heard him say. “I thought he'd have another couple years. Honest to God, all the rest put together, they're not half what he was.”

Giant George closed the laptop when he realized I was there. His expression was so hard, I began to worry that he was revealing himself as stunted in the area of feeling sorry for a grief-stricken human. I wondered if I should be alarmed about him, sitting around (I thought) heartlessly watching videos of people whose pets had died.

He didn't want to tell me what it was. But he had to say something. I wasn't going away until he did. He confessed he'd made his way into a website he was not a member of. He admitted he knew a few things about hacking.

“That guy,” he told me, “is talking about a dog of his he trained to be a fighter.” Maybe he would have said more if I looked like I was ready for more listening. But I wasn't.

Dogs, grooming.
On a visit to Boomer, I noticed a brush on top of his crate. He noticed right away that I had noticed it. He came out into the open, looking up at me, so I picked it up. He didn't know I'd never brushed a dog before.

At first I was wussy about it, making short, light strokes, hardly leaning into it at all. But then it came back to me that before I had short hair, back in my college days, I had very long hair. I started brushing him from personal experience. I loved the way he tipped up his head so I could do his mane.

In came Josie. She watched for a while, looking jealous. It occurred to me that she might not think of brushing as patting, so I asked her if she wanted me to groom her, even though her fur was so unhairy. She did!

Soon the sounds coming out of her were almost like purring. Boomer was a good sport about it. She let him lick her muzzle. I faked her out a couple of times by running a hand along her back instead of the brush. She didn't reel about and snap at me. But I was careful not to push that too far.

Dogs, photographing.
A volunteer who has a job as assistant to a photographer of weddings and other special events came to take new pictures of everyone for putting on adoption websites. We decided to include Shadow as a maybe-adoptee, in case we'd have to give up on SAR for him. Only Josie cooperated. There was some tension in the air. They knew something was going to happen, even though they didn't know what.

We had to put three of them on leashes for the picture taking, even Dora, who has a jumpy streak, on top of I'm someone who doesn't like being told what to do. Alfie came out in every shot with his eyes closed. Josie sat so pretty. She hasn't given up.

The pit bulls, Giant George told me, wouldn't have their pictures taken until after they've lived at the Sanctuary for a while, probably at least four or five months.

They're going to be sequestered, he told me.

Losers,
dogs who think they are.
I wonder how many races Alfie won, and how many he lost, and how many he lost very badly, crossing the finish line as the last one, the bottom dog, the failure. Maybe he didn't care one way or another. But maybe he did.

He'd been “taken.” When his rescuers showed up, was he even a little bit glad? If he wasn't, had he already confirmed with himself, in dog talk, that he was fully a loser, in every way?

It's not just him. I've seen “loser” in all their eyes, in the way I've noticed them gazing off blankly in idle moments, feeling that maybe being thrown from a car by your owner, or being left in an apartment alone, or being kept outdoors on a chain, et cetera, was actually something they
deserved.

When I told all the dogs that there were dogs on the way who had it worse than they did, and they should be glad they'd never been put in a fight, they didn't look at me like they felt better about themselves. It could get a little low in my classroom. I wished I was the kind of girl in high school who tried out for cheerleading and made the squad. I wished I knew some cheers, especially the ones near the end of a game when your team is getting creamed and there you still are, buoyant, bubbly, jumping around, waving pompoms.

I hated it when the dogs looked at me like they thought they were losers. I keep saying, “Would you wipe that look off your faces? Would you please erase all that stuff like a virus on a computer?”

Surrender.
Maybe in its good sense, it doesn't have to mean “go submissive.” I've been worrying about that. When I invite Shadow to give me a ball I threw him, or I invite Tasha to consider being forever a non-bully, am I standing there like a dictator, ordering them to obey me
or else,
even though I'm not aware of the “or else”? I'm wondering this because Margaret mentioned to me that she thought I was getting
rigid.
No one had ever used that word about me before. Margaret said it's normal for this point in my training program. I don't know what she meant by “this point.” There aren't any points in my program. There isn't even a program, just me and dogs and the sun in different places in the sky on top of this hill.

Maybe she didn't criticize me because she was annoyed that I disagreed with her about postponing my agility course. Maybe she was teaching me.

I thought of a counselor I had in my old program, a former hippie who was also a veteran of Vietnam. He became a hippie when he got out of the army, even though the days of hippies were in decline by then. I had a massive crush on him, unrequited. It was against the rules for a staffer to do anything with a resident but be a staffer. But personally, to take the edge off some tension I put out to him, as I was having an identity as someone who didn't believe in obeying rules, he told me he never involved himself with white girls, as a rule. He was frank about it. To deal with that, I had to write names of Morgan Freeman movies on the request list for DVDs, so I could sit around looking at Morgan Freeman, pretending he was my boyfriend, in spite of our age difference.

He actually sort of looked like Morgan Freeman. He called himself my teacher. Counselor, he felt, was too nice of a word, too polite.

“I'm going to take you apart, and I'm not going to put you back together, Evie,” he told me, after the crush had worn off. I was sitting there starting to hate him. This was being a teacher? This was rehab?

“Surrender, Evie,” he told me, like he was riding a broomstick up high, skywriting, like I was Dorothy.

He didn't think teaching me meant teaching me how to put the pieces back together. He was, figure it out your damn self.

He left that program before I did. We couldn't keep in touch, another rule. But he didn't break me when he took me apart. If he did, I wouldn't be here.

So I'm saying to Margaret, sort of, about the rigidity, thanks for the tip. And I'm saying to the dogs, I won't break you. I mean, I won't make you worse than how much you're already broken.

Treats,
random.
Besides giving treats to say “good job,” or to avoid bad behavior, there's another element of
positive reinforcement.
You give a dog a treat for no reason, as a surprise, like a gift when it's not your birthday. I love how they always get startled, especially when you single out one of them, away from the eyes and noses of the others. They're looking at you like, what? What? What did I do wrong now? And you hold out a treat and smile and say, “Oh, I wanted to remind you I think you're cool.” This amazes them every time. They never get used to the randomness.

It's not spoiling them. Abused rescued dogs can't have birthdays. I bet that every day in America, non-rescued dogs wake up to their people saying to them, “Happy birthday!” Probably many of them receive presents, perhaps a party too. People with rescued dogs can make up a birth date, sure. But it's not the same thing.

We're not getting treats anymore from Mrs. Treats in Mrs. Auberchon's kitchen. I don't know why. We're getting them in bulk from the feed store, like the food. But the first time the new treats appeared, they came in a delivery of just treats.

This was a truck that was not turned away. The driver was a guy with a wedding ring. In the cab with him were his own dogs, a pair of friendly, happy young collies, brother and sister. It was obvious that their natural desire to be out herding a flock of something had been modified to fit their lifestyle. They and the guy were crazy about each other. They rode everywhere with him, herding traffic out the window glass, the guy told us, with their eyes.

While the guy unloaded the bags, one of the staffers gave permission for the collies to visit my class. It was a good opportunity to see how our students would act in the presence of strangers from the outside world. I coped with the surprise very well, expecting the worst, ready to stop Tasha from being a bully, Shadow from howling at them, Josie from biting them, Dora from bossing them around and demanding that they bow to her, Alfie from ignoring them, when it wouldn't kill him to pick up his head and say hi. But nothing happened.

It was the same as if those collies and the Sanctuary dogs belonged to two different species of aliens, from two different planets, with nothing to say to one another and no means to say it, even if they did. The visiting dogs remained at a distance, staring silently, getting stared at back. Not even Tasha went over to them, which would have been her job, as the biggest.

They weren't being indifferent or antisocial. I don't know how I knew what was happening, but I knew. Truly, in their own minds, they recognized the huge abyss between them; they had nothing in common. The collies had a person. The collies had a home. No human had ever hurt them. They had zero awareness of such a thing as “homeless dogs hurt by humans.”

I was sure my dogs felt they were looked upon by the visitors as losers. When the visit was over, the sense of relief in my classroom was like the removal of a collective collar worn too tightly, finally taken off.

Everyone received treats from a new bag. They didn't care that the treats were not homemade. “Those collies were snobs,” I told them. “They were boring, ignorant snobs.”

Two-ball.
Louise returned to my class to give Shadow a lesson on Drop It.

She had me keep the other dogs to the side, Tasha on a leash and Dora too, because Dora didn't like anyone doing something she wasn't involved in. I sat on the floor with Josie in my lap. Alfie was beside us, inert, his tail tucked in, his sleekness and smoothness curving like half of a hoop. He was letting me pat him with the hand that wasn't holding the two leashes.

Tasha and Dora settled down. I think the dogs knew we were playing the part of an audience.

With all her quietness and calm, Louise called Shadow to come to her. Of course he went rushing. He adored her. She spoke him into a sit. In her hand was a tennis ball. She made him wait for the throw until he started drooling for it.

She didn't fling it far. He shot after it and, as usual, hung onto it, looking like he'd rather stop breathing than give it up. She didn't call him back. She didn't tell him he needed to go and drop the ball at her feet.

“Shadow, look,” she called softly, reaching into her pocket.

And it was, oh my God she has another ball.

She held up the second ball, her arm pre-throw. In the audience, we were riveted. Shadow turned toward us as if asking for advice, but he knew he was on his own with this. He went rigid with perplexity, Hamlet-like with indecision. He wanted that other ball. He also wanted the one in his mouth. I don't know how he knew he had to return the first one to have the second. But he knew.

“Come and drop, Shadow,” called Louise.

He was so conflicted, some pee dripped out of him. It was only a little. No penalty. He watched Louise bounce the second ball, catch it smartly, bounce it again, again, again. He couldn't bear it. He moaned and let out a half bark and streaked to her, skidding to a rest just beyond her. Then he reversed himself to stand in front of her. Up went her arm.