on the floor in front of me, how grateful I was, how full of love I was for the man who was giving me dinner with his hand. Homesickness gripped me as powerfully as the cramps I had awakened with that morning, and I knew I would soon be leaving this town to get back on the trail.
I was learning, though, that I needed to eat whenever the opportunity presented itself. It might be many days before my next meal. When darkness fell I went to the street with the most food smells. The night was bringing a cold with it, and I remembered being in the hills with Big Kitten. I would have to hunt like her to feed myself. But I would do whatever I needed to do to be a Go Home dog.
A man was sitting on the sidewalk on blankets in a pool of light falling from a lamp overhead. “Hey, dog,” he called softly as I made to avoid him.
My first instinct was to flee. I paused, though, hearing something in the voice that sounded friendly.
The man smelled of dirt and beef and sweat. The hair on his face and head was long and tangled. He had plastic sacks piled up next to him on one side and a suitcase like Taylor’s on the other. His wore a glove with no fingers, which he extended in my direction. “Here, puppy,” he said gently.
I hesitated. He sounded nice, and because he was lying there with his legs extended and his back to the building behind him instead of standing with his arms out or a leash in his hands, did not seem like the sort of person who would try to keep me from doing Go Home.
He dug into a small box and extended a piece of beef in my direction and I went to him, wagging. The beef treat had cheese on it! I gobbled it quickly and did Sit.
“Good dog,” he praised. He apparently recognized a good Sit when he saw it. He dug into his box and came up with another chunk of meat. He ran his hand over my fur and briefly held my collar, squinting at it. “Bella,” he said.
I wagged. Most people who knew my name would give me treats. The people in the building with the chickens had not known me, which might explain why they were so angry.
“What are you doing out by yourself? Are you lost, Bella?”
I heard the question in his voice and looked pointedly at the box by his side. Yes, I would be happy to have more beef with cheese.
“I’ve been lost,” the man stated softly after a moment. He reached into one of his sacks, digging around. I watched attentively.
“Hey, here, would you like these?” He fed me a handful of nuts and while I was chewing them he played with my collar some more. When I was finished I realized I now had a stretchy cord tied to my collar. Alarmed, I tried to move away from the man, but was not able to go far before the rope flexed taut.
The man and I gazed at each other. A small whimper escaped my lips.
I had made a terrible mistake.
Twenty-three
The man owned a pushcart like the ones people used in the parking lot to ferry food and children to their cars, but he had no children and most of what he stuffed into the cart in plastic bags was not food. “Go for a walk,” the man would say nearly every day, loading everything off the sidewalk into the cart. I longed to walk, to get away up into the hills, but we rarely went far. Usually we would stroll up the street to a flat yard with pieces of plastic and metal in it strewn across the soil, and I would squat to do Do Your Business and then we would return to the place by the wall where he would spread his blankets. Next to the wall was a metal fence, and when the man would leave me he would tie me there. Most of the time he went across the street to one of several buildings—one smelled of food, and one smelled of nothing I could detect except people and boxes. When he emerged from this second place he would be carrying a glass bottle and when he cracked it open the pungent tang reminded me of Sylvia.
Mostly we just sat. The man would talk to me almost constantly, repeating