One
Something was happening to my puppy family.
Up until now, my world was made up of my littermates and a man named Roger. (Roger was the one who’d come up with the brilliant idea to feed us soft food.) There was also my mother dog and the yard we lived in. We were all given names (I was Zeus) and this was life—wonderful, wonderful life.
But one day two women and a child came and played with my sister Lady, and when they left, Lady went with them. Then my brother Henry departed with a full human tribe—too many children to count! Next it was Snoopy who vanished. And very much to my surprise, not long after that, my mother left, too.
My mother and my littermates, it occurred to me, were all getting families. The thought made me swoon. Roger didn’t spend much time with us. I enjoyed loping around in the sun and the grass with other dogs to keep me company, but it would be even better to have a family all my own—a bunch of people dedicated to me.
Except this didn’t happen. No families came to take my brother Troy or me. Troy and I regarded each other warily. For some reason, we were just not good enough to have our own families. Did it have something to do with the fact that we were the two biggest of the bunch? Did people like smaller puppies better? I worried about it a lot as I lay in the grass and chewed sticks or Troy’s ear or now and then my own front paws, just to see what they tasted like.
Why wasn’t Troy good enough to get a family? Why wasn’t I?
A long time passed, and then one day the gate opened. Troy and I went berserk, because a new family walked in, with a woman and a man and many human children. “Troy, Zeus, this is the ‘Ōpūnui family,” Roger announced to us.
The children separated me from my brother, giving us each undivided attention. So many feet and ankles to sniff. So many fingers to lick. So many hands stroking me. Yes, this is what I wanted.
I had finally met my family.
“You said these puppies were born on a farm?” the woman asked, reaching down for Troy. I watched jealously as he squirmed in her arms.
“That’s right,” Roger told her. “Pregnant female just showed up at the farm one day, no microchip, no collar.”
“These are such beautiful chocolate Labradors. I don’t know how you do it.” The woman gave Roger a sad smile. “I’d want to keep all of them for myself.”
“Animal rescue is hard,” Roger admitted. “We don’t let ourselves fall in love. Finding them new homes is more important.”
“So how does this work?” the adult man asked. He stroked Troy’s head, but I was not too jealous because a boy and a girl were focusing warm, happy attention on me, rubbing my soft, round belly until I groaned with happiness.
Roger nodded. “I told you on the phone about Marco Ricci. He’s a paramedic and a member of the Oahu Search and Rescue team. He’ll be out in a few days to decide which dog he wants—I reserved the two smartest ones for him. Then, if you want, you can have the other one.”
“Oh, we want, we definitely want,” the woman assured Roger.
“He sounds like an interesting guy,” the man observed.
“Marco? Oh yes, that’s the perfect word, interesting,” Roger replied with a chuckle. “Extremely organized and strategic. If he says he’ll be here at 10:35, that’s when he’ll arrive. But the guy came back from a visit to family in Italy with the idea of training dogs in water rescue, and now they say he’s just about the best in the world.”
“I don’t know that we’re good at dog training, but we’ll certainly give Troy or Zeus a lot of love!” the man said with a smile.
The man and woman took a turn petting me next, while some of the children played Tug-on-a-Stick with Troy. Everything seemed to be going just as it should. So Troy and I were stunned when the family left without taking either of us. We had been so good!
Many more days passed without families. I felt pretty confident that Troy was the problem.
One morning we were sleeping deeply when I had a sense that someone new had arrived. Both Troy and I blearily opened our eyes to find a man kneeling right there, smiling down at us. I sniffed his hands, finding a rich, earthy odor and strong traces of dog. The man’s eyes and hair were dark like Roger’s, but his arms and hands were lighter.
Roger watched approvingly as Troy and I found our energy and leaped up at the new man’s face, trying to lick him. “I already have a family lined up for whichever one you don’t pick, Marco. That one’s Troy, and that one’s Zeus,” Roger told him. I heard my name, but I was focused on this man, chewing his hands with affection so that he would understand that I, and not Troy, should be his dog.
I was pretty surprised when he scooped us both up and stood. Troy and I stared at each other, amazed to be so high off the ground.
“Thanks for holding them for so long,” the new man said cheerfully. “I know it’s easier to adopt out younger puppies, but there’s really no way to test them before they’re three months.”
Roger shrugged. “You do enough for our rescue, Marco. And like I said, I’ve already got a family for the one you decide isn’t good enough.”
“Oh,” the man corrected, “I’m sure they’re both good. But to work in water rescue you need to be fearless. By the end of the day, I’ll know if one of these can make it through the program.”
I had never been beyond the gate of our yard, so when the man stepped through it, my nose was in the air, drinking in new smells. The man smiled down at us. “Ready for a ride in the Jeep?”
He put us in a crate in the back of a car and closed the door. Next to us was another crate, with another dog in it! He was male and huge, with a white face spotted with what looked like mud splatters. Troy and I climbed on top of each other to get a better look. “That’s Bear,” the man told us before he moved around to sit in the front of the car.
“All right, little guys, let’s go find out which one of you will be the next water rescue dog!” he called back to us.
Soon we felt ourselves moving. Troy splayed his legs out nervously. I lifted my nose to the amazing assortment of scents that were streaking by, a jumble of birds and flowers and other living things, most obviously the big dog next to us. A deep rumble vibrated up through the floor.
Was this where our siblings had gone when they were carried out of the gate by their new people?
After a while, the rumble ended and we stopped moving. Troy fell down. Sharp, clean, nearly overwhelming fragrances flowed into my nose. The man took us out of the crate and set us down on warm pavement.
“What’ve you got here, Marco?” a smiling woman asked. This was when I decided that Marco was the name of the man who’d brought us here, the way Roger was Roger and I was Zeus and Troy was Troy.
The woman was shorter than Marco and carried the same strong scent as the air—it blotted out everything else, this fiercely clean odor.
“Aloha, Jessica. This is Troy and Zeus.”
“And this is the famous Bear,” she said delightedly, as the big dog dropped down next to us. Troy and I instantly nosed him, climbing on him, loving him. He regarded us with a dour expression while we tried to bite his jowls. “He’s so big!”
“Bear’s face is English Setter, but his body’s all Newfoundland, like his mother.”
“He’s beautiful! Okay, you’ve got the whole day. The water park’s closed to the public for spring inspection,” the woman told Marco.
“That’s more time than I need. All I’m looking for today is a sense of how they react to scary things, like waterslides and wave pools. A rescue dog needs to think of water like air—something to move through.”
“Have fun,” the woman said with a smile.
“Okay, dogs. Dogs!” We heard the sharp note in Marco’s voice and looked up in amazement. For some reason, he ran away from us! Didn’t he like us?
But the big dog followed Marco, so we followed the big dog. Now I understood—we were playing a chase game! We ran through some sort of gate and across a stretch of concrete that was slick and hard under my paws. I realized very quickly that Troy was faster than I, which was frustrating. Whatever we were doing, I wanted Marco to love me the most for doing it.
Marco reached the sloping edge of a pool of clear, glassy water. This was where the sharp smells came from—the water! It didn’t smell anything like the water in my bowl back in the yard.
Marco didn’t stop. He just kept running, right into that strange-smelling water. It started out very shallow and quickly got deeper, up over his ankles, then as deep as his knees.
Bear didn’t hesitate, so Troy and I didn’t either, plunging after him, galloping, then lunging, and then finally swimming to catch up with Marco. He waded ahead of us and then turned and smiled. “Look at you! You’re such good dogs!”
Troy and I reached Marco and didn’t know what to do next. I tried to climb up Marco’s legs, but that didn’t work. The water splashed into my nose and I sneezed and paddled as hard as I could.
“Come on, Zeus! Come, Troy! Come, Bear!” Marco turned and waded energetically back to shore. “Let’s go to the river!”
The big dog, I decided, was called Bear.
We followed Marco across more pavement and reached a place where the pavement ended. More of the clear, pungent water flowed past, moving quickly.
Marco and Bear didn’t even stop. They just kept moving, jumping into the air and then dropping through the water’s surface.
I was running so fast that I couldn’t stop even if I’d wanted to. In a moment, I was over the edge, and then I was falling. I sank in bubbles and bobbed up, blinking, totally confused.
Bear was swimming in circles around Marco, so I followed. Swimming felt a little like running, except it was harder work to push my legs through the water than to gallop along the ground.
Marco stood and water parted around him. When I went toward him, the paddling was easy. But if I tried to head away from him, the water pushed at me, hard. I had to struggle to keep moving.
“Zeus! Oh, that was good. Look at you, brave puppy!” He glanced up. “Come on, Troy!”
Troy was still on the pavement, some distance above us, wagging anxiously. He did not want to make the leap. But I could tell he wanted some of the approval Marco was showing me. Perhaps my brother had figured out the same thing I had, that making Marco happy would mean having a family.
So, with a final glance at me, Troy flung himself off the perch, falling into the water to be with us. He went under and came up sputtering. “Good dog. Good dog,” Marco told him. I didn’t know what this meant, but I heard the approval. Troy and I had figured out how to please Marco.
Marco boosted us out of the water and then we did the same trick over and over, moving along the stream. Each time, the edge we jumped from was higher and the water below us was deeper. Troy’s hesitation had vanished, making us equals as far as I could tell. That was too bad. I didn’t mind if Marco liked Troy, but I wanted him to like me more.
“Such good dogs,” Marco praised both of us.
I liked hearing that, whatever it meant. Marco’s voice was happy, and I liked making him happy.
“All right, let’s do the wave pool.”
By this time I’d decided that whatever was going on, I should just mimic the big dog. When Bear swam out after Marco into a wide, flat pond, I followed. Swimming was getting easier, and I was starting to understand how to keep my nose high enough that the water would stay out of it.
I was astounded to be tossed high when the water suddenly swelled and crashed. Troy decided he’d had enough and went for shore, but I hung with Bear and Marco.
“You’re fine. See, it’s just a wave. You’re fine,” Marco told me.
We swam in the middle of the pool as one mound of water after another came at us. The mounds swept me up high and then slammed down on my head, dunking me under. It was very strange and confusing, but I learned that I’d bob up to the surface every time, so it wasn’t too bad. And Marco was happy.
Finally, we joined Troy at the edge of the unstable pool. I could tell my brother was as tired as I was, even though all he’d done was run around and yap, anxiously watching us get tumbled by water.
“Just one more thing,” Marco promised. We followed on his heels, no longer full of berserk energy but just keeping pace as he trotted over to a set of stairs.
He reached down and gathered up Troy. I watched in distress as Marco climbed up with my brother under his arm. Bear mounted the steps under his own power.
I was alone! Would a yip be appropriate? I put a paw on the first step and looked up, wagging in confusion. How was I supposed to get up there? My brother peered at me smugly from under Marco’s arm, clearly assuming he was the one chosen.
But Marco understood what was wrong. I loved Marco! He came back and carried me up next to Troy, and we were again equals. We were on a small platform high above a bright, glistening pool. There was barely room for all of us.
Marco sat down. “Okay, I promise you, this will never happen in real life. Who wants to go first?” He scooted himself forward until his legs were dangling over the edge of the platform, his feet pointed down a long, wet ramp. “Ready for the slide? You ready, Troy? Zeus, you want to do the slide?”
I thought of this new place as Slide.
Then, to my utter shock, Marco pushed himself off with his hands and shot down the ramp. He was gone! He fell into the pool with a massive splash, and I whined with worry. But a moment later he stood up in the water, clapping his hands. “Bear!”
The big dog leaped forward and plummeted down, into the pool. I stared in disbelief, utterly astounded that a dog could do something like this!
“Okay, Zeus. Okay, Troy. Come!”
I was beginning to understand that word, Come. Marco seemed to use it when he wanted us all to be together. But why was he saying it now? The slide was between us, keeping us apart!
I gazed down the steep ramp, my heart pounding. Though I had just witnessed Bear flying down it, what Marco was asking seemed impossible. Troy whimpered, utterly terrified. We couldn’t go back—the ground was too far below us. Going forward seemed just as perilous.
“Troy! Zeus!”
Trembling, I put one foot, then the other, on the slippery slide.
Copyright © 2023 by W. Bruce Cameron
Copyright © 2023 by Tor Books
