The Lost Dogs

by Jim Gorant

  He knew what sort of supplies he needed, how much time he’d have to devote to the effort, and how to work with the dog. But there were just enough differences about the situation to keep him from feeling that he knew exactly what to expect. For starters, this dog was from a fight bust, and of all the dogs Cohen had worked with, none had that specific background. No doubt some of them had fought, but they had not been raised as part of a large, well-funded fighting operation. Although he didn’t like to admit it, even to himself, the dog’s potentially violent history made him nervous. Of all things, he’d been having visions of the Undertaker, the ghoulish professional wrestler who wears all black and fosters a persona of evil incarnate.

  The other attention-getting detail was the dog’s name: Jonny Rotten. A pit bull from a fight ring is one thing. A pit bull from a fight ring named after a notoriously abrasive and out-of-control punk rocker suggested something else altogether.

  Those facts had swirled through Cohen’s mind in the weeks since he’d been informed of his assignment, and they only grew more prominent as he prepared to meet the dog. Still, he grabbed the leash and collar, a handful of treats and a chew toy, climbed into his silver Toyota pickup truck, and made the half-hour drive from the Sunset Hill neighborhood of San Francisco out to Donna and Tim’s house in Oakland.

  Inside he greeted everyone. After a few minutes of friendly banter, he was led through a maze of pens. Finally Tim Racer stopped before one and opened the door. Out came a dog, Jonny Rotten. He was about thirty-five pounds and his black-and-white fur twisted around his body in a way that left his right eye encircled in a big ring of black. The other eye was surrounded by white and its natural tearing left a little pink comma on the fur below. Under his nose another little black patch looked like a greasepaint mustache, and when the sun was behind him, the light shone through his pink ears.

  There was no other way to say it: Jonny Rotten was small and cute. He looked like a scrappy street kid in a cow suit. As Cohen assessed the little fella he couldn’t help but laugh. He laughed at the name, he laughed at the dog, he laughed at himself. He laughed right through Racer’s speech about his responsibilities. He laughed while he signed the release papers, and he laughed as he loaded the pen into the truck. He even laughed when, halfway over the Bay Bridge, the little dog puked all over the truck.

  Dogs love the rut. They love getting into a routine that doesn’t change. Once they know they’re going to get fed and walked and have playtime daily, they can relax. They can focus on other things. Jonny needed a rut.

  He’d come a long way since leaving the shelter but he was still stressed and wired. When Cohen came out to greet him after his first night in the house, Jonny’s eyes were the size of silver dollars, taking in everything. Jonny wiggled and paced in his crate and Cohen could tell that as fast as he was moving on the outside, he was going twice as quickly inside.

  In the last nine months he’d gone from Vick’s woods to the shelter, to the RV, to Donna and Tim’s, and now here to Cohen’s house. He was set up in a crate in the dining room, which was gated off from the rest of the house. As Jonny sat in his spot he could first smell and then see Lilly roaming around. There was another pit bull in the house; what did that mean? Who were these people? What would they want of him; what would they give him?

  The first thing Cris hoped to give Jonny was a rut, and then they’d go from there. Growing up in Southern California, Cohen had always had dogs and he’d spent his summers at a camp where animals were part of the curriculum: They rode horses, they caught snakes. He’d made it his business to understand animals and both he and Jen were such animal lovers that they decorated their home with a taxidermist’s tributes. The walls and shelves of their two-story rental were dotted with a horse skull, a rabbit, a possum, a raven, a snake, and an armadillo. There were rooster carvings and mini-alligator heads, too.

  Cohen’s plan for Jonny was simple. Up every day between 6:30 and 7:00 A.M., and out for a forty-five-minute walk to take care of any lingering overnight business and burn off some energy. The path would be the same every morning. Rut, rut, rut. After that it would be back home for a handful of food, some grooming, a quick scratch down, and then into the crate with a few toys and puzzles.

  Cohen ran the service department at a nearby car dealership. At lunchtime he’d zip home and Jonny would get a quick trip to the yard, some playtime, and a little lounge in the sun followed by a return to the crate until Cohen got home at 5:30 P.M. Then there would be another long walk—an hour this time—dinner, a game of fetch in the yard, quiet time, and sleep.

  At least that was the plan. Cohen realized quickly that this routine would have to be something of a long-term goal. He clipped a leash on Jonny and started leading him across the floor, but when they reached the stairs they needed to go down in order to get out, Jonny came to a stop.

  He sniffed at the empty space where it seemed as if the floor should continue. He shifted his weight from side to side and looked around. He let out a soft, squeaky hhmmmm. Cohen didn’t understand the problem. He walked down a few steps and encouraged Jonny to follow. The dog moved forward like he wanted to do as asked, but he would not take the first step.

  He shifted and barked. He reached his paw out once or twice but when it didn’t make contact with anything he pulled it back. The dog was clearly frustrated. Jonny’s history rushed through Cohen’s head. He realized the little guy had never lived in a house before and had probably never seen steps. Jonny had no idea what stairs were or how to conquer them.

  Cohen tried to help. He reached out and grabbed Jonny’s front paw and tried to guide it down to the first step. That worked okay, but the dog had no idea what to do next. Which foot should he move now? He still had his weight shifted all the way back and showed no signs of throwing it forward. He was stuck.

  Cohen decided that would be a lesson for another day, so he picked Jonny up and carried him out. Jonny was ecstatic to be outside. Cohen wanted to follow a path that they could stick to every day. He lived about two blocks from Golden Gate Park, so incorporating the park into the walk seemed like a good idea, but he also wanted to expose Jonny to new things, so some neighborhood exploring was necessary too.

  That was a problem, though. When he was trying to help Jonny down the stairs Cohen noticed that the little pads on the bottom of his feet were soft as cooked ravioli. It made sense. Sure, Jonny had spent the last six months living on concrete floors, but he didn’t go anywhere. As he sat there in his tiny pen, his body atrophied and his feet lost the calluses and rough spots that usually build up naturally when any animal walks around.

  They would have to keep the early excursions a little shorter until Jonny’s feet hardened. Cohen dreamed up a course that they could gradually expand so most of it would be familiar, but as Jonny’s stamina and walking welts built, they could tack on more distance without much of a shock.

  Within minutes, Cohen realized he didn’t have much to worry about: Jonny would not make it far that day. He was so stimulated and so fearful at the same time that he jumped and chased and retreated and cowered and raced ahead in jumbled succession. Cohen held the leash like a man waterskiing behind a hummingbird, and Jonny, darting and dashing back and forth, tied his two-legged companion in knots. By the time they reached the corner, a distance of perhaps one hundred yards, they’d had to come to a complete stop twice so Cohen could untangle himself from the leash.

  As they waited for the light to change, Jonny darted into a hedge planted in the adjacent yard. He dove over branches, scampered around trunks, rushed through leaves. Before Cohen could yell stop, the dog had so thoroughly knotted himself into the trees that it took a full ten minutes to disentangle him.

  As Cohen stood there trying to calm the dog and work the leash through the branches, he was transported for a second. He was suddenly looking down on himself from above, and the scene he envisioned struck him as one of such utter frustration combined with pure slapstick that before he knew it he was lau
ghing again.

  For the rest of the walk Cohen laughed every time the dog knocked over a garbage can and then leapt away in horror. Every time Jonny twitched or skittered from everyday objects, every time the pooch looked up at him with his half-black and half-white face, like a big cookie, and raised his brows as if to ask, “Hey, you’re from around here; what’s up with this?”

  In forty-five minutes they had not traveled far, but Cohen could already see this was going to be a real trip.

  28

  THE VIDEO WAS GRAINY and unprofessional, shot on a handheld camera that shook and skipped and soaked up all the ambient noises—a few voices, birds, distant barking. Still, she studied it, watched it over and over. It felt like 500,000 times, although the real number was probably more like 100. What she saw was both heart-melting and slightly alarming. The sight was also somewhat familiar.

  On the day of the original raid at Michael Vick’s house, Marthina McClay had been sitting in the green velvet rocker that anchors her living room, watching a CNN report about the situation. Helicopters hovered over the stately white house on Moonlight Road and their cameras picked up the activities below. One of them zoomed in on a police officer leading a dog out of the woods and into a waiting crate.

  He was a large male, maybe fifty-five or sixty pounds, with a tawny brown coat. Before the animal stepped inside he looked back over his shoulder and stared into the camera. McClay gasped. He was beautiful, with a black snout and black highlights around his eyes that made it look like he was wearing eyeliner. He wagged his tail and posed for the camera, which panned away. McClay turned to her roommate, who sat on the couch nearby, and said, “Shame is, they’re probably going to kill them all.”

  Now, eight months later, McClay stared at the video on her computer screen. There had been a few big brown dogs with black snouts in the group, so she couldn’t be sure this was the same guy, but he sure looked like the dog from that CNN footage. His name was Bouncer and as she watched the video she knew why. Again and again he jumped straight up and down as if his legs were made of pogo sticks.

  Amusing as it was to watch, the jumpiness was something of a warning sign for McClay. It was typical of high-energy dogs that had been locked up too long—jumping was the only outlet for their energy in confinement. How it would translate into a home setting was anyone’s guess. Would the big lug spend his days leaping all over her house? Would he transfer the impulse into some other energetic pursuit that would do even more damage?

  But the video showed something else, too. In the scenes where Bouncer interacted with the men and women around him, he was calm and attentive. He was very people-focused. He was interested in what the handlers wanted, and he had a desire to please. These, McClay knew, were great traits. They indicated a solid temperament that she could work with.

  She could also see that he was good with other dogs. That was important to McClay, since she had three pit bulls sleeping at her feet, and Bouncer would have to get along with them. When she first learned that the government was considering signing the dogs over to rescue groups, she submitted an application on behalf of her organization, Our Pack, but figured she’d never hear anything. A few weeks later she got a phone call. It was Rebecca Huss.

  “What do you think about these dogs?” Huss asked.

  “I believe at least a few of them could make the best household pets in America,” McClay responded.

  “Oh, so you’ve worked with pit bulls before,” Huss said.

  The conversation had gone on from there. Huss asked all the expected questions. The two women talked for a long time about the dogs. McClay also spoke numerous times to Tim Racer and Donna Reynolds, who were attempting to broker the arrangement. Eventually, Our Pack’s application was approved and the intensity of those negotiations picked up. Huss, Reynolds, and Racer hoped she could take more than one dog, but McClay didn’t have any foster homes available other than her own.

  She could take only one dog, but she couldn’t decide which. She received videos of six or seven dogs. She asked endless questions. Somehow, though, she kept coming back to that big jumping bean. What she didn’t know was that Bouncer had been the luckiest of the Vick dogs. He had been the only one sent to the shelter in Hopewell, Virginia. It was a smaller, quieter facility at which each kennel had an indoor and outdoor section, which meant that he had more space, more stimuli, and fresh air. He was treated as an individual, not dealt with in a group. The staff bonded with him. He received lots of attention and was regularly allowed to run and play in a small exercise area. That didn’t erase the effects of eight and a half months of shelter life and the years in Vick’s operation, but it helped.

  McClay had made up her mind, but she watched the tape one more time anyway. She looked at the way he wagged his tail and shook his whole body with excitement; she looked at his big goofy body. “I like goofy,” she thought. She looked into his big brown eyes again and picked up the phone. “I’ll do it.”

  Nicole Rattay was going home. Finally. Her four-week dog-sitting assignment had turned into six weeks, but the time spent had been worth it. She had helped the dogs fight off some of their kennel stress and many had even shown distinct improvement. Now she was on the road again.

  There was no RV with thirteen dogs crated up in the cabin this time. Instead, she drove a rented four-door sedan with only one dog along for the ride. The drive, though, was the same: Virginia to Oakland. She could move a lot faster in the car, but she was on her own, with just the radio and Bouncer panting in the backseat to keep her company.

  She and Steve would have brought him out on the first trip, but Huss hadn’t yet secured a home for him, so he’d stayed behind. But now that McClay had agreed to take Bouncer, and since Rattay was heading west, she had agreed to drive him out. Getting out of town proved a little harder than Rattay had imagined. Before she could leave with Bouncer, she had to call a few of the shelter attendants at home. They had grown so attached to him that they had begged for a chance to come down and say good-bye. So Rattay waited patiently while everyone sobbed through their send-offs before hitting the highway.

  Once they were on the road, Rattay kept Bouncer crated up in the backseat and tried to cover as much distance as possible. When she finally pulled into a motel for the night, her watch showed almost 11:00 P.M. Rain fell. She was road-weary and didn’t feel like hauling the crate into the room. She decided to let Bouncer sleep on the floor. They got into the room and she passed out almost immediately, but he was a ball of energy.

  As she drifted in and out of sleep she could hear him barreling around the room and bouncing off the furniture. Finally he settled down. Some sound, a sort of crunching, filtered into her subconscious, but she couldn’t make herself care where it was coming from.

  When Rattay woke in the morning the room looked as if a tornado has passed through it. Things were knocked over, the sheets on the other bed were tossed and there was paper everywhere, torn up little bits of yellow and white paper. During the night Bouncer had shredded a phone book. As Rattay cleaned she came up with a new plan: She would let him roam free in the car during the day so he could burn up a little energy and then she’d crate him up at night.

  Back on the trail, this seemed to work better. Bouncer quickly made his way into the front seat. He spent time looking out the window, watching the sky and the trees and the other cars. He took great interest in what Rattay was doing and checked out all the controls, sniffing everything from the radio dials to the steering wheel. When he was done he looked at Rattay with those big brown eyes and goofy expression, as if to say, “Anything I can do to help?”

  There was. Over the next two days he helped Rattay stay awake and entertained on the long cross-country haul. Finally they arrived at Donna and Tim’s.

  I’m crazy. What made me think this was going to work? What made me think I could take a dog from Michael Vick’s fighting operation and make it better?

  Mathina McClay was standing in the street watching the big br
own dog jump up and down, up and down. The ridiculousness of it all was crashing down on her. Besides questioning her own sanity, she wondered how she had missed the signs. She’d seen the jumping and the high energy on the video; did she really think that would magically cure itself once the dog got here? Hell, Huss and Racer had named him Bouncer.

  Now she was stuck. Donna and Tim had driven the beast down to her home in Los Gatos, about an hour south of Oakland, and as soon as he stepped out of the car the big dope started with the kangaroo impression. She wished she could call the whole thing off, but she knew she was committed. She took the leash and waved as the pair drove away.

  She turned toward the house, a tidy one-story structure appointed with Renaissance reproductions and a hand-painted sign that read COLD NOSE, WARM HEART. The place contained three other dogs, and McClay wondered if it would survive the fourth.

  McClay locked the other dogs in her bedroom before she brought Bouncer inside—that would have been way too much for him. But nothing seemed to make Bouncer any less bouncy. He continued to jump and jump and jump. He jumped on McClay, even nipping at her to get her attention. He jumped on the furniture. He found a pair of socks and chewed on them. When the socks were rescued, he grabbed a pillow and began gnawing on that. He tried to pee on everything: the kitchen floor, the couch, the TV.

  Finally, McClay coaxed him into his crate and he seemed to settle a little bit, as if he knew the drill. She offered food and toys, neither of which held his attention. He was uneasy and scattered, and McClay felt bad for him. She dropped a pillow on the floor, sat down next to the crate, and settled in for a long night.

  29

  CATALINA STIRLING FELT AS though she were carrying a package. Maybe a large box or a bag of groceries. The thing hugged close to her chest was that stiff and lifeless, and yet Sweet Jasmine was alive. The dog was simply frozen, locked in a rigid pose that spoke volumes about her anxiety and fear.