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For Curtis and the dogs,
with love and gratitude
—M. E.
To Misha, a great mountain dog,
who helped our son to find his path
—O. I. and A. I.
FIDE CANEM (TRUST THE DOG)
—Ancient Roman search-and-rescue proverb
THAT OTHERS MAY LIVE
—Official motto of search-and-rescue teams all over the world
CONTENTS
Title
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigram
1. Tony the Boy: No No No Maybe
2. Gabe the Dog: Yes Yes Yes Always
3. Tony the Boy: Scent Trails
4. Gabe the Dog: Word Smells
5. Tony the Boy: Trail Angels
6. Gabe the Dog: Roundness
7. Tony the Boy: Invisible Clues
8. Gabe the Dog: Hide-and-Seek
9. Tony the Boy: Fences
10. Gabe the Dog: Togetherness
11. Tony the Boy: The Rescue Beast
12. Gabe the Dog: Teamwork
13. Tony the Boy: Loser
14. Gabe the Dog: Boy Training
15. Tony the Boy: Lonely Smells
16. Gabe the Dog: Sniffing School
17. Tony the Boy: Insect Math
18. Gabe the Dog: Dog Truths
19. Tony the Boy: Uno
20. Gabe the Dog: Smelly Rhymes
21. Tony the Boy: Walking with Bears
22. Gabe the Dog: Chasing the Moon
23. Tony the Boy: Dancing Elephants
24. Gabe the Dog: The Smell of a Voice
25. Tony the Boy: Found and Lost
26. Gabe the Dog: Sharing
27. Tony the Boy: Shorelines
28. Gabe the Dog: Beach Dreams
29. Tony the Boy: When Elephants Jump
30. Gabe the Dog: My Wishful Nose
31. Tony the Boy: Dog Years
32. Gabe the Dog: Explosions
33. Tony the Boy: Trail Names
34. Gabe the Dog: Search!
35. Tony the Boy: Rescued!
36. Gabe the Dog: Winners
37. Tony the Boy: Puppy Testing
38. Gabe the Dog: Full Moon
39. Luz the Dog: Finding Home
How to Stay Found in the Wondrous Woods: By Gabe, Luz, and Tony
A Note to Readers
Acknowledgments
About the Author
About the Illustrators
Copyright
1
TONY THE BOY
NO NO NO MAYBE
In my other life there were pit bulls.
The puppies weren’t born vicious,
but Mom taught them how to bite,
turning meanness into money,
until she got caught.
Now I don’t know where I’ll live,
or what sort of foster family
I’ll have to face each morning.
I dread the thought of a new school,
new friends, no friends, no hope.…
No! No no no no no.
But the social-worker lady doesn’t listen
to NO. She’s like a curious puppy, running,
exploring, refusing to accept collars and fences.
She keeps promising to find a relative who will
give me a place where I can belong.
I don’t believe her.
There aren’t any relatives—
not any that I’ve ever met.
I know I’m right, but family court
makes me feel dumb, with judges
and uniforms
wrapped up in rules.
It’s a world made for grown-ups,
not unlucky kids.
Even the angriest pit bulls
are friendlier than my future.
Everyone talks about dog years,
but all I can see now is minutes.
Each impossibly long dog minute
with the frowning judge
and cheerful social worker
feels like it could go on and on
forever.
Mom’s cruelty to animals
was her fault, not mine, but now
I’m the one suffering, as if her crimes
are being blamed on me.
When the social worker keeps smiling,
I find it hard to believe she’s actually found
a relative, a great-uncle, Tío Leonilo.
What a stupid name!
Maybe I can call him Leo the Lion,
or just tío, just uncle, as if I actually
know my mother’s first language,
the Spanish she left behind
when she floated away
from her native island
with me in her mean belly.
The social worker promises me
that although Tío is old—nearly fifty—
he’s cool.
He lives on a mountain, rescues lost hikers,
guides nature walks, and takes care
of trees. He’s a forest ranger.
She might as well say he’s a magician
or a genie who lives in a bottle.
I’ve spent all my life in the city.
All I know is Los Angeles noise, smog,
buses, traffic, and the gangs, and my mom,
the dogs, fangs, blood, claws.
Nothing makes sense.
Why would a cool uncle want to share
his long-lost relative’s kid-trouble?
This can’t be real.
Real life should feel real,
but this feels all weird and scary,
like a movie with zombies or aliens.
When a man in a forest green uniform
walks into the courtroom, he hugs me
and calls me Tonio, even though Mom
never called me anything but Tony
or Hey You or Toe Knee.…
Out in the hall, Tío shows me a photo
of a dog, a chocolate Lab—goofy grin,
silly drool—not a fighting dog,
just a friendly dog, eager, a pal.
Tío walks me out of that crazy
scary courthouse, into a parking lot
where the happy dog is waiting
in a forest green truck.
I have to meet Gabe’s welcoming
doggie eyes and sniffy nose,
even though I’m not ready to meet
nice dogs, cool uncles, or anyone else.
Well, maybe just one sniff is okay.
When I pat Gabe on his soft, furry head,
he gives my hand a few trusting,
slobbery licks.
Yuck.
2
GABE THE DOG
YES YES YES ALWAYS
The boy sees how I sniff, and he breathes too, smelling the deep odors of night and bright fragrance of day. Time is all mixed together in one long, endless pleasure of sniffing. We open our noses, inhaling everything—all we need is in the air.
I love the sound of his boy voice. Tonio. Tony. Not a very hard name to remember. I love the smell of his hands. The finger scent rhymes with good smells, food smells, friendly smells. Only his shoes hold an unfriendly odor. Bad dogs have walked near him. Strange dogs. Dangerous dogs. Their stench rhymes with bear scent and lion scent and the stink of rough places where stray dogs are caged.
The boy moves his head in slow circles, ey
es closed, nose open.
The truck roars up our mountain. Aromas rush in. We lift our noses
together, pushing our heads out the wide-open window
into a wild place
where only scent
matters.
We sniff.
We share the road,
the window,
and clear
invisible
air!
We will always be friends.
Always.
3
TONY THE BOY
SCENT TRAILS
I’ve slept in plenty of ugly
splintered
stinky
spiderwebby
nightmarish
hard
wooden
doghouses.
This place is different,
even though it’s not a real
house, just a two-room cabin,
with one whole room
for me.
The knotty pine walls
are filled with pictures of trees
and animals—no family photos, no
pictures of Mom when she was little.
I wonder what she was like.
Was she already fierce, or did she
look shy and scared
like me?
Tío’s brown dog claims my bed,
dropping his weight over my ankles,
as if to keep me from sprinting
away
in my dreams.…
Life is so weird. Gabe is a happy,
almost-as-smart-as-any-human
creature, while I feel like a worn-out
zoo beast.
I lie awake for a long time,
gazing out the cabin window at stars
that seem to be cradled by branches.
Our drive up the mountain
was so long and dizzying
that I can’t even begin to imagine
how far away
from my other life
I am now.
When I finally sleep, I dream
of a funny future. No fangs
or claws. Just me and Gabe,
only he’s a serious human,
and I’m the playful pup.
Then it’s morning, and Gabe
starts begging to go outside,
but when I glance out the window,
my view of a forest is so unfamiliar
that I stay where I am, motionless
and silent.
Pretty soon, my uncle is up
and breakfast is ready, the morning
already a flurry of surprises.
No one has ever cooked for me.
Not once. Oatmeal might not be
my favorite, but today it tastes
warm and comforting.
Tío says his cabin is so remote,
so high in the Sierra Nevadas,
that I’ll have to go to an old-style
three-room mountain school—
grades six through eight together
in one class. I’ll be with big kids,
and even though I’m tall, I’m only eleven
and a half. How am I going to survive
around twelve and thirteen-year-olds?
The worst part of picturing myself
at a new school is those moments
at the board, showing everyone
that I can’t ever
do any
of the math.
I’m nervous around fractions
and percentages, but word problems
about money are the ones
that really terrify me.
The social worker says it’s because
at home, when I showed that I knew
how to count, Mom made me keep track
of greedy bets
at the growling, snarling,
bloodthirsty dogfights.
So instead of practicing numbers,
I just learned letters, and then
I figured out how to keep my words
to myself.
Now, right after breakfast, Tío invites me
to help him take Gabe for a rambling walk
in the woods, where wild pine trees
smell like Christmas, even though
it’s springtime.
The forest is shadowy green,
with spiky red flowers sprouting
from bright patches of snow.
My first snow.
My first mountain.
My first off-leash dog.
No chain.
No muzzle.
No scars
or scabs.
Gabe follows a scent, nose to the ground,
nose in the air, back and forth, tracing
a pattern as he follows a smell
toward its source.
He’s so thrilled that I soon share
his excitement, racing to catch a sniff
and a glimpse
of the deer or squirrel
that left this mysterious trail
of drifting air.
I wish my stupid human nose
understood all the invisible clues
that Gabe can follow! Dogs inhale
the scents of sweat, breath, skin,
poop, and pee, but they can smell
emotions, too—anger, sadness, fear,
happiness, love, hope.…
Dogs can even smell a tricky lie
or the soothing truth.
Gabe bounces along the trail
of mystery scent, leading me
from a scared-of-life mood
to one that feels
like music.
Tío runs and laughs with us,
but the next day, on our morning walk,
when I sit on a tree stump to rest,
he suddenly turns serious,
reassuring me that he really is
Mom’s uncle—my great-uncle—
a true relative. He says he cares
what happens to me.
He tells me what happened to him.
He came to this country on a raft,
just like Mom, but years earlier,
when she was still a child.
His raft drifted, then washed ashore
and crashed on rocks, leaving him alone
and stranded on a tiny, nameless isle
for weeks, a castaway, marooned,
just like Robinson Crusoe.
He had to learn how to survive
by eating seaweed, drinking rain,
and breathing hope.…
I wonder if he remembers my mother
when she was tiny. I hope she was gentle,
sweet, and kind. I hope she loved animals,
and liked everybody,
and was too young to know
that life can be dangerous.
All I know about her is that
after growing up and floating away
from her island, she reached a rough city
where she met mean people
who used drugs and dogfights
as cruel ways to make money.
Tío swears that if he’d known
where she was, he would have tried
to help her, he would have struggled
to help me.
When he’s finished talking,
I shake off the tears, and he asks
if I want to sing.
That makes me grin, but he’s not joking,
so we pile into the truck with Gabe,
and we whirl around mountain curves,
until the steep road ends at a jumble
of barns and corrals
beyond a crooked wooden sign
that announces
COWBOY CHURCH
DOGS & HORSES WELCOME
I’ve never been to any church at all before,
and I’ve certainly never imagined a God
who likes horses and dogs.
Gabe treats the place like a feast
&
nbsp; of scent, sniffing boots, jeans, hoofs,
and manure. Even the yucky smells
make him smile. He turns out to be
the kind of dog that loves to laugh
and howl.
When the cowboys and forest rangers
start to sing, Gabe joins in, off-key,
and everyone ends up chuckling,
especially me. I never thought
I could have so much fun
so soon after trading
my tough-pit-bull
real life
for this temporary
foster home
in a wild forest
that somehow feels
so much more gentle
than the city.
4
GABE THE DOG
WORD SMELLS
After horse smells and howling, we run, race, leap, noses open, eyes open, mouths open, until the floaty aroma of a passing hawk almost disappears.
Low flying. Foresty. Swoop. Chase. Hunt. Hawks leave winged trails of hunger in midair.
Snow. We’re tired. We flop, dance, flap, flutter, flip. We make shapes in the softness. Tony’s patterns of snow are four limbed, just like mine when I roll from side to side. Only my shape is bigger and more wispy, because it has a tail.
Snow angels. I love it when the boy shouts words with cold, clear meanings that I can smell and taste!
I twitch my nostrils, inhale deeply, swallow meanings. I make the sound, smell, and taste of each new word my own, filling my hunger for friendship. I breathe the bumpy surface of words that rhyme with the scent of humans, the aroma of happiness.
5
TONY THE BOY
TRAIL ANGELS
I’m afraid to sleep, terrified
that the same old nightmares
of fangs
and claws
will keep coming back …
but beside me, Gabe woofs,
then drifts
into a running-dog
dream
that leads my tired mind
toward a race
where I am four legged
and fast
so swift that I can
almost
fly!
It’s not a real dream,
just a half-awake
fantasy,
but it helps me feel
safe enough
to doze.
In the morning, I wonder
why people always assume that dogs
just want food. Walks are the reward
they really crave—movement,
adventure, new smells.
So I get up and take Gabe out
to sniff the forest while I wish
for a way to avoid my first day
at a new school, and a way
to visit Mom without seeing her
in a prison uniform.
An hour later, my wishing ends.
Small yellow school bus.
Mountain Dog Page 1
