Saved

by Karin Winegar

  Mason saved his owner, Shannon Larson of Banks, Oregon, and other family pets from a fire in their rural Oregon home.

  Mason is pale gold, and although he seems to be mostly yellow Labrador retriever, his grooved forehead, white toes, a white slash across his bull-like chest, and his size indicate something else—Shannon suspects a bit of mastiff.

  He was barely a year old when she adopted him from the Oregon Humane Society in Portland, where she learned his sad beginning. “The people who had Mason first had no time for him. They kept him on a short chain with almost no food, and no one played with him,” says Shannon.

  During the first weeks with Shannon and her husband in their apartment, the canine teenager was a handful. Thrilled by his liberty and all the new sensations, Mason gobbled down everything, including an entire bag of chocolate chips (semisweet, fortunately; dark chocolate can be fatal to dogs), Shannon’s lipstick and makeup, a few Christmas ornaments, and a pair of glasses.

  Mason was still rambunctious a year or so later, when Shannon, divorced after a year of marriage, was living with her father far up a winding dirt road in Buxton near the coast. It was a good place for big dogs like Mason, and her father, an excavator, raised Tibetan mastiffs there as well.

  Shannon worked at Netflix in customer service, and she spent her nights at her father’s home, squashed into a twin bed with Mason, a rescued bulldog puppy named Emma, and a cat named Honeybee, who insisted on sleeping on the pillow at Shannon’s head. Occasionally the foursome was too much for the bed, and Shannon plopped onto the floor.

  One morning about 2:00 a.m., Mason started barking. Shannon, a heavy sleeper, didn’t wake up at first. When she did, she was annoyed with the agitated dog. “I told him to be quiet, and he did for a little while, but he was shaking,” she recalls. “He got up and jumped on me and barked again. I finally looked out my bedroom window, and flames were coming out the trellis above the window.”

  Faulty wiring had sent sparks shooting from an electrical box, and the heat was so abrupt and intense it had already melted the smoke detectors in the prefabricated house. Shannon and the dogs ran into the night. “Emma tried to stop and eat cat food as we ran out, and Mason went back and nudged her to make her follow,” says Shannon.

  “At first, Dad thought I’d already gone to work and assumed I was not there,” she says. “He would have had to go back inside to get me if it had not been for Mason.”

  As it was, her father tried to re-enter the house for the other animals. “Dad got our five dogs out, then he went back. He pulled at the front door, but there was no oxygen inside and it slammed because of heat. He tried again and it just opened and slammed—he didn’t know what to do.”

  It took the fire department forty-five minutes to get to the house. “Then the water truck wouldn’t fit up our driveway, which is a half-mile long and curves uphill, so they had to park at the bottom and run hoses all the way up. And first they had to disconnect the main power source. Then it took another hour before the water started to put the fire out.”

  By then little of the structure was still standing, the ceiling had caved in, and most of the walls were gone, and the smoke had killed three cats—two belonging to her father, as well as her darling Honeybee.

  “I sat in Dad’s truck with Mason and Emma while we were waiting for the fire truck,” she says. “Mason was worried about me, licking my face and lying in my lap. He’s always been able to tell when I’m sad. I knew the cats were hiding inside the house. I felt terrible; I thought I should go open a window for Honeybee or something.”

  It was a terrible blow to Shannon, who has always been around a variety of animals. Her mother owns golden retrievers, while her father has had horses, cows, peacocks, and pigeons. Her grandmother owns rescued border collies and also helps a feral cat coalition.

  Shannon has always had nurturing, caretaking impulses: she once rescued a bulldog bitch that had been relentlessly bred, had fungus growing in her wrinkles, and was living outdoors with no shelter. “I found she had so many respiratory problems that she had been on steroids,” says Shannon.

  “It’s their unconditional love, and having that is really important,” says Shannon, on the site of the house fire.

  “I paid $800 for her, and $2000 in vet bills later she died, but in that time she was so much happier. I am glad I gave that to her. I have her ashes; they were one thing I got out of the house that day it burned.”

  Shannon seems quiet, almost curt on the phone, but is shyly welcoming when we meet her, and the outgoing Mason seems to lend her a bit more social courage. She doesn’t know what her next job will be, but she hopes it might be in a veterinarian’s office.

  Mason needs more room to run than a townhouse provides, so he mostly lives with an uncle at a nearby farm up the road, while Shannon and her baby share the townhouse with two teenaged stepsisters and Jinx, a long-haired white cat, as well as eager little Harley.

  Having a daughter has changed her life, but her bond with Mason remains intact. “I was concerned I wouldn’t love a baby as much as I love animals,” she admits. “There were times during the pregnancy I wasn’t in love with her.”

  “I find it easier to be friends with animals than with most people,” she confesses.

  “It’s their unconditional love; no matter what your situation is in life or what things you have going on, they are there, and having that is really important.”

  She strokes Mason’s leonine forehead. He pants and grins. “He’s always been a best friend to me, more than people. With animals, with Mason, I know somebody loves me no matter what; it lifts my spirits in dark days. He makes it better; he makes me smile.”

  16

  CHOOSING HIS BOYS

  TRINA MARVIN, HER SONS, PRESCOTT AND DAWSEN, AND THEIR DOG, NICKEY

  “WELOOKED AT twenty or thirty dogs,” says Trina Marvin. “I didn’t want Nickey, and Nickey hated us. He barked, he bit, but my son insisted. He was relentless.”

  Nickey was found on a California golf course when he was just a year-old pup. He stayed in an animal shelter for seven months, setting a record of unadoptability through his intractable crabbiness and nipping. Nickey wanted to choose his people, and nobody was right.

  Then Trina, a golf pro in Thousand Palms, California, and a single mother of two boys—Dawsen and Prescott—arrived at the shelter. For Dawsen, it was love at first bite. He was smitten with Nickey, who is low-bodied, high-headed, and trots with his chest thrust out, his long hair the probable legacy of a papillion, and his sassy attitude certainly a bit of terrier. His tail forms a complete circle of fine hair lofting over his back. And he looks shrewd and smart and dauntless, a small dog with a Napoleon complex.

  Nickey was found on a California golf course when he was a year-old pup. He stayed in an animal shelter for seven months, setting a record for unadoptability.

  For Trina, appreciating and loving Nickey took much longer. Dawsen was three and a half when Kiko, Trina’s beloved Akita, was killed by a drunk driver. “We were so close that when I was pregnant with Prescott, Kiko had a sympathetic pregnancy—her milk came in and she started nesting,” says Trina, who has the trim, muscular arms and legs born of her profession, and narrowed eyes as if she were always squinting in the intense desert sun.

  “I wanted a Sheba Inu, another Japanese breed that reminded me of a miniature Akita,” says Trina. “On a camping trip in Santa Barbara, I saw one and started talking to the owner. The next day we went to his campground. I loved the dog, and the family let Dawsen play with him. And Dawsen said, ‘Yeah, but what about Nickey?’” They looked at twenty or thirty dogs, and Dawsen kept saying, “Yeah, but what about Nickey?” So they returned to the shelter, where Trina was certain the nasty little guy would be gone.

  “But there he sat, and he hated us just as much as in the beginning,” she says.

  Dawsen, ice blonde with startlingly light-blue eyes, is reserved but quietly adventuresome. He sat down next to Nickey and talked to the
irascible dog for hours. He got bitten. He kept talking.

  Trina and her husband had divorced, and Dawsen and Prescott’s father moved to Washington State. Dawsen deeply missed his father, and he was especially bereft. “Mom, what do I put in the hole in my heart?” he asked Trina one day.

  And he kept visiting Nickey whenever he could persuade his mother to drive him to the little strip mall where the shelter was located. Finally, Christine, the shelter owner, suggested that Nickey go home with the family for a trial weekend. Out of the shelter, Nickey was an altogether different dog: his crabby disposition vaporized, and he was cheerful and engaging and loving.

  Now Nickey wrestles with Sylvester, the family cat. He romps with Dawsen, and out in the yard watching Prescott, he provides a first alert better than any electronic security system. His attitude of tender, willing alertness is girded with a fierce protectiveness over both boys. When Trina mock swats either one of them, tiny Nickey charges at her, growling, and he once leaped up and pulled her shorts down to get her away from the boys.

  His first loyalty is to his boys, yet he treasures Trina too. When she suffered heat exhaustion and was in bed for a week, he would not leave her bedside. “I don’t think he even ate,” Trina says. “He drank water, then he went immediately back under the bed.”

  At bedtime, Nickey barks in the boys’ bedroom until Trina lifts him up to the top bunk where Dawsen sleeps. “He allows me to pick him up and put him on Dawsen’s bed for awhile, even though he’s afraid of the height,” she says. “Then I ask, ‘Are you done? Do you want down?’ He inches over to me on his belly and allows me to take him down.”

  “Nickey is one of the best things that ever happened to us,” says Trina. “Go find the boys!” And Nickey does.

  17

  TOUGH LITTLE WING NUT

  CHRISTINE MADRUGA AND THE DOGS OF THE PET RESCUE CENTER

  CHRISTINE MADRUGA IS giving us a tour of her suburban animal shelter, inciting a happy pandemonium among a pack of small dogs. Sisters Ni Ni and Chi Chi, two saucy golden Chihuahua mixes, scamper out of their enclosure, then tear back in, guilty clowns giddy with life, with human attention, and with their own tiny daring.

  “They’re the baby girrrrrrrls!” Christine coos at the ecstatic pair. Ni Ni tunnels under a pink bath towel in her pen, hides for five seconds, then springs out, yipping, five pounds of faux ferocity.

  “Chihuahuas are real popular since that Taco Bell commercial—that’s why we have so many,” Christine explains. “These were two of fifteen dogs we found in a closet in an abandoned house where squatters were living. Ni Ni and Chi Chi were pregnant, and they had their puppies here, and the babies are all placed.”

  “I taught ’em to wave and smile. Baby girrrrlls! Smile!” she commands. And the speedy little sisters draw back their lips to reveal miniscule teeth and lift little paws stiffly in the air.

  Christine Madruga rescues small dogs, dogs used for pit-bull bait, and feral dogs, and she is very careful about who adopts them.

  In addition to Chihuahuas, rescued cats, kittens, cocker spaniels, and miniature pinschers sleep, eat, and play in clean, portable wire pens in the middle of the linoleum floor or in steel cages ranked against the walls. Christine’s shelter, the Pet Rescue Center, is one fiercely air-conditioned room at the back of a strip mall overlooking a dry wash that might be a riverbed if it ever rained here in California’s Coachella Valley.

  “Stop barking—the neighbors will get mad!” she orders, and the pack goes quiet for all of ten seconds.

  Christine is round and petite, with sunburned legs and arms revealed by her clam diggers and sleeveless blouse. On this hot, bright desert morning, silver heart earrings flash on her earlobes, more silver hearts adorn her watchband, and silver hearts wink up from her black loafers. She brushes futilely at the animal hair stuck to her knees.

  The Pet Rescue Center was just four small cages in the back room of an animal clinic when Christine opened it in 1998 in the desert suburb of La Quinta, where luxury homes and golf courses are gobbling up the date and orange groves. Since then, she has taken in 1,389 dogs and 2,036 cats. She has placed them all except for Ni Ni and Chi Chi, who will remain her personal “grrrrrrrls,” “grrrrr-grrrrs,” “grrrr-gens,” or whatever affectionate nonsense words she feels like calling them.

  She is also keeping Honey, a Chihuahua mix with fine cream-colored short hair, large ears, and the huge sad eyes of a roadside velvet painting. Honey cowers in a pen, lying on a plush, oval dog bed next to a toy hedge-hog. Along her spine, large pairs of sores are healing. “She’s about a year old, a real feral dog,” Christine explains. “She was running the streets of Indio for six months, and the feral males raped her, used and abused her. Some kids grabbed her and burned her with cigarettes. Finally a lady captured her and brought her here.”

  In 1975, when Christine was sixteen, she left her family in Long Beach, California, to stay in La Quinta with a girlfriend. She never went home. “Much to my parents’ chagrin,” says Christine. “They had visions of Cal State Long Beach, but I was a hippie chick.”

  She found a cottage in Thousand Palms for a hundred and twenty dollars a month and lived off her garden, spending money mostly for fifty-pound bags of dog food and twenty-five-pound bags of cat food for her pets and a huge bag of carrots to carry in her truck and feed to horses whenever she saw one.

  When her cat was injured in the fan blades of her old pickup truck, Christine negotiated with the local veterinarian to paint and organize his office in exchange for emergency care. She had been working and studying to be a gardener, but she started skipping her horticulture classes in order to watch the vet perform surgery; she learned how to crop a dog’s ears, thread needles, read lab tests, and give vaccinations.

  Today, along with her “right arm,” a friend named Jean Landes, she runs the shelter by cobbling together donations of supplies from friends, grants from the city of Indian Wells, and gifts from two major donor families.

  Dogs find their way to Christine through people who spot them in the street and the desert. She finds dogs tied to the shelter door, and boxes of kittens set on the sidewalk with no notes. And not long ago, a Labrador-dachshund mix and her seven puppies were left in the adjacent alley in one-hundred-and-ten-degree heat.

  “Las Brisas? How long have you had her? Is she house-trained?” In addition to escorting us around, Christine is questioning a woman who has walked in with a small stray. She is also managing to direct a handful of volunteers from a vocational service who have been helping this morning, serving scrambled eggs to the dogs, cleaning cages, and petting the pet-able.

  “Those guys are not kid-friendly—don’t go back there.” Christine warns a visiting family away from cages at the rear of the room. “Elvis is back there. He bites everybody!”

  “I am organized; it just doesn’t seem like it,” says Christine, whose cheery directness makes her a good ringmaster in this small-critter circus. “Yeah, I go five ways from yesterday, but I love what I do. And I can multitask like crazy.”

  When Christine places a dog, the two often stay in touch. Cruiser, an escape artist, fence climber, and tunnel digger, comes in each morning with his adoptive mom to walk other rescued dogs. Cowboy “writes” postcards to Christine from Alaska, where he travels in a motor home with his new family. Ernie’s owner walks in wearing a tiara. It is her fiftieth birthday; she and her husband are celebrating by heading to Las Vegas. Ernie, an honored alumnus, will stay the weekend at Christine’s shelter.

  And then there is Bonfire, a small, dark dog whose tongue lolls out through the broken spars of his teeth. He was found behind a restaurant, bloody and chewed up. He had rolled in sand to stop the bleeding. From the bite marks on his body and head, Christine surmised he was a “dummy dog” or bait dog, one of the small dogs used to tease pit bulls or tossed in a dogfighting arena where pit bulls kill them for practice. The little dogs are force-fed tequila, and then their teeth are torn out or broken off. They are sometimes
suspended in a tree and dangled above the pit bulls like a living lunch. No one knows how he escaped.

  Bonfire has been adopted, but he returned to serve as master of ceremonies for the shelter’s annual golf tournament, which raised seventeen thousand dollars that year. His new owner, Minde Parks, had lost custody of her four dogs during her recent divorce. On Fridays, she came into Christine’s shelter to pet dogs, walk dogs, and play with them. One day, the small, toothless mutt was there. “I thought he was so sweet—he put his paw in my hand when I put it in his cage,” she says. “His story ripped my heart out. I had a dream about him and called Christine and she said, ‘He’s just waiting for you to come back and get him.’ He came home with me, went to sleep on the bed with me, and never looked back.”

  Minde, an equestrian, named her dog after the 2000 Olympic gold-medal-winning dressage horse. Now Bonfire flies with her up and down the West Coast as she does business, selling wholesale investment products to stockbrokers for an insurance company. He sleeps on her pillow, rises with her at four o’clock every day to drive two and a half hours to the stable where she keeps her dressage horse.

  “Bonfire is funny, he makes me laugh, he has so much energy—he grabs stuff and piles it in the middle of the floor,” says Minde. “He has given me back an awful lot. I tell his story to every person who reaches out to pet him so people will know what goes on. It’s mainly in the Latino community: you see them in the spring and fall; men hook pit bulls to a cart and put rocks in the cart and run the dogs along the road. Guess what they are training them for?”