A Dog's Purpose (21 page)

“We didn’t notice her missing until lunch, but we don’t have any idea how long she’s been gone.”

“Marilyn’s an Alzheimer’s patient.”

“I don’t understand how she got away with no one seeing.”

While I sat there, a squirrel climbed down the trunk of a tree and busied itself foraging for food in the grass. I stared at it, astounded at its audacious disregard for the fact that I, a vicious predator, was a mere ten feet away!

Jakob came to the cage and opened the door. “Heel!” he commanded, giving me no chance to catch the squirrel. I snapped to it: time to work. Jakob led me away from the people, to a corner of the front yard of the building. He held out two shirts that smelled reminiscent of Grandma, a little. I stuck my nose into the soft cloth, inhaling deeply. “Ellie. Find!”

I took off, running past the knot of people. “She wouldn’t have gone that way,” someone said.

“Let Ellie work,” Jakob replied.

Work. I carried the sense memory of the clothing in my mind as I held my nose up to the air, coursing back and forth as I’d been trained. There were a lot of people smells, dog smells, car smells, but I couldn’t Find. Frustrated, I turned back to Jakob.

He read my disappointment. “That’s okay, Ellie. Find.” He began walking down the street, and I leaped ahead, cruising up and down the yards. I turned the corner and slowed down: there it was, tantalizing, coming to me. . . . I zeroed in on it and raced ahead. Forty feet in front of me, lying at the base of some bushes, her scent was clear. I turned and ran back to Jakob, who had been joined by several police officers.

“Show me, Ellie!”

I took him back to the bushes. He bent, poking at something with a stick.

“What is it?” one of the officers asked, coming up behind Jakob.

“A tissue. Good dog, Ellie, good dog!” He grabbed me and wrestled with me briefly, but I sensed there was more work.

“How do we know that’s hers? It could have been dropped by anybody,” one of the policemen objected.

Jakob bent down, ignoring the men behind him. “Okay, Ellie. Find!”

I could follow her scent, now, faint but traceable. It went ahead two blocks, then turned right, getting stronger. At a driveway it made an abrupt right, and I tracked her through an open gate, to where she was sitting on a swing set, moving gently. There was a real sense of happiness flowing from her, and she seemed glad to see me.

“Hello, doggy,” she said.

I ran back to Jakob, and I could tell from his excitement that he knew I’d found her before I got up to him, though he waited for me to reach him before he reacted. “Okay, Show me!” he urged.

I took him to the lady on the swing set. I felt Jakob’s relief when he saw the woman. “Are you Marilyn?” he asked gently.

She cocked her head at him. “Are you Warner?” she replied.

Jakob spoke into the microphone on his shoulder, and soon we were joined by the other policemen. Jakob took me aside. “Good dog, Ellie!” He pulled out a rubber ring and sent it bouncing across the lawn, and I jumped on it and brought it back, holding it out for him to grip and tug on. We played for about five minutes, my tail whipping the air.

As Jakob shut me in the cage on the back of the truck, I could feel the pride coming off of him. “Good dog, Ellie. You are such a good dog.”

It was, I reflected, as close as Jakob could come to the unrestrained adoration I once felt from Ethan, and from it I realized that today I truly understood my purpose as Ellie: not just to Find people but to save them. The worry that poured off the knot of people in front of the building could not have been more clear, just as their relief when we returned was clear. The lady had been in some sort of danger, and by Finding her Jakob and I saved her from the danger. That is what we did together,
that was our work, and that’s what he cared most about. It was like the game I played with Ethan: Rescue.

The next day Jakob took me to a store and purchased some fragrant flowers, which he left in the truck while we did some work. (Wally was hiding on top of a strong-smelling trash Dumpster, but he couldn’t fool me.) Then Jakob and I went for a long car ride—so long that I became tired of holding my nose up to the side of the cage and lay down on the floor.

When Jakob came to let me out, there was a heaviness in him—whatever was always hurting him inside seemed stronger than ever. We were in a big yard filled with stones. Subdued, not sure what we were doing, I stayed next to Jakob as he walked a few dozen yards, carrying his flowers. He knelt and put the flowers down next to one of the stones, the pain twisting in him so deeply that tears fell silently down his cheeks. I nuzzled his hand, concerned.

“It’s okay, Ellie. Good dog. Sit.”

I sat, grieving with Jakob.

He cleared his throat. “I miss you so much, honey. I just . . . sometimes I don’t think I can get through the day, knowing you’re not going to be there when I get home,” he whispered hoarsely.

I lifted my ears at the word “home.”
Yes,
I thought,
let’s go home, let’s leave this sad place
.

“I’m on K-9 patrol right now, search and rescue. They don’t want me on regular patrol because I’m still taking anti-depressants. I’ve got a dog, her name is Ellie, a one-year-old German shepherd.”

I wagged my tail.

“We just got certified, so we’ll be going out, now. I’ll be glad to get off the desk; I’ve gained about ten pounds from all the
sitting.” Jakob laughed and the sound of it was so peculiar, such a sad, tortured laugh, with no happiness in it at all.

We remained there, nearly motionless, for about ten minutes, and gradually the feeling from Jakob shifted, became less raw pain and more like what I felt when Ethan and Hannah would say good-bye at the end of the summer—something similar to fear. “I love you,” Jakob whispered. Then he turned and walked away.

From that day forward, we spent a lot more time away from the kennel. Sometimes we would ride on airplanes or helicopters, both of which vibrated so much they made me sleepy despite the noise. “You’re a chopper dog, Ellie!” Jakob told me whenever we rode on the helicopters. One day we even went to the biggest pond I’d ever seen, a huge expanse of water full of exotic smells, and I tracked a little girl down the sand to a playground full of children who all called to me when I approached.

“Want to play in the ocean, Ellie?” Jakob asked me after I Showed him the little girl, and a mother and father took her away for a car ride. We went to the pond and I splashed and ran in the water, which was very salty when the spray came up into my nose. “This is the ocean, Ellie, the ocean!” Jakob laughed. Playing in the ocean, I felt the thing that had such a tight clench on his heart loosen just a little.

Running through the shallow water reminded me of chasing Ethan on his sled—I had to lunge upward to make any progress, exactly the same gait I’d used in the snow. It made me realize that though the sun’s cycles suggested a couple of years had passed, there was never any snow here. It didn’t bother the children, though—they had sleds they rode on the waves. I stood and watched them play, knowing Jakob would not want me to chase them. One boy looked something like Ethan when he was
younger, and I marveled that I could remember my boy when he was little and also when he was a man. An ache overtook me then, a sharp stab of sadness that didn’t go away until Jakob whistled me back to his side.

When I did go to the kennel, Cammie was often there, but Gypsy almost never was. On one such day I was trying to interest Cammie in a glorious game of I’ve Got the Ball when Jakob came out to get me. “Ellie!” he called.

I’d never heard such urgency in his voice.

We drove very fast, the tires making screeches as we turned corners that I could hear above the wail of the siren. I lay down on the floor of my cage to keep from sliding around.

As usual, when we arrived at the place to work, there were a lot of people standing around. One of them, a woman, was so afraid she couldn’t stand up, and two people were holding her. The anxiety rippling off Jakob as he ran past me to talk to these people was so strong it made the fur on my back stand up.

It was a parking lot, big glass doors on a building swinging open for people carrying small bags. The woman who had collapsed reached into her bag and pulled out a toy.

“We’ve got the mall locked down,” someone said.

Jakob came to my door and opened it. He handed me a toy to sniff. “Ellie, okay? Got it? I need you to Find, Ellie!”

I leaped out of the truck and tried to sort through all the smells, to Find one that matched the toy. I was concentrating so hard I didn’t notice that I’d trotted out in front of a moving car, which rocked when the driver hit the brakes.

Okay, I had it. There was a scent, a scent that was oddly married to another, a strong male smell. I tracked them both, sure of myself.

The smell vanished at a car—rather, next to the car, telling me
that the people we were working had driven away in a different vehicle and this one had pulled in to take its place. I alerted Jakob, cringing at his sense of frustration and disappointment.

“Okay, good girl, Ellie. Good girl.” His play was perfunctory, though, and I felt like a bad dog.

“We’ve tracked her to here—it looks like she got into a vehicle and left. Do we have surveillance on the parking lot?”

“We’re checking now. If it is who we think it is, though, the car’s stolen,” a man wearing a suit told Jakob.

“Where would he take her? If it’s him, where would he go?” Jakob asked.

The man in the suit turned his head, squinting at the green hills behind us. “The last two bodies we found were up in Topanga Canyon. The first one was in Will Rogers State Park.”

“We’ll head up that way,” Jakob said. “See if we can pick up anything.”

I was startled when Jakob put me in the front seat of the truck. He’d never let me be a front-seat dog before! His mood was still tense, though, so I stayed focused and didn’t bark when we passed some dogs who yipped at me with unrestrained jealousy. Jakob and I drove out of the parking lot, and he held the same toy out to me, which I dutifully sniffed. “Okay, girl, I know this is going to sound strange, but I want you to Find.”

At the command, I turned and stared at him in bewilderment. Find? In the truck?

The smells coming in the window lured my nose in that direction. “Good girl!” Jakob praised. “Find! Find the girl!”

My nose was still filled with the scent from the toy, which was why I alerted when a stray breeze brought me her smell, still entwined with the man’s. “Good girl!” Jakob said. He stopped the car, watching me intently. Behind us, cars honked. “Got it, girl?”

I couldn’t smell her anymore. “That’s okay; that’s okay, Ellie. Good girl,” he said.

I understood, now—we were working from inside the truck. He drove and I kept my nose out the window, straining, rejecting everything except the smell from the toy.

I felt the tilt of the truck as we headed uphill, and with it a rising sense of disappointment from Jakob.

“I think we’ve lost her,” he muttered. “Nothing, Ellie?”

At my name, I turned, then went back to my work.

“Unit Eight-Kilo-Six, what’s your twenty?” the radio squawked.

“Eight-Kilo-Six, we are proceeding up Amalfi.”

“Any luck?”

“We had something on Sunset. Nothing since.”

“Roger that.”

I barked.

I normally didn’t bark when I caught a scent, but when this hit it was strong and steady, carried on a current of air that filled the cab of the truck. “Eight-Kilo-Six, we’ve got something, corner of Amalfi and Umeo.” The truck slowed, and I stayed on point. I could still smell her, and the man’s scent was strong as ever. Jakob eased to a stop. “Okay, which way here, Ellie?” Jakob asked.

I climbed across the seat, shoving my face out his window. “Left on Capri!” Jakob shouted excitedly. A few minutes later the truck started to bump. “We’re on the fire road!”

“10-4, we’re on our way,” the radio said.

I was on alert, focused dead ahead, while Jakob wrestled with the truck to keep it on the narrow road. Suddenly we banged to a stop, facing a yellow gate. “Be advised, we need the fire department up here; there’s a gate.”

“10-4.”

We jumped out of the car. A red car was parked off to the side, and I ran right to it, on alert. Jakob was holding his gun out. “We’ve got a red Toyota Camry, empty; Ellie says it belongs to our man.” Jakob led me around to the back of the vehicle, watching me intently. “No indication anyone is in the trunk of the car,” Jakob stated.

“Roger that.”

The scent from the car wasn’t as strong as what was coming from the air currents rising up from the canyon below. A steep road held the man’s scent as it descended, while the girl’s was more delicate. He’d carried her.

“Be advised, suspect took the road down to the camp. He’s on foot.”

“Eight-Kilo-Six, hold and wait for backup.”

“Ellie,” Jakob said to me, putting his gun back on his belt. “Let’s go find the girl.”

I felt strong fear from Jakob as we descended down into the canyon, so strong I kept returning to him for reassurance. Then the girl’s scent pulled me forward and I galloped ahead, racing toward a collection of small buildings.