Chicken Soup for the Pet Lover's Soul (8 page)

Before long, I started noticing that she relished human company. She and her mother were first at the gate at feeding time, and when I scratched her neck, her eyelids closed in contentment. Soon she was nuzzling my jacket, running her lips over my shirt, chewing my buttons off and even opening the gate to follow me so she could rub her head on my hip. This wasn’t normal behavior for a filly.

Unfortunately, her appetite was huge. And the bigger she got, the uglier she got.
Where will we ever find a home for
her?
I wondered.

One day a man bought one of our best Appaloosas for a circus. Suddenly he spied the brown, bobtailed filly. “That’s not an Appaloosa, is it?” he asked. “Looks like a donkey.” Since he was after circus horses, I snatched at the opportunity. “You’d be surprised,” I said. “That filly knows more tricks than a short-order cook. She can take a handkerchief out of my pocket and roll under fences. She can climb into water troughs. Even turn on spigots!”

“Reg’lar little devil, huh?”

“No,” I said quickly, then added on the spur of the moment, “as a matter of fact, I named her Angel!”

He chuckled. “Well, it’s eye-catchin’ color we need,” he told me. “Folks like spotted horses best.”

As time passed, Angel—aswe nowcalled her—invented new tricks. Her favorite was opening gates to get to food on the opposite side.

“She’s a regular Houdini,” Bill marveled.

“She’s a regular pain,” said Scott, who always had to go catch her.

“You’ve got to give her more attention,” I told him. “You spend all your time grooming and training the other yearlings. You never touch Angel except to yell at her.”

“Who has time to work with a jughead? Besides, Dad said we’re taking her to auction.”

“What! Sell her?”

I corralled Bill. “Please give her a chance. Let her grow up on the ranch,” I begged. “Then Scott can saddle-break her when she’s two. With her sweet nature, she’ll be worth something to someone by then.”

“I guess one more horse won’t hurt for the time being,” he said. “We’ll put her down on the east pasture. There’s not much grazing there, but . . .” Angel was safe for now.

Two weeks later, she was at the front door eating the dry food from our watchdog’s bowl. She’d slipped the chain off the pasture gate and let herself out—plus ten other horses as well. By the time Scott and Bill had rounded them up, I could see that Bill’s patience was wearing thin.

Over time, her assortment of tricks grew. When Bill or Scott drove to the field, she’d eat the rubber off the windshield wipers. If they left a window open, she’d snatch a rag, glove or notebook off the front seat, then run like the wind.

Surprisingly, Bill began forgiving Angel’s pranks. When an Appaloosa buyer would arrive, she’d come running at a gallop, slide to a stop thirty feet away, and back up to have her rump scratched. “We have our own circus right here,” Bill told buyers. By now, a small smile was even showing through Scott’s thick mustache.

The seasons rolled by. Blazing sun turned to rain—and brought flies by the millions. One day, when Angel was two-and-a-half, I saw Scott leading her to the barn. “She gets no protection at all from that stupid tail,” he told me. “I’m gonna make her a new one.” That’s when I realized Scott’s feelings for the horse were starting to change.

The next morning I couldn’t help smiling as Scott cut and twisted two dozen strands of bright-yellow baling twine into a long string mop and fastened it with tape around Angel’s bandaged tail. “There,” he said. “She looks almost like a normal horse.”

Scott decided to try to “break” Angel for riding. Bill and I sat on the corral fence as he put the saddle on. Angel humped her back. “We’re gonna have a rodeo here!” I whispered. But as Scott tightened the cinch around Angel’s plump middle, she didn’t buck, as many other young horses would. She simply waited.

When Scott climbed aboard and applied gentle pressure with his knees, the willing heart of the Appaloosa showed. He ordered her forward, and she responded as though she’d been ridden for years. I reached up and scratched the bulging forehead. “Someday she’s going to make a terrific trail-riding horse,” I said.

“With a temperament like this,” Scott replied, “someone could play polo off her. Or she could be a great kid’s horse.” Even Scott was having a few dreams for our plain brown Appaloosa with the funny-colored tail.

At foaling time, Angel whinnied to the newborns as though each one were her own. “We ought to breed her,” I said to Bill. “She’s four. With her capacity to love, imagine what a good mother she’d make.”

Bill thought this was a good idea. So did Scott. “People often buy bred mares,” he said. “Maybe we’d find a home for her.” Suddenly I saw an expression on Scott’s face I hadn’t seen before.
Could he really care?
I wondered.

During the winter months of her pregnancy, Angel seemed to forget about escaping from her corral. Then in early April, as she drew closer to her due date, a heavy rain came and our fields burst to life. We worried Angel would once more start slipping through the gates in her quest for greener pastures.

One morning, I was starting breakfast when Scott came through the kitchen door. His hazel eyes loomed dark beneath his broad-brimmed Stetson. “It’s Angel,” he said softly. “You better come. She got out of the corral last night.”

Trying to hold back my fears, I followed Scott to his pickup. “She’s had her foal somewhere,” he said, “but Dad and I couldn’t find it. She’s . . . dying.” I heard the catch in his voice. “Looks like she was trying to make it home.”

When we got to Angel, Bill was crouched beside her. “There’s nothing we can do,” he said, pointing to the blue wildflowers in the lush green fields, in easy reach for a hungry horse through the barbed wire. “Loco weed. Some horses love it, but it can be a killer.”

I pulled Angel’s big head onto my lap and stroked behind her ears. Tears welled in Scott’s eyes. “Best mare we ever had,” he murmured.

“Angel!” I pleaded. “Please don’t go!” Choking back my grief, I ran my hand down her neck and listened to her labored breathing. She shuddered once, and I looked into eyes that could no longer see. Angel was gone.

In a cloud of numbness, I heard Scott call out only a few yards away. “Mom! Dad! Come look at this foal!”

Deep in the sweet-smelling grasses lay a tiny colt. A single spot brightened his face, and stars spangled his back and hips. A pure, radiant Appaloosa, our horse of many colors. “Starburst,” I whispered.

But somehow, all that color didn’t matter anymore. As his mother had taught us so many times, it’s not what’s on the outside that counts, but what lies deep inside the heart.

Penny Porter

Home

E
ventually you will come to understand that
love heals everything, and love is all there is.

Gary Zukav

A freezing downpour washed the black asphalt street in front of the small-town bar. I sat gazing into the watery darkness, alone as usual. Across the rain-drenched roadway was the town park: five acres of grass, giant elm trees and, tonight, an ankle-deep covering of cold water.

I had been in that battered old pub for a half hour, quietly nursing a drink, when my thoughtful stare finally focused on a medium-sized lump in a grassy puddle a hundred feet away. For another ten minutes, I looked out through the tear-streaked windowpane trying to decide if the lump was an animal or just a wet and inanimate something.

The night before, a German shepherd-looking mongrel had come into the bar begging for potato chips. He was mangy and starving and just the size of the lump in question.
Why would a dog lie in a cold puddle in the freezing
rain?
I asked myself. The answer was simple: Either it wasn’t a dog, or if it was, he was too weak to get up.

The shrapnel wound in my right shoulder ached all the way down to my fingers. I didn’t want to go out in that storm. Hey, it wasn’t my dog; it wasn’t anybody’s dog. It was just a stray on a cold night in the rain, a lonely drifter.

So am I,
I thought, as I tossed down what was left of my drink and headed out the door.

He was lying in three inches of water. When I touched him, he didn’t move. I thought he was dead. I put my hands around his chest and hoisted him to his feet. He stood unsteadily in the puddle, his head hung like a weight at the end of his neck. Half his body was covered with mange. His floppy ears were just hairless pieces of flesh dotted with open sores.

“Come on,” I said, hoping I wouldn’t have to carry his infected carcass to shelter. His tail wagged once and he plodded weakly after me. I led him to an alcove next to the bar, where he lay on the cold cement and closed his eyes.

A block away I could see the lights of a late-night convenience store. It was still open. I bought three cans of Alpo and stuffed them into my leather coat. I was wet and ugly and the clerk looked relieved as I left. The race-type exhausts on my old Harley-Davidson rattled the windows in the bar as I rode back to the bar.

The barmaid opened the cans for me and said the dog’s name was Shep. She told me he was about a year old and that his owner had gone to Germany and left him on the street. He ate all three cans of dog food with an aweinspiring singleness of purpose. I wanted to pet him, but he smelled like death and looked even worse. “Good luck,” I said, then got on my bike and rode away.

The next day I got a job driving a dump truck for a small paving company. As I hauled a load of gravel through the center of town, I saw Shep standing on the sidewalk near the bar. I yelled to him and thought I saw his tail wag. His reaction made me feel good.

After work I bought three more cans of Alpo and a cheeseburger. My new friend and I ate dinner together on the sidewalk. He finished his first.

The next night, when I brought his food, he welcomed me with wild enthusiasm. Now and then, his malnourished legs buckled and he fell to the pavement. Other humans had deserted him and mistreated him, but now he had a friend and his appreciation was more than obvious.

I didn’t see him the next day as I hauled load after load up the main street past the bar. I wondered if someone had taken him home.

After work I parked my black Harley on the street and walked down the sidewalk looking for him. I was afraid of what I would find. He was lying on his side in an alley nearby. His tongue hung out in the dirt and only the tip of his tail moved when he saw me.

The local veterinarian was still at his office, so I borrowed a pickup truck from my employer and loaded the limp mongrel into the cab. “Is this your dog?” the vet asked after checking the pitiful specimen that lay helplessly on his examining table.

“No,” I said, “he’s just a stray.”

“He’s got the beginnings of distemper,” the vet said sadly. “If he doesn’t have a home, the kindest thing we can do is put him out of his misery.”

I put my hand on the dog’s shoulder. His mangy tail thumped weakly against the stainless steel table.

I sighed loudly. “He’s got a home,” I said.

For the next three nights and two days, the dog—I named him Shep—lay on his side in my apartment. My roommate and I spent hours putting water in his mouth and trying to get him to swallow a few scrambled eggs. He couldn’t do it, but whenever I touched him, his tail wagged slightly at the very tip.

At about 10
A.M.
on the third day, I went home to open the apartment for the telephone installer. As I stepped through the door, I was nearly flattened by a jumping, wiggling mass of euphoric mutt. Shep had recovered.

With time, the mangy starving dog that nearly died in my living room grew into an eighty-pound block of solid muscle, with a massive chest and a super-thick coat of shiny black fur. Many times, when loneliness and depression have nearly gotten the best of me, Shep has returned my favor by showering me with his unbridled friendship until I had no choice but to smile and trade my melancholy for a fast game of fetch-the-stick.

When I look back, I can see that Shep and I met at the low point of both of our lives. But we aren’t lonely drifters anymore. I’d say we’ve both come home.

Joe Kirkup

Innocent Homeless

N
o matter how little money and how few possessions
you own, having a dog makes you rich.

Louis Sabin

The hastily scrawled sign on the crumpled cardboard read: BROKE—NEED DOG FOOD. The desperate young man held the sign in one hand and a leash in the other as he paced back and forth on the busy corner in downtown Las Vegas.

Attached to the leash was a husky pup no more than a year old. Not far from them was an older dog of the same breed, chained to a lamppost. He was howling into the brisk chill of the approaching winter evening, with a wail that could be heard for blocks. It was as though he knew his own fate, for the sign that was propped next to him read: FOR SALE.

Forgetting about my own destination, I quickly turned the car around and made a beeline back toward the homeless trio. For years, I’ve kept dog and cat food in the trunk of my car for stray or hungry animals I often find. It’s been a way of helping those I couldn’t take in. It’s also what I’ve used to coax many a scared dog off the road to safety. Helping needy animals has always been an automatic decision for me.