I uncoiled the leash from where it rested on top of the crate, reached down and unlatched the wire door on the crate and swung it wide. Robot stepped out as quietly as he did everything else and then stood there, waiting to see what the humans who controlled his life would do next.
For me, the moment was one of those rare ones when the reactions of others take you back in time and let you see something familiar as if for the first time. I was looking down at Robot, but saw Turner’s gray-clad legs as he took a step back. At the same time I heard Deputy Horton inhale sharply. I never saw Deputy Carraher move, but when I looked up, her right hand was at her holstered gun. Their combined reactions brought back the memory of the first time I’d walked up to a full grown male Rottweiler, how my mouth had gone dry and my pulse had quickened.
Contrary to urban legend, Rottweilers are not giant dogs, and Robot was a proper twenty-six inches at the shoulder. He tipped the scale at my vet’s office at one hundred and twenty pounds, a good weight that included little fat and showed off sleek, powerful muscling. He had come to rescue with no known background, but Susan estimated he was between two and three years old, a mature male with the typical substantial bone, strong level back, and deep chest.
In his time in foster care Robot had shed a lot of dull, dry hair, and now, after the bath I’d given him the day before, his short black coat had a healthy shine, and the mahogany markings on his legs, chest, and face had a rich glow.
Still, it is undoubtedly the head that leaves so many people in awe of these dogs. Broad in the skull, with ears folded close to his head in a way that emphasized the breadth, Robot also had the developed cheekbones and shortish wide muzzle that all add up to impressive. His eyes were the proper medium size and almond shape, but instead of the dark brown, almost black color, the breed standard calls for, Robot’s eyes were a topaz that made them stand out almost eerily in his dark face.
I pretended not to have noticed the reactions of any of my companions and snapped the leash onto his collar. My thanks to Carey were all the more prolonged and profuse because of my new insight into exactly what this small woman had done for me in putting a strange big dog into her car, taking him home, and stuffing him into a too small crate in her home.
Carey refused to let us leave until Robot had a drink, and I refused to put him in my car until he had a walk down the block. I even offered Deputy Horton the full plastic cleanup bag after our walk, but he insisted in a most gentlemanly fashion that I keep custody of the “evidence.”
Turner and I followed the sheriff’s car to the emergency veterinary hospital the county had decided to use to examine Robot. The hospital was a new one, open nights and weekends and closed during ordinary business hours. I was not familiar with the place, even by reputation, but as the heat began to fade with evening, and fatigue began to creep up my spine, I was grateful for an agreement on anywhere that didn’t mean much more driving.
The staff was expecting us. As soon as we arrived, a wide-eyed vet tech led us to a large examining room. There was only one chair in the room, and I sank into it without asking, holding Robot close to me. No one spoke in the few minutes we waited before the vet appeared.
Dr. Jaeger was a small, round man who looked too young to have many years of practice behind him, but he had an easy way with Robot and showed none of the fear of big dogs too common in veterinarians these days. He asked me once if a muzzle would be necessary, and simply accepted my negative answer.
He started by running a handheld scanning device over Robot’s shoulders until the microchip implanted there registered in the scanner window. He wrote the number at the top of the record he was starting for Robot, and both deputies verified the number on the scanner and initialed the record. He accepted the full plastic bag from me without comment and placed it on the counter. He used a small sharp instrument to scrape around each of Robot’s nails. The rust color of some of those scrapings made me glad to be sitting down.
I watched as if from a great distance as Dr. Jaeger and Deputy Horton discussed the best way to get prints of Robot’s paws. In the end they unrolled what looked like a large piece of wrapping paper on the floor, dipped each of Robot’s feet in a blue liquid and walked him across the paper. The blue pawprints looked all too much like the red ones I’d seen so much earlier in the day. A wave of nausea rolled through me, and I leaned forward, elbows on thighs, head down.
“Are you all right?” Owen Turner asked.
“Yes. As soon as this is over I’ll be fine,” I assured him.
“Just a little bit more.” Dr. Jaeger rubbed Robot behind one ear. “This good boy is making things easy,” he said, earning a new client for his emergency services, even though I hoped never to need them.
“What is this?” he asked, his fingers still on the ear, but now moving over the entire length.
“Scars,” I said. “He has a lot of scars all over.”
I watched the vet’s skilled hands move over every inch of Robot and saw from the look on his face he didn’t like what he found any better than I did.
“Where did this dog come from?” he asked.
“A Good Samaritan found him more dead than alive on the side of Highway 85 north of Greeley. They took him to a vet up there, and the vet called our rescue group.”
“Were these open wounds?”
“No, they were healed over already. The only fresh wound was from a bullet that almost killed him. Evidently it came close enough for whoever dumped him. Maybe they thought he
was
dead.”
“And maybe he didn’t care enough to make sure,” Jaeger said angrily.
“He?” Owen Turner asked. “You know who did it?”
“No,” I told him. “We just know the kind of person who did it, and it’s almost always men. They try to fight Rottweilers, but Rotties aren’t fighting dogs, and when the dogs don’t work out, they dump them, and sometimes they use them as bait for real fighting dogs before they dump them. The scars on Robot — he would have made somebody like that really mad, he’s totally non-aggressive towards other dogs.” And towards all people, but I didn’t bother saying that, as everyone in this room was seeing that first hand.
The rest of the exam didn’t take long. Robot endured having blood drawn out of him and an emetic poured into him. He vomited promptly and saved himself a second dose.
I thanked Dr. Jaeger sincerely and left him labeling various samples.
In the parking lot, Deputy Carraher shut herself in the cruiser without a word, saving both of us any false politeness. I thanked Owen Turner and Deputy Horton and assured them that I was capable of driving home by myself.
I lied. Instead of starting the drive home, I detoured to the drive-through line at the nearest Arby’s. Robot might not like people, but he was a fan of people food. Sharing a roast beef sandwich and potato cakes with him made me feel better. After all was said and done, the day was ending for both of us the same way it had begun, going down the road together. All considered, it could have been worse. For Jack Sheffield it had been a lot worse.
That first male Rottweiler that
I’d ever met was my ex-husband’s dog Butch. Butch was only one of the surprises John Brennan brought into our marriage. Like many young men, John had gotten himself a Rottweiler puppy on a whim.
Of course, unlike a Harley, a pickup, or a tattoo, the living breathing masculinity symbol John chose grew into an unruly adult dog that he dumped on his mother, who kept Butch tied in her yard until her son married me and she saw her chance. On her first visit to our new home, “Mother” Brennan brought Butch with her and tied him in
our
yard.
“Now that you have a home of your own, you need a watch dog,” she said, almost unable to contain her glee.
Butch was only one of the many things John and I disagreed about with increasing vehemence over the course of our short and unhappy union. Our divorce settlement did not address the dog because neither of us wanted him. John was out of the house by then and never responded to any plea to take his dog. His mother had moved to another state. With no little bitterness, I suspected she’d deliberately made herself unavailable for involvement with any debris from our failed marriage, particularly Butch.
“Just take him to the pound,” John told me blithely. “He’s a great dog. Someone will adopt him.”
As a matter of fact, I did take him to a shelter, the politically correct term for pound, but I never took him inside. Even without knowing the statistics, I suspected John’s “great dog,” so totally untrained that getting a leash on him and battling his filthy self into my car had taken all my strength and wiles, would not attract a line of eager adopters.
I watched several other people take dogs into the building. No one took any out. I wondered what Butch’s odds would be in that place. I wondered how they killed — euthanized — the unwanted.
Butch never went in that building, but in the end, I did. The staff was quite willing to tell me about an alternative for Butch. Rottweiler Rescue. It sounded grand. It sounded safe. I called the number they gave me with great relief and got — Susan McKinnough.
The reason Susan is fond of me, I suspect, is that I’m one of the few callers wanting to “find a new home” for an unwanted and hopelessly unadoptable dog who ever listened to her.
Susan told me the unvarnished truth she tells all callers like me.
“Most adopters want young dogs. The few people who will adopt a dog as old as four want one that’s housebroken, trained, good with children and other animals. If you find someone to take him, they’ll keep him exactly the way your husband kept him, on a chain in the yard. Do you think that’s any kind of life for a dog?”
No, I didn’t, which was why John and I had argued about Butch on and off for the entire two years of our marriage. It was also why I felt guilty. I had argued but had never done anything about it, in part because I didn’t know
what
to do.
Susan also told me about the other things that could happen to an intact male Rottweiler like Butch, things that were worse than living on a chain. She explained that sometimes euthanasia is the only decent thing that can happen to a dog.
“He’s only four years old,” I argued. “Surely there has to be something better for him.”
“He’s your dog,” she said. “If you aren’t willing to do what he needs, why do you think someone else should?”
He’s not my dog!
I wanted to shout.
He’s John’s dog!
But John was already long gone on his merry way. Butch was mine, like it or not. So I asked Susan what to do, and she told me, although our voices reflected our mutual lack of confidence in my ability to bring about any change for the better in Butch.
Our pessimism proved unfounded. I wasn’t totally without experience with dogs. I just didn’t have any experience with a dog that could pull me off my feet without half trying. However, one area in which I was not and never had been “ordinary” was in my level of sheer cussed stubbornness. Just ask anyone who knows me, especially my mother.
Enrolled in a basic obedience course, the freshly neutered Butch terrorized all the other students and their handlers for only about the first five minutes of the first class before we were expelled. After several months of weekly private instruction, we were allowed to rejoin a class and proudly graduated with half a dozen others at the end of the eight-week course.
Butch was one of the two good things that came out of my marriage. The house that I refinanced to get the money necessary to fence every one of the five acres around it was the other. Once the property was fenced, Butch was never tied anywhere again for the rest of his life, and as soon as he was housebroken, he slept every night on John’s side of the double bed, providing considerably more comfort than John ever had and snoring less.
Five years later, when Butch was diagnosed with the cancer that took a year to kill him, I talked to Susan a second time. She remembered me, and finding out what had happened to that unruly four-year-old yard dog pleased her enormously, which was why she adopted my current Rottweiler, Sophie, to me.
Sophie was released to rescue at four months old by owners who claimed they hadn’t realized puppies chew. Healthy puppies with little baggage from neglect and mistreatment don’t come to rescue often, and I took my puppy home feeling particularly fortunate. I paid the adoption fee and didn’t wake up to the fact Susan planned to extract another kind of payment until months later.
Susan kept in touch the way she keeps in touch with all her adopters. She also set her careful rescue trap. First she made just the occasional phone call, could I keep one nice dog for a day or two? Could I do a short transport run?
I can’t claim that when I finally tumbled to what Susan was up to, I couldn’t have refused to go along with her plan. I let her knit me into her rescue net willingly enough, and now here we were the morning after Jack’s murder, sitting in the same kitchen where John and I used to argue over Butch, arguing over Robot with equal intensity.
When the argument started, Robot and Sophie were sprawled on their respective mats in opposite corners of the kitchen. Robot still was, but our raised voices had Sophie alert, keeping a wary eye on us.
“I can’t believe you did it!” Susan said for at least the tenth time. “I never should have let you take that robot of a dog to foster in the first place. You know perfectly well I’ve been looking for something special for you for months.”
Yes, I knew. At seven, Sophie was getting up there in years for a Rottweiler, and getting a younger male dog now so that I wouldn’t be without a dog when her time came seemed sensible. But it was Susan’s ambition to find me another dog like Sophie, young and easily trainable, with no history of abuse or neglect.
She wanted me to do what she would have done — train him right from the start and compete in obedience, agility, or herding. The fact that she had failed to push or lure me down that path with Sophie hadn’t discouraged her in the slightest. She was quite ready to try again. My enthusiasm for canine competition was distinctly less than Susan’s, non-existent in fact, and she simply refused to acknowledge it.