Stella, page 1
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For William Bodie Cameron
One
I first became aware of the world outside my home because of Artemis, the gigantic dog who loved to lower his massive furry white head to sniff me and my littermates in our box with his wet black nose. Once we were old enough to scramble out of the box, I happened to spot the giant canine as he wriggled out through what I later learned was called “the dog door.” I was so astonished I followed him through the stiff curtain, and that’s when I discovered that my life was not at all what I’d thought.
It turned out that I lived with many, many dogs, and also a few people. One of the humans, Donitta, was in love with me and my littermates. She leaned over us constantly, her long black hair spilling down within reach for tugging.
“Squiggles,” she crooned to my only brother. “Noodles. Romy,” she said to my sisters. And when she picked me up: “Stella.” That is how I came to understand that not only did my littermates have names, but I did too. I was Stella, and I loved being with my brother and sisters.
“These are the cutest corgi puppies in the world,” Donitta cooed often. She usually addressed these comments to one of two other people: Erra, a lean, strong woman with short-cropped hair, light eyes, and a steady gaze, or Memphis, a tall, heavy man with rich dark hair and a ready smile. Erra was home both days and nights, but Memphis only showed up for the day. Erra didn’t play with me or my littermates. Memphis did cuddle with us, although he sometimes called Squiggles Noodles and me Squiggles.
“Noodles,” Erra repeated. “Squiggles. Where do you come up with these names, Donitta? At least my Great Pyrenees have respectable dog names.”
Donitta gave Erra an affectionate laugh. “Oh sure. Thor, Cleto, Spartacus, Athena.” Donitta ticked off her fingers. “Terrible names for puppies. It sounds like you’re making a Marvel movie.”
“That’s because they’re not inside dogs,” Erra advised. “They’re livestock guardian dogs. LGDs.”
“I know what an LGD is.”
“I wouldn’t be giving a name like Squiggles to a dog and expect it to face down a pack of coyotes.”
“When it’s time to sell them, I might keep Squiggles. Or Stella,” Donitta mused. “They’re so cute.”
Erra just snorted at this. “We’ll send all the LGD puppies to the co-op sale and keep one of them,” she proclaimed. “You want to keep Stella to put little sweaters on her, that’s fine with me, but the rest of the corgis we’ll advertise in the paper as house pets, same as always.”
Whenever the humans spoke to one another, it was always with humor and affection. “Memphis,” Erra stated in a curious voice one afternoon. “I thought I asked you to lay down salt in the driveway.”
“I did it,” Memphis protested.
“Well.” Erra frowned. “Are you sure you put down salt? Because the ice is still like a skating rink. I pushed the brakes on my truck and slid all the way down to the bottom of the hill. Where did you put the salt?”
Memphis scratched his head, his face looking blank. “Pretty much where it needed it the most.”
“Where it needed it the most?” Erra repeated, unsure.
Donitta started laughing. “Where it needed it most? You mean, not in the tire tracks, but up on the mounds of snow?”
“Well, sure. Isn’t that what you want melted?” Memphis asked, bewildered.
Now Erra was starting to laugh herself. “Oh, Memphis,” she gasped. “You are such a treasure.”
I was warmed by the love between my humans, and I loved wrestling with my brother and sisters, but my favorite puppies lived outside, in a building called “the barn.” They were fluffy and pure white. Even though they were younger than I was, they were much bigger, which was very odd. They were clumsier, too.
A day out playing with them, pushing against their superior weight while we wrestled, exhausted me. But I knew I would someday be as big as Artemis, and then my friends wouldn’t be able to knock me over so easily.
Artemis, I sensed, was the father dog to my large, outdoor puppy friends, and Athena—smaller than Artemis but with the same coloring—was their mother. My own mother was a much smaller dog, with bright brown eyes and ridiculously stubby legs. Donitta called her Pooby.
Other animals lived with me. I occasionally spotted big, tall creatures, taller even than Artemis, so big that people sometimes sat on their backs. I saw an enormous pack of white creatures on four legs who I could smell were the source of the powerful, ever-present odors outside. Running around with these animals were even more dogs. I perched on a couch and watched them out a window, fascinated.
Donitta came over to pet me. “The English sheepdog is Deuce,” she told me, as I alertly focused on a gray-and-white dog with a mop of hair over his eyes. “And Maverick is the Australian shepherd and Ice is the German shepherd. See? Their job is to control the sheep.”
I loved watching the small pack of dogs race back and forth in front of the white creatures I learned were called “sheep.” These big, focused dogs ignored everything else around them. My littermates weren’t like that. They could be distracted by anything.
I wanted to run with them, and I tried to make friends with Deuce and the others, but I could not get their attention, so I gave up on that. I was in the middle of wrestling with a puppy I would later learn was named Thor when Donitta picked me up. Suddenly, I was higher than even Artemis. She gazed at me full in the face, smiling.
“You silly, silly little corgi puppy,” she simpered to me. “What’re you doing out here? Do you think you’re an LGD?” I heard the question but didn’t know what she was saying to me. She smiled into my face, fixing me with her warm, dark eyes. “Sweetie, these dogs are going to be sold to live on ranches with animals that need to be guarded—goats and sheep and the like. You’re an inside dog. Why do you keep coming out to the barn?”
This was my life, and I loved it. But then one cool, clear day, I was dozing with my giant puppy friends in the barn when Erra knelt down to us. She didn’t smile like Donitta and didn’t make kissing sounds at us, but I could feel her affection.
“All right, puppies,” Erra announced. “You’re off to the sale this morning.” She pursed her lips. “It’s been fun having you here.” With that, she rose and abruptly walked away.
I smelled Donitta easing into the barn and wagged my nonexistent tail. Donitta petted Athena, the mommy dog. Then she scooped up Cleto and held the big puppy nose to nose with Athena. “Say goodbye,” Donitta murmured quietly. Something involving humans and emotions was happening, and we all took notice, watching respectfully.
One by one, Donitta picked up Thor and the rest of the giant white puppies, holding each dog’s nose up to Athena and then to Artemis. The adult dogs seemed to understand that something serious was going on. They were quiet and seemed thoughtful, so the puppies all were too.
“Say goodbye,” Donitta kept repeating. I didn’t know what that meant. She turned and started chatting with the nice man named Memphis, completely ignoring me. I trotted over to her and put an expectant paw on her leg. She glanced down at me and then laughed.
“Oh, Stella.” Donitta chuckled. “Okay, you can say goodbye too.” She scooped me up and held me nose to nose with Artemis. I think Artemis, being an indoor and outdoor dog, tolerated me better than Athena, who always regarded me with a little bit of suspicion. The two adult dogs, though, sniffed my nose just as they had sniffed the noses of the bigger puppies.
“All right, Memphis,” Donitta proclaimed, sweeping her hands at the puppies. “Time to take them. Dayna knows you’re coming. She’s got two other farms bringing their dogs, so it’ll be a big gathering of LGD puppies. Put them all up for sale but hold one back for us at the end. Your choice which pup, but I’d pick Thor. Erra won’t admit it, but I think she likes him best. I’ll see you when you get back.” She started to walk away, then turned and pointed at me and laughed. “Oh, I better take Stella inside. I don’t think she’d understand.”
Donitta lifted me gently and carried me into the house and plunked me down with my small littermates. I was unhappy—I belonged with the big dogs!
As soon as Donitta left the room, I scampered to the dog door and pushed through it. In the barn, Memphis was just shutting the back gate of the pickup truck, and I only caught a glimpse of my big puppy friends in a pile, playing with each other inside the truck bed.
I knew I should be with them.
Memphis opened the driver door and climbed in. I sprang into action.
The truck was parked next to some bales of hay. The top bale was high off the ground, but the rest were stacked lower. The very first bale in the row was right in front of me, and I could leap up on it as easily as I could the footstool in the living room.
I took a running start, jumped on the first bale, the second one, and then the third, each time climbing higher. Now I could see the puppies in the back of the truck. I launched myself into the air and landed squarely among them, falling mostly on Thor, who shook it off, delighted to see me.
I felt movement, and then the sun was sharp overhead, and the air was clear and cold as it sailed past our heads. We were going somewhere, somewhere on a wonderful adventure!
An amazing assortment of smells kept interrupting our play as we raised our noses to the perplexing, complicated odors of a world we’d never known existed. I was with my best friends, and I was happy. We were pressed together tightly enough to be warm. Then we were flung forward slightly as the truck slid to a halt.
We smelled Memphis easing out of the truck. When he lowered the tailgate, we saw a woman standing next to him. She was short and thin, with hair almost as short as Memphis’s, though she didn’t have fuzz on her face like he did. She grinned delightedly as we all surged forward to meet her and sniff her hands. We stopped at the very edge, though, because there was quite a drop from where we gathered to the snowy ground below.
“Memphis,” the woman asked with a giggle, “why on earth did you bring a corgi? This is a guardian dog sale.”
Memphis scratched at the fuzz on his face. “I didn’t know I did.”
“Well, we can’t leave her out here alone in the cold. Let’s bring them all into the barn.”
We were gathered up in their arms and carried through a big door into a huge, amazing room filled with animal scents, especially puppy scents. I could hear yips and excited panting and saw that there were cages filled with jumbling, tumbling dogs, all of them around the size of my best puppy friends but none as big as Artemis.
“All right,” Dayna said. She and Memphis set us in a big wire box with a high, open ceiling. “Let’s separate the corgi. What’s her name?”
“If it’s the dog I think it is, it’s Stella.”
“Hi, Stella,” Dayna greeted me. I went to her, absolutely enthralled. She was unlike Erra and unlike Donitta. It occurred to me now that humans could be of all sorts and sizes, just like dogs. I had just never realized that before.
“Let’s put Stella in her own cage,” Dayna went on. She picked me up off the ground, and I wiggled in her arms, trying to plant my tongue on her face.
“We’ve got three litters of Great Pyrenees, plus some malamutes,” Dayna advised Memphis. “Your GPs will fit right in.”
I was shocked when Dayna set me in a tiny wire box by myself. I yipped in disbelief. I belonged with my best friends!
“You’re the cutest dog,” she gushed at me. “Look at your tiny little legs.” I could tell I was pleasing her and hoped it meant she would change her mind about this cage. But she did not. Devastated, I watched her walk away.
People arrived, milling around, exclaiming over the puppies who were allowed out to run around and greet the humans.
I put my paws on the little wires of my cage and yipped frantically. How could they have forgotten I was here? It was absolute agony.
Then I saw something new. One of the humans who walked in was much shorter than any other I’d ever seen. He moved differently as well, quick and light on his feet. His skin and eyes were slightly darker than Dayna’s. It was, I recognized, a boy, a younger human male.
A much taller, older man with light hair and light eyes stood next to the boy. Memphis called this man Bart, and Dayna called the boy Mateo. At some point, someone said something, and they all turned and gazed across the room at me.
When the boy’s eyes fell on mine, something happened to my insides. It reminded me a little bit of the sensation of being flung around in the back of Memphis’s truck.
I had to meet this boy.
Two
I yipped at the boy as loudly as I could, telling him, “Please come, please see me.” And he did. The boy, grinning, broke away from the grown-ups and strode over to where I was, kneeling down and putting his fingers through the cage bars. I licked those fingers frantically, tasting something sweet on them.
Dayna approached and stood beside the boy. “It’s okay, Mateo,” she urged. “Go ahead. You can let Stella out.”
“Stella,” the boy repeated. I nearly swooned to hear him say it. His name, I decided in that instant, was Mateo, the way Memphis was Memphis and Erra was Erra. I spent a good long time playing with that boy right there on the dusty surface of that huge room, my big puppy friends forgotten. This was a human puppy and was more fun to play with than any dog I’d ever met.
I was pretty disappointed when, with a last regretful look, he slid me back into my cage. I reared my head back and tried to push my paws against the bars. No, no, no! I belonged out with the boy!
The light-haired man wandered up to join us. His smile was easy and a bit mocking as he gazed down at me and then at Mateo.
“This the dog you want, Mateo?” he demanded with a chuckle.
Mateo laughed awkwardly. “Oh, no. I’m thinking maybe one of the malamutes.”
The older man nodded. “Good choice. Why don’t you go check them out?” he suggested. “I don’t want to be here all day.”
Mateo gave me one last long look before turning and dashing across the vast space of the room, to the other side, where he knelt and joined the humans playing with some other puppies and not me. I was despondent. What had just happened?
The man turned his quick grin on Dayna. “Kid’s been unable to sleep, so excited to get his own dog.”
Dayna smiled at him.
“He’s my brother,” Bart continued. He laughed at that, but Dayna did not. “Kind of the caboose of the family, you know what I mean? We don’t look much alike. He takes after my mom. She passed away when the poor kid was four years old. So now it’s just me and my dad running the ranch and taking care of my three worthless brothers.”
“Aren’t you Bart? Bart Schmidt?” Dayna replied.
He brightened even more. “Yeah!” he agreed.
I didn’t know what a Schmidt was but concluded the man’s name was Bart.
“So, your brother Elias, the one who shears all the sheep in the county? You’re saying he’s worthless?” Dayna questioned skeptically.
Bart’s smile faltered a moment, and then he shrugged. “Well, I had to assign him something to do,” he explained lamely.
The tension I had felt over being separated from my puppy friends had shifted, and now I was upset because I was apart from the boy Mateo. The room’s high ceilings and all the other people and every puppy faded from my vision—my eyes were focused on the boy. I saw him hoisting up a white, furry puppy and willed him to drop the little dog and come back to me.
He glanced over, and we locked eyes. I did a play-bow and then put my butt on the ground and sat for him, gazing at him expectantly. When that didn’t work, I spun in a quick circle, panting and yipping.
“It’d be hilarious,” Bart observed to Dayna, “if Mateo got himself this corgi. That would really get to the old man, I’ll bet. Dog doesn’t even have a tail!”
Bart laughed. Again, Dayna did not. “Some corgis have their tails docked at birth,” she responded.
“So, Dayna,” Bart continued breezily, his voice changing a little, “maybe I can come back up here this weekend. You and I could go out, even.”
“Oh,” Dayna replied lightly, “how’d I know you were going to say that?”
“Pardon me?” Bart looked puzzled.
“Your reputation precedes you, Mr. Bartholomew Schmidt. I was wondering when you were going to ask me for a date. I’m just about the last woman in this area who hasn’t been heartbroken by you, and I intend to keep it that way.”
Bart had a slack look on his face. At that moment he reminded me a little bit of Memphis. Then he blinked. “Hmm,” he offered, and that was all he had to say on the topic. He turned on his heel and walked over to where two women were kneeling by Thor, who was on his back, pedaling his legs.
