Chapter 1 – The Free Dog
It was December of 2018 and the dog that would change our lives was there on Facebook. Hungry, sad, and neglected. Pam’s high school classmate Beth had posted it. She had been watching her neighbors’ dog deteriorate in their backyard. Since Ciara, the dog, had escaped from their yard a few times and chased the mail carrier and UPS driver, she spent most of her time on a chain. The only exception seemed to be when it was extremely cold outside. On those days, she was moved to a pen in the garage. After months of Beth’s persuasion, the family had agreed to give her up and Beth was looking for someone to take her. I’m not sure how long after the post first appeared, but one afternoon Pam finally told me about it. “I know how much you like German Shepherds,” she said, “and having three dogs isn’t much harder than having two.” She was right, we’d had three dogs before, and although getting a second dog is more work than having just one, adding a third isn’t that hard. I had grown up with small dogs but have always had a soft spot for large ones. I had loved German Shepherds since childhood and Ciara, as the dog Beth had posted about was called at the time, was a German Shepherd mix. She had the color and markings of a German Shepherd, but was smaller and boxier in stature, with a solid white paw. In the photo on Facebook, she was so thin that you could see her ribs. Her eyes stared past the camera, empty, without hope. So, it took no time at all for me to say “yes.”
Two weeks later, on a cold Saturday morning in December, we made the two-and-a-half-hour drive from Wichita to Kansas City. We had a kennel in the back of my Dodge Durango and a leash. And no idea what to expect. Beth had told us the family with Ciara spoke Spanish and not much English. Would they understand what was going on? Would we drive all the way up there for them to tell us no? Fortunately, Pam had a couple of friends that spoke Spanish, so we had them on standby to translate if needed. We also took some cash in case there was a misunderstanding about “free.” We stopped for shopping and lunch in Kansas City, giving ourselves one last chance to back out. We didn’t. So, we headed to Beth’s neighbor’s house to meet Ciara. It turned out there was less of a communication barrier than we expected; the family’s oldest son was home, he spoke English, and the turnover went smoother than expected. The house was surrounded by a three-foot chain-link fence, and at the end of a metal chain, lying in a “bed” of dirt, was the dog from the Facebook post. But she was even sadder in person, thinner, lonelier. The look in her eyes was one of defeat, that this was going to be the best life she would know. Because she had a stocky neck, the two-inch collar she wore was buckled tight and had worn off some of her fur. When I reached for her to pick her up, she growled, that low, warning growl that says, “don’t do that.” I froze and realized it wasn’t going to be the way we got her in the truck. Luckily, Pam was able to put the leash on her and lead her toward the truck. I managed to sneak up behind Ciara, pick her up, and get her into the kennel before she realized what was going on. A few hugs and some tears of joy from Beth. Then we pulled away from the curb with a traumatized dog in the back and no idea what came next. Was there a happy dog still in her? Would she get along with our other two dogs, Abbey and Grace? Had we made a mistake? Ciara wasn’t a name we liked, in fact we didn’t even know it was her name until we looked at the paperwork from her previous veterinarian. We had already decided to name her Scout.