by Tod Davies.
Shadow told me her name before we ever saw her. It was her real name, too. Not the name they’d given her in the shelter where she’d done so badly that they sent her to the dog orphanage in the Arizona desert—Fedwell Farms, run by Carrie Wright, who is close to being a saint. Carrie takes in all the herding dogs around there that wash out of the local shelter, trying to find them homes. Fifty-six dogs she had when we first found her. She told me that at one point, someone asked her to take care of their six kids while they went through a rancorous divorce. “I said, look, if I liked kids as much as I like dogs, I’d have more of them. So I said no, but if you have some dogs I could look after, happy to.”
She had taken Shadow in, after the shelter found the little dog circling more and more hysterically in her little cage, trying to hide from anyone who came near. “Dani,” they called her, after a character in “Game of Thrones.” “Queen of the Arizona Desert,” it said on her papers.
I’d seen a photo of her that Carrie had put up with hopes it would catch the eye of a proper home for such a skittish little dog. “She doesn’t do well when I take the dogs to the Costco parking lot on Sundays, to try and get them adopted. The picture was her only chance.” Dani looked like a heeler to me, and in the picture she looked like Pearl. Pearl was still alive, but I knew it was only a matter of time before she left us. Alex would need another dog. “I’ve always wanted a dog who would follow me around,” he said wistfully.
The picture of Dani showed a very skittish little black dog, with greasy fur, looking anxiously at the camera, tail between her legs. But we thought we’d go look at her, especially since there was a dog there that I meant to adopt myself. It was a long drive, from Oregon to Arizona. And on the way there, spending the night in a hotel with Pearl, I had a short dream. I dreamt that little dog was following Alex like a shadow. And that she told me that was her name. Shadow. Not Dani. Shadow.
“She’s a silver dog, very rare,” Carrie said on the phone. I had no idea what she meant. And when we got there, and Alex met Dani, neither of us could see what ‘silver’ meant. She was a mess of matted fur, a freaked out, skinny little creature, who ran away from us, barking hysterically. Alex put her on a leash, which quieted her down, and walked her to the edge of Carrie’s fence.
“You don’t want that dog,” I said. “You want a camping dog. That dog is going to be impossible to train.”
Carrie muttered to me, “First time she sees a bear, she’s gone all the way to Canada.”
Alex walked her to the fence and back, twice. And then he said, “I want this dog. She’s a good walker.”
How did he know he’d found the dog of his heart? For that was what she is—the dog of his heart, of which I believe there is only one in every person’s life.
We drove back with her, and with Pearl, and with the dog I had come for to replace Gray, as much as he could, in my heart. The first night in a hotel, she hid under the night table on Alex’s side of the bed. She sat in the passenger side wheelwell all the way home to Oregon, refusing to come out except to pee. It was hard to get her to eat. It was hard to see her wherever she hid, since she seemed to be all sorts of shades of black and grey and brown, blending into corners and hidey holes.
Alex said, “She looks just like a shadow.” It was so obvious that Shadow was her name. And she answered to it immediately.
She terrified us on the way home, in the mountains in a deserted meadow where we stopped to let the dogs have a safe run without cars near by. Alex let her off the leash, and she was gone like a shot. She ran and ran and ran. He called “Shadow!” and she ran right back to the car, getting into it as docilely as if she’d never run away.
She hid in the wheelwell, though.
We skipped the third night in a hotel, and drove all the way to our little mountain valley. We said, “This is your new home.” Alex sat with her, leashed, on the deck. A noise came from the road down the meadow, and she jumped three feet up and off the deck. She would have hung herself on the leash if Alex hadn’t let go. She ran around the house, before running back and begging to be let back in.
She slept with us that night. Three dogs on the bed! And in the morning, she was the first one up. I woke and saw a little black and grey and brown plume as she moved experimentally around the bed. “Alex,” I breathed. “Look.” She was wagging her tail. It was the first time we’d seen that.
She scared us again. We who were so used to dogs who just walked along with us in the woods, we weren’t prepared for the two street dogs we’d brought home. She would disappear for an hour, and I would start thinking about calling the local shelter and putting out word in the neighborhood, when she would reappear at the door, silent as a shadow. We realized later she was circling the house, trying to figure out what was her territory and what wasn’t. She always came back. And she always came back to Alex.
He took her in his truck out camping. She would shy away from any other people. But at night, she figured out what none of the other dogs had managed, how to get up to where Alex had his camper bed. She hated to be away from him for very long. Soon he hated to be away from her.
When Pearl died, Shadow immediately claimed her place on the bed, lying across Alex’s feet. She would clamber up to his face in the morning, the first one to wake up, and hit him with her paw. She was like a cat with him. After breakfast, she would curl up on his chest and encourage him to hug her. We had never had a dog who would do that.
She loved to run. First thing in the morning, when we let the dogs out, she would take off in a wide circle around the meadow. After awhile, Alex wanted to know what animal had made the trench that formed a semicircle from the house to the road. But when we watched, we saw it was Shadow. She made her own racetrack. Her agility teacher said she was a natural. Even though she came to us without knowing any commands, she seemed to understand what was wanted of her—as long as it was Alex who asked.
And she watched our other dog for cues about how to behave, and imitated his ways, whether they were the best ways or not. Our male had a habit of jumping up, which I tried to break him of, and before I managed to get it under control, she had taken to jumping up too. Gleefully. As if she was saying she could do what the big dogs do, for even though our other dog was inexplicably the same weight, he seemed to be much bigger. More muscle, a bigger presence, while she was slim and fairy like and light on her feet.
She was scared of everyone and everything, it seemed like, for about a year. We had a joke that she saw zombies everywhere. Alex bought a harness so that she wouldn’t slip her collar when he took her to town, and she managed to wiggle out of two different sizes until he found the size that was small enough that she couldn’t get out of it no matter how hard she tried. Or at least, so we thought. She did get out of it once when a waitress dropped a tray on an outdoor table Shadow was resting underneath. We didn’t even know she was gone until someone yelled to us, “Have you lost a dog?” And we saw she had disappeared. She ran all the way home, with half the town chasing her, and Alex laughing the last two blocks. He knew she’d be fine. She had been a wily stray long enough to avoid cars, and she knew where she lived.
She loves her house. She loves her view. She loves her beds. But most of all, she loves Alex. “I always wanted a dog who would follow me everywhere,” he says. And now he has one. His very own Shadow.