Getting Millie - Part III
Not every dog is that special one who connects to your soul like my big sweet Newfoundland, Lucille, did. She was the gentle creature who’d taken me through the death of my sister, family problems, surgeries, the isolation of Covid. For me, her departure was one of the great tragedies of my life. And so, as soon as she was gone, I set out to find another dog. As it turned out, I should have waited.
THIS IS PART 3 of a SIX-PART STORY
Millie, the day we rescued her
The reason Lez wouldn’t get out of the car was that Hispanics and hillbillies have a traditional dislike and distrust of one another. I hadn’t known that. The people we were visiting – the Redds – looked like meth addicts with their dusty, untended property and the decrepit trailer they lived in. When I saw all those puppies, at least thirty of them, sitting in the baking heat, something twisted in my stomach. We’d been told that they had two female puppies for us to consider. One of them had been separated out and put in a small pen. The other, they informed us, had “run off somewhere, disappeared.”
The puppy they’d singled out for us was a right mess. Her coat was dry and patchy, her eyes lustreless and dull. She had a long, ratty tail and this she held timidly between her legs. It didn’t take much intelligence to see that she was shaky and in poor health, but she had a sweet face, and without saying a word to one another, Jofka and I decided to take her.
The Redds called her a “Newfador,” as if they had concocted a new breed. In reality, she was a mix of Bernese Mountain Dog, Lab and Newfie. The Lab predominated, but we wouldn’t know that till later. (We did, however, get to meet the father, a dirty, rust-colored Newf with an agreeable face; the mother was nowhere to be seen.) We lifted the dog into the back seat of the car and there she lay for the two hour drive home, quiet and still, enjoying the luxury of the A/C and the smooth and steady motion of the car. We had paid a hundred-and-fifty dollars for her, the same price we would have had to pay to adopt a dog from the pound.
She was fourteen weeks old, a large puppy already the size of a grown Australian Shepherd (a friend had an adult dog of that breed, so I was able to compare). The first day home, she was a dream. I had a crate for her, but she preferred to lie behind an antique chair upholstered in light green silk that my husband had inherited from his parents. Later, we would discover that she had completely destroyed the back of the chair, but for the moment we didn’t know that and were just pleased that she had found a place where she could flop down and feel safe.
For the first day she was chill, slowly moving out of her comfort zone as she wandered around the house, sniffing and exploring. We thought, Wow, what a great dog! And congratulated ourselves on having done a good deed, rescuing her, as we had, from nasty circumstances. But after that first day, all hell broke loose and we realized we’d made a big mistake.