A Dog's Purpose by W. Bruce Cameron Read Free Book Online Page A

Yard.
    Unbidden, the sadness I’d felt from Senora washed through me, and I wanted to squirm up to her and lick her palms and make her happy again. Of all the things I’d ever done, making Senora laugh seemed the most important.
    It was, I reflected, the only thing that gave my life any purpose.

{ FIVE }

    At once, everything was both strange and familiar.
    I could clearly remember the loud, hot room, Spike filling the air with his fury and then abruptly falling into a slumber so deep it was as if he’d opened a gate with his mouth and run away. I remembered becoming sleepy, and then there was the sense that much time had passed, the way a nap in the afternoon sun will span the day and suddenly it will be time for the evening feed. This nap, though, brought me not just to a new time but to a new place.
    Familiar was the warm, squirming presence of puppies on either side of me. Familiar, too, was the shoving clamber for a turn at the teat and the rich, life-giving milk that was the reward for all the pushing and climbing. Somehow, I was a puppy again, helpless and weak, back in the Den.
    But when I took my first bleary look at the face of my mother, she wasn’t the same dog at all. Her fur was a light color, and she was larger than, well, than Mother. My brothers and sisters—seven of them!—shared the same light-colored fur, and when I examined my forelegs I realized that I matched the rest of the litter as well.
    And not only were my legs no longer dark brown—they stretched out from me in perfect proportion to the rest of my body also.
    I heard a lot of barking and smelled many dogs nearby, but this wasn’t the Yard. When I ventured from the Den, the surface beneath my pads was rough and hard and a wire fence abruptly ended my exploration after half a dozen yards. It was a cage with a wire top and a cement floor.
    The implications of all this made me weary, and I stumbled back to the Den, climbed up on top of a pile of siblings, and collapsed.
    I was a little puppy again, barely able to walk. I had a new family, a new mother, and a new home. Our fur was uniformly blond, our eyes dark. My new mother’s milk was far richer than what had come from my first mother.
    We lived with a man, who came by with food for my mother, which she gulped down quickly before returning to the Den to keep us warm.
    But what about the Yard, and Senora, and Fast and Coco? I could remember my life very clearly, and yet everything was different now, as if I had started over. Was that possible?
    I recalled Spike’s outraged barking and how, as I fell asleep in that hot room, I was seized with an inexplicable question, a question of
purpose.
This didn’t seem like the sort of thing a dog should think about, but I found myself returning to the issueoften, usually as I was just dozing off for an irresistible nap. Why? Why was I a puppy again? Why did I harbor a nagging feeling that as a dog there was something I was supposed to
do
?
    Our enclosure didn’t offer much to look at, and there was nothing fun to chew on except each other, but as my brothers and sisters and I became more aware, we discovered there were more puppies in a kennel to the right: tiny, energetic little guys with dark markings and hair that stuck up all over the place. On the other side was a slow-moving female, all alone, with a hanging belly and distended teats. She was white with black spots, and her coat was very short. She didn’t walk around much and seemed pretty uninterested in us. About a foot of space separated the two kennels, so all we could do was smell the little puppies next to us, though they looked like they’d be fun to play with.
    Straight ahead was a long strip of lawn that beckoned with sweet odors of moist earth and rich, green grass, but we were prevented from going out there by the locked door to the cage. A wooden fence encircled both the grassy area and the dog cages.
    The man wasn’t anything like Bobby or Carlos. When he ventured into the