Giant George by Dave Nasser and Lynne Barrett-Lee Read Free Book Online Page B

were a pair of mixed-breed dogs,both smaller than George, but adult and very confident.
    We’d just arrived at the park that afternoon, and were walking toward the central area, when this guy came in with his two dogs. It all started incredibly quickly. One minute all was quiet,and George was bounding around happily; the next thing I knew, a terrible commotion had started up, with that all-too-familiar—not to mention horrible—noisewhen a dog starts acting really aggressive.
    I leapt up, but by the time I was over to the three animals, the first of the dogs was just about to bite George. The other was at his opposite flank, trying to do the same thing, and Georgie was whimpering and trembling uncontrollably. There was no fight in this gentle giant of ours, but his lack of reaction or retaliation didn’t seem to make any difference.

    The other dogs’ owner looked as shocked by what was happening as I was. Though he repeatedly yelled at his animals to get off George, neither dog paid him the slightest bit of attention. In the end, it took brute force to drag the dogs off a now terrified George, the owner hauling one of his pets off by the collar, and then, having had no success in getting near the front end of his other dog,and no other option, yanking him off by his tail.
    He looked mortified, and was very apologetic about it all, and immediately put his dogs back on their leashes. As for me, I’d been a dog “dad” for such a short time, I had no idea what the appropriate etiquette was at times like this. As scared as I’d been of what might have happened to poor George, who was shaking, and cowering close at my side,I figured the whole thing must have come as a complete shock to the other guy as well, so I accepted his obviously sincere apology, and just hoped George didn’t run into his two dogs again. The guy left the park right away.
    I gave George a once-over, and no blood had been shed, but he was clearly bruised and very traumatized. His confidence, always tenuous, was shot to pieces, and it occurredto me that George had been bullied at the park only because we’d let a few dog owners in the puppy part bully
us.
We decided then and there that the adult park was not where he belonged yet, and began taking him back into the puppy and small-dog part, determined to ignore the constant comments and glares from the other owners. The phrase “pick on someone your own size” had a distinctly hollowring. Our poor pup was a misfit, it seemed.
    Ironically, it was only a few days after the incident in the adult dog section that a guy entered the park with a Great Dane. As dog owners do when they have pets in common, he came straight over to the chain-link fence that separated the big dogs from the smaller ones, beckoned to Christie and me and said, “Hi.” His dog was named Drake and was a handsomeblack Great Dane. He obviously also had a great temperament, like George’s—you could see it. He was, his owner told us, about five years old. He seemed enormous to us, and having become so preoccupied with George’s size lately, we asked him how much Drake weighed.
    “One hundred and forty pounds,” he said. We were both openmouthed. Yes, George was pretty big, but we couldn’t imagine him ever getting—everbeing—
that
big. It seemed impossible, unthinkable, that George could get so huge.
    I said so to Christie on the way home from the park. “Still,” I added, “if he gets anywhere near that sort of weight, no dog’s going to take him on—no way.”
    She smiled. “What d’you reckon, Georgie?” she said, reaching into the backseat of the truck to pet him. “I think you need to grow some more, sweetie. Thenyou’ll show ’em.”
    I think somebody upstairs must have been listening.

CHAPTER 5
Honey, I Shrunk the House

    “You know what?” Christie said to me one day in early summer. “I swear I can actually
see
Georgie growing.”
    She’d taken to calling George “Georgie” early on—not