My Life in Dog Years by Gary Paulsen Read Free Book Online Page B

now, gone some years from a combination of dysplasia and cancer that wasimpossible to cure or fix but I still have the drawing in a box somewhere. It shows up from time to time when I am moving or straightening things, and I think of him and the perfect summer afternoon when we ate hot dogs and played ball and made some new friends.

Fred came to me in a small cardboard box filled with wood chips.
    I had been in a bookstore in Bemidji, Minnesota, looking for a book on pickling fish. I love to eat pickled herring and had access to a large supply of small northern pike.
    It was in this uncomplicated frame of mind that I met Fred.
    I was at the curb when a small boy came up to me holding an old detergent box.
    “Hey, mister,” he said with the air of a con man, “you want to buy a puppy?”
    “Buy?” I stopped and peered into the box. There was nothing but a pile of wood shavings. “What puppy?”
    “He’s in there, down in the wood. Dig him out.”
    I dug around in the shavings until my fingers hit the soft fur. There was a moment’s hesitation, then a small growl; then a set of needle-sharp teeth ripped into the soft tip of my finger. “He bit me!”
    The boy nodded. “He’s half Lab and half something that came into the yard one night Dad said he’d make a great watch-dog.”
    I studied the boy. He was short, with frankblue eyes and golden blond hair. He didn’t look like a con man.
    “Let me get this straight. You want me to buy a puppy I can’t see, that bites me, and you aren’t sure who the father is?”
    He thought a moment, then nodded. “Yep. He’s a good watchdog. Look how he defends that box.”
    Just for the record, I was going to say no, but I looked down and a small black head appeared, with two floppy ears, a black button nose, two dark brown eyes and a little mouth that smiled at me. I know some people think dogs can’t smile, but they can, and he did. I was sunk. I’ve always been a sucker for puppies. I can’t get out of a dog pound without a dog, especially a cute one like Fred.
    “How much?” I asked.
    The truth was, it was silly to buy a puppy— you could go to any mall or shopping center parking lot and find someone trying to givethem away. Add to that the fact that I was terminally broke and it became doubly crazy.
    “Fifty dollars,” the boy said without smiling or batting an eye.
    “For a mutt puppy?”
    He looked at me, calculating. “How about five bucks?”
    “Done.”
    I gave him the money and took the dog and box and wood shavings and put them on the floor of the cab of my old truck. I had just lost a friend to cancer. His name had been Fred and I thought it would be nice to hear his name now and then, so I looked down into the box while I drove and I said, “Your name is Fred.”
    At home I took the pup out of the box and into the house, where he promptly peed on the floor and tore a hole in a couch cushion, spilled trash all over the kitchen floor, ripped open two bags of beans and rice inthe pantry, dismembered a doll that a neighbor’s daughter had left, ate the laces and tongues out of four pairs of shoes (but only the left shoe of each pair), absolutely destroyed a vacuum cleaner somebody foolishly had left in the same closet as the shoes, and stuck my wife’s cat, Matilda, almost permanently onto the ceiling.
    This was in the first twenty minutes Fred was in the house, while I was looking for my wife to tell her I had brought a puppy home.
    Of all the dogs I have had, Fred was the closest to being actually nuclear in his capacity for destruction. None of it was done with evil intent. He was a wonderfully happy pup and adult dog—inventive and with a great sense of humor, more of which later— but he was also amazingly persistent. Once he started a project, he simply would not stop until it was done. I think nothing illustrates this better than what came to be known as the great wire war.
    Fred grew, in spite of early attempts by Matilda the cat to disconnect