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the window at Blue, who was as content as could be sleeping under the sun. Aside from his tiny scabs, he seemed as happy and healthy as any puppy I’d ever known. It was challenging, if not impossible, to imagine that just a couple of weeks earlier he had been in line to be tossed into a gas chamber, was so sick with diarrhea that he couldn’t keep weight on, and was covered in some kind of a rash that left people coating his skin with bleach and vaginal anti-yeast cream.
    Turner was kind enough to say that I could call her back at any time if I needed additional information. From her end, I surmised, everything she’d said was routine. A job well done.
    I thanked her, hung up the telephone, and walked outside to the deck. Blue’s ears perked up and then his eyes opened, and he lifted his head out of what looked like a deep slumber. I sat down and crossed my legs, and he crawled into my lap. He curled himself into a ball, rested his head on my thigh, and went peacefully back to sleep.
    So began our two-week quarantine for what, mercifully, ended up not being ringworm. I’ll never know for sure what actually caused Blue’s rash because all of his tests came back negative and his scabs continued to heal. Baby Avery never had any problems, and I—despite a few paranoid moments of feeling phantom itches all over my body for absolutely no reason whatsoever—got to enjoy two whole weeks of paying extra-special attention to Blue. Since I work from home as a writer and have the benefit of making my own hours, there was lots of time spent with just the two of us practicing basic commands, learning how to walk on a leash, and playing on the backyard grass. And it was in the backyard that I started to realize Blue not only had an exceptional emotional effect on a good number of people, but also on other dogs.
    At just twenty pounds during those first weeks at home, Blue was literally a third of Stella’s size. She’s as solid as dogs come, with a strong proud chest, a big square forehead, and muscles so carved and pronounced that you’d think she was hitting the weight room for a few deltoid reps in between her walks at the park. Between her looks and her personality, I used to joke that Stella was an all-star linebacker living in a world filled with powder-puff cheerleaders. She didn’t approach other dogs and ask them politely if they wanted to play. She ran up to other dogs and gave them the canine version of a smack across the head as if to insist, “Let’s wrestle!”
    Blue, on the other hand, was a typical awkward puppy, so eager to run that he sometimes forgot which feet he was supposed to move next. He had all the requisite loose skin on his back and baby fat around his waistline, and his natural instinct was to be cautious and protect himself around other dogs, just as he did with people. He also had what I came to appreciate as a pretty sharp brain inside his little noggin, using it at first to outsmart Stella and then to win her respect.
    My backyard is surrounded by a four-foot-tall, split-rail fence. Inside is about fifteen hundred square feet of nothing but freshly mowed grass. Around the fence is the rest of my property, a few wooded acres with tall, old-growth trees. Deer tend to wander by, and though the yard is plenty big for Stella to run at a full sprint, she decided early on that she wanted to follow the deer into the woods instead. She quickly figured out how to leap clear over the fence, pretty much in a single bound. Soon after, I installed an invisible, electrical fence around the regular one, as well as a shock collar around Stella’s neck to keep her safely inside the yard.
    Blue had no need for a shock collar; it took him a few days to even bark at the deer, let alone try to chase them. But once he took a liking to getting his nose right up into the fence to bark at the deer, he began to realize that Stella always stayed a few feet behind. He would actually look back over his shoulder at her,