I volunteer at the animal shelter here in Wichita, and most mornings we come in to find a crate or two left by the door overnight, somebodys dog or cat they could not keep, dropped off in the dark because they could not bear to hand it over in the daylight. It is always sad. You get used to sad, in this work, or you learn to carry it. But the dog somebody left last night was not just dumped, and what I found in his crate is a thing I could not shake loose.
He was an old dog, gray around the muzzle, and he was clean, and fed, and he had a good collar on with his name spelled out. That is not a dumped dog. A dumped dog comes in matted and starving. This dog came in loved. Somebody had folded a blanket down in the crate so he would be comfortable, and tucked in a bag of his food, and his own worn tennis ball.
Under his collar, when I checked the tag, there was a slip of paper folded up small and tucked behind it. Just a few words. And they turned my stomach right over.
His name is Gus. I go in for surgery Monday and I have got nobody. Please do not put him down. He is a good boy and he is not done. Neither am I, I hope.
I sat down on the shelter floor, and that old dog laid his head in my lap, and I read it again. Surgery Monday. Nobody. The kind of note a person writes when they are scared they will not walk back out, and their last worry on this earth is what happens to their dog.
I was not going to let that stand. Not the note, not the fear in it. I picked up my phone.
The name on the collar tag and a couple of calls got me there. His owner was a man named Earl, seventy-six, a widower, no kids, going in Monday morning for a heart surgery with a hard number on it and not one soul to hold his dog. He had done the only thing he could think of. He had brought Gus to the one place he trusted to keep him alive if he did not make it, and he had begged, in a few words behind a collar, for the dog to be spared.
We did not put Gus in a kennel. One of our fosters, a kind woman with a fenced yard, took him home that very day. And that Monday, Earl went in for his surgery knowing his dog was on a couch somewhere, warm, safe, waiting.
Earl made it. Came through it slow but he came through. And the day he got home from the rehab place, our foster pulled up in the driveway and opened the car door, and that gray old dog went across the yard like a puppy, and a tough old widower got down on his bad knees in the grass and cried into his dogs neck.
Gus is not done. Neither is Earl. And I have got half the shelter checking on the both of them now.
Some notes turn your stomach. And then you get to answer them.