The Puppy Express
The Topps stood on the shoulder of the road and watched as their truck’s engine shuddered and died. Nancy and Joe, their two children, Jodi, twelve, and Matthew, fifteen, and their elderly dog, Snoopy, were 1,500 miles from home, stranded on a highway in Wyoming, with the old truck clearly beyond even Joe’s gift for repairs. The little dog, peering around the circle of faces with cataractdimmed eyes, seemed to reflect their anxiety.
The Topps were on the road because five months before, a nephew had told Joe there was work to be had in the Napa Valley and he and Nancy decided to gamble. Breaking up their home in Fort Wayne, Indiana, they packed up the kids and Snoopy and set out for California. But once there, the warehousing job Joe hoped for didn’t materialize, Nancy and the kids were very homesick, and their funds melted away. Now it was January and, the gamble lost, they were on their way back to Fort Wayne.
The truck had taken them as far as Rock Springs, Wyoming, but now there was nothing to do but sell it to a junk dealer for twenty-five dollars and hitch a ride to the bus station. Two pieces of bad news greeted them at the station. Four tickets to Fort Wayne came to much more money than they had, and dogs were not allowed on the bus.
“But we’ve got to take Snoopy with us.” Nancy pleaded with the ticket-seller, tears welling in her eyes.
Joe drew her away from the window. It was no use getting upset about Snoopy, he told her, until they figured how to get themselves on the bus. With no choice but to ask for help, they called Travelers’ Aid, and with kind efficiency, the local representative arranged for a motel room for them for the night. There, with their boxes and bags piled around them, they put in a call to relatives back home, who promised to get together money for the fare and wire it the next day.
“But what about Snoopy?” Matthew said as soon as his parents got off the phone.
“We can’t go without Snoopy,” Jodi stated flatly. At seventeen, Snoopy, a beagle-dachshund mix, had a bit of a heart condition and some kidney problems, and the family worried about her.
Joe picked up the little dog. “Snoopy,” he said, tugging her floppy ears in the way she liked. “I think you’re going to have to hitchhike.”
“Don’t tease, Joe,” said Nancy shortly.
“I’m not teasing, honey,” he assured her, tucking Snoopy into the crook of his arm. “I’m going to try to find an eastbound trucker to take the old girl back for us.”
At the local truck stop, Joe sat Snoopy on a stool beside him while he fell into conversation with drivers who stopped to pet her. “Gee, I’d like to help you out,” one after another said. “She’s awful cute and I wouldn’t mind the company, but I’m not going through Fort Wayne this trip.” The only driver who could have taken her picked Snoopy up and looked at her closely. “Naw,” the man growled, “with an old dog like her, there’d be too many pit stops. I got to make time.” Still hopeful, Joe tacked up a sign and gave the motel’s phone number.
“Somebody’ll call before bus time tomorrow,” he predicted to the kids when he and Snoopy got back to the motel.
“But suppose nobody does?” Jodi said.
Joe answered, “Sweetie, we’ve got to be on that bus. The Travelers’ Aid can only pay for us to stay here one night.”
The next day Joe went off to collect the wired funds while Nancy and the kids sorted through their possessions, trying to decide what could be crammed into the six pieces of baggage they were allowed on the bus and what had to be left behind. Ordinarily Snoopy would have napped, but now her eyes followed every move of Nancy and the children, and if one of them paused to think, even for a minute, Snoopy nosed at the idle hand, asking to be touched, to be held.
“She knows,” Jodi said, cradling her. “She knows something awful is going to happen.”
The Travelers’ Aid representative arrived to take the belongings they couldn’t pack for donation to the local thrift shop. A nice man, he was caught between being sympathetic and being practical when he looked at Snoopy. “Seventeen is really old for a dog,” he said gently. “Maybe you just have to figure she’s had a long life and a good one.” When nobody spoke, he took a deep breath. “If you want, you can leave her with me and I’ll have her put to sleep after you’ve gone.”
The children looked at Nancy but said nothing; they understood there wasn’t any choice and they didn’t want to make it harder on their mother by protesting. Nancy bowed her head. She thought of all the walks, all the romps, all the picnics, all the times she’d gone in to kiss the children goodnight and Snoopy had lifted her head to be kissed too.
“Thank you,” she told the man. “It’s kind of you to offer. But no. No,” she repeated firmly, “Snoopy’s part of the family, and families don’t give up on each other.” She reached for the telephone book, looked up “Kennels” in the Yellow Pages, and began dialing. Scrupulously, she started each call with the explanation that the family was down on their luck. “But,” she begged, “if you’ll just keep our little dog until we can find a way to get her to Fort Wayne, I give you my word we’ll pay. Please trust me. Please.”
A veterinary clinic, which also boarded pets, finally agreed, and the Travelers’ Aid representative drove them to the place. Nancy was the last to say good-bye. She knelt and took Snoopy’s frosted muzzle in her hands. “You know we’d never leave you if we could help it,” she whispered, “so don’t give up; don’t you dare give up. We’ll get you back somehow. I promise.”
Once back in Fort Wayne, the Topps found a mobile home to rent, one of Joe’s brothers gave them his old car, sisters-in-law provided pots and pans and bed linens, the children returned to their old schools, and Nancy and Joe found jobs. Bit by bit the family got itself together. But the circle had a painful gap in it. Snoopy was missing. Every day Nancy telephoned a different moving company, a different trucking company, begging for a ride for Snoopy. Every day Jodi and Matthew came through the door asking if she’d had any luck, and she had to say no.
By March, they’d been back in Fort Wayne six weeks and Nancy was in despair. She dreaded hearing from Wyoming that Snoopy had died out there, never knowing how hard they’d tried to get her back. One day, having tried everything else, she telephoned the Fort Wayne Department of Animal Control and told them the story.
“I don’t know what I can do to help,” the director, a man named Rod, said when she’d finished. “But I’ll tell you this: I’m sure going to try.”
A week later, he too had exhausted the obvious approaches. Snoopy was too frail to be shipped in the unheated baggage compartment of a plane. A professional animal transporting company wanted $665 to bring her east. Shipping companies refused to be responsible for her. Rod hung up from his latest call and shook his head. “I wish the old-time Pony Express was still in existence,” he remarked to his assistant, Skip. “They’d have brought the dog back.”
“They’d have passed her along from one driver to another. It would’ve been a Puppy Express,” Skip joked.
Rod thought for a minute. “By golly, that may be the answer.” He got out a map and a list of animal shelters in Wyoming, Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois and Indiana, and began telephoning. Could he enlist enough volunteers to put together a Puppy Express to transport Snoopy by stages across five states? Would enough people believe it mattered so for a little seventeen-year-old dog to be reunited with her family that they’d drive a hundred or so miles west to pick her up and another hundred or so miles east to deliver her to the next driver?
A week later, Rod called the Topps. “The Puppy Express starts tomorrow. Snoopy’s coming home!” he told Nancy jubilantly.
The animal control officer in Rock Springs had volunteered to be Snoopy’s first driver. When he pulled up outside the clinic, the vet bundled Snoopy in a sweater and carried her to the car. “She’s got a cold, “ the vet said, “so keep her warm. Medicine and instructions and the special food for her kidney condition are in the shopping bag.”
She put the little dog on the seat and held out her hand. S
noopy placed her paw in it. “You’re welcome, old girl,” the vet said, shaking it. “It’s been a pleasure taking care of you. The best of luck. Get home safely!”
They drove the 108 miles to Rawlings, Wyoming. There they rendezvoused with a woman named Cathy, who’d come 118 miles from Casper to meet them. Cathy laughed when she saw Snoopy. “What a funny-looking little serious creature you are to be traveling in such style,” she teased. “Imagine, private chauffeurs across five states.” But that evening, when she phoned Rod in Indiana to report that Snoopy had arrived safely in Casper, she called her “a dear old girl,” and admitted that, “If she were mine, I’d go to a lot of trouble to get her back, too.”
Snoopy went to bed at Cathy’s house a nondescript little brown-and-white dog, very long in the tooth, and woke the next morning a celebrity. Word of the seventeen-year-old puppy with a bad cold who was being shuttled across mid-America to rejoin her family had reached the news media. After breakfast, dazed by the camera but, as always, polite, Snoopy sat on a desk at the Casper Humane Society and obligingly cocked her head and showed off the new leash that was a gift from Cathy. And that night, in Fort Wayne, the Topps were caught between laughter and tears as they saw their old girl peer out at them from the television set.
With the interview behind her, Snoopy set out for North Platte, 350 miles away, in the company of a humane society official in Casper who had volunteered for the longest single hop on Snoopy’s journey. The two of them stopped overnight and arrived in North Platte at noon the next day. More reporters and cameramen awaited them, but as soon as she’d been interviewed, Snoopy was back on the road for a 138-mile trip to Grand Island.
Twice more that day she was passed along, arriving in Lincoln, Nebraska, after dark and so tired that she curled up in the first doggie bed she saw despite the growls of its rightful owner.
With a gift of a new wicker sleeping basket and a note: “Happy to be part of the chain reuniting Snoopy with her family,” Nebraska passed the little dog on to Iowa. After a change of car and driver in Des Moines, Snoopy sped on and by nightfall was in Cedar Rapids.
At nightfall of her fifth day on the road, Snoopy was in Chicago, her next-to-last stop. Whether it was that she was getting close to home or just because her cold had run its course, she was clearly better. Indeed, the vet who examined her told the reporters that, “For an old lady who’s been traveling all week and has come more than 1,300 miles, she’s in grand shape. She’s going to make it home tomorrow just fine.” The Topps, watching the nightly update of Snoopy’s journey on the Fort Wayne TV station, broke into cheers.
The next day was Saturday, March 17th. In honor of Saint Patrick’s Day, the little dog sported a new green coat with a green derby pinned to the collar. The Chicago press did one last interview with her, and then Snoopy had nothing to do but nap until Rod’s assistant, Skip, arrived from Fort Wayne to drive her the 160 miles home.
Hours before Snoopy and Skip were expected in Fort Wayne, the Topps were waiting excitedly at the humane shelter. Jodi and Matthew worked on a room-sized banner that, when it was unfurled, read: WELCOME HOME, SNOOPY! FROM ROCK SPRINGS, WYOMING, TO FORT WAYNE, INDIANA, VIA THE PUPPY EXPRESS, with her route outlined across the bottom and their signatures in the corner. Reporters from the Fort Wayne TV stations and newspaper, the Topps, friends and family and the shelter’s staff all crowded into the shelter’s waiting room.
Somewhere amid the fuss and confusion, Rod found time to draw Nancy aside and give her word that Snoopy would be arriving home with her boarding bill marked “Paid in Full.” An anonymous friend of the Humane Society in Casper had taken care of it.
Then the CB radio crackled, and Skip’s voice filled the crowded room. “Coming in! The Puppy Express is coming in!”
Nancy and Joe and the children rushed out in the subfreezing air, the reporters on their heels. Around the corner came the pickup truck, lights flashing, siren sounding. “Snoopy’s home!” screamed the children. “Snoopy’s home!”
And there the little dog was, sitting up on the front seat in her St. Patrick’s day outfit, peering nearsightedly out of the window at all the commotion. After two months of separation from her family, after a week on the road, after traveling across five states for 1,500 miles in the company of strangers, Snoopy’s odyssey was over.
Nancy got to the truck first. In the instant before she snatched the door open, Snoopy recognized her. Barking wildly, she scrambled across the seat and into Nancy’s arms. Then Joe was there, and the children. Laughing, crying, they hugged Snoopy and each other. The family that didn’t give up on even its smallest member was back together again.
Jo Coudert
When Snowball Melted
Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul.
And sings the tune
Without the words,
And never stops at all.
Emily Dickinson
Lovebirds. That’s what all our friends called us when we first married.
I guess Don and I deserved it. Money was tight because we were both full-time students, working to pay our way through school. Sometimes we’d have to save up days just for an ice cream cone. Still, our tiny, drab apartment seemed like paradise. Love does that, you know.
Anyway, the more we heard the term “lovebirds,” the more we thought about birds. And one day we started saving up for a couple of lovebirds of our own: the feathery kind. We knew we couldn’t afford to buy both birds and a nice cage, so in his spare moments, Don made the cage himself.
We set our cage in front of a shaded window. Then we waited until the crumpled envelope marked “lovebirds” was full of bills and spare change. At last the day came when we were able to walk down to our local pet store to “adopt” some additions to our little family.
We’d had our hearts set on parakeets. But the minute we heard the canaries singing, we changed our minds. Selecting a lively yellow male and a sweet white female, we named the youngsters Sunshine and Snowball.
Because of our exhausting schedules, we didn’t get to spend too much time with our new friends, but we loved having them greet us each evening with bursts of song. And they seemed blissfully happy with each other.
Time passed, and when our young lovebirds finally seemed mature enough to start a family of their own, we went ahead and prepared a nest area and lots of nesting material for them.
Sure enough, one day they began to find the idea very appealing. Snowball was a very exacting supervisor in designing and decorating their nest just so, while Sunshine, his face aglow with love, bent over backward to put everything just where she ordered.
Then one day an egg appeared. How they sang! And a few weeks later when a tiny chick hatched, their happiness seemed to know no bounds. I don’t know how it happened genetically, but that baby canary was bright orange. So right off we named him Punkinhead.
The sunny days passed. How proud all of us were when our fledgling tottered out of the nest onto a real grown-up perch!
Then one day, Punkinhead suddenly plunged headlong from his perch to the bottom of the cage. The tiny orange bird just lay there. Both parents and I rushed to his rescue.
But he was dead. Just like that. Whether he’d had a heart attack before he fell or broke his neck in the fall, I’ll never know. But Punkinhead was gone.
Though both parents grieved, his little mother was inconsolable. She refused to let either Sunshine or me get near that pitiful little body. Instead of the joyful melodies I usually heard from Snowball, now she gave only the most excruciating cries and moans. Her heart, joy and will seemed completely melted by her sorrow.
Poor Sunshine didn’t know what to make of it. He kept trying to push Snowball away from her sad station, but she refused to budge. Instead, over and over she kept trying to revive her adored child.
Finally Sunshine seemed to work out a plan. He convinced her to fly up and eat some seeds every so often, while he stood duty in her place. Then each time she l
eft, he’d quietly place one piece of nesting straw over Punkinhead’s body. Just one. But in a few days, piece by piece, it was completely covered over.
At first Snowball seemed disoriented when she looked around, but she didn’t try to uncover the chick. Instead, she flew up to her normal perch and stayed there. Then I was able to quietly reach in and remove the little body, straw shroud and all.
After that, Sunshine spent all his time consoling Snowball. Eventually she started making normal sounds, and then one day, her sorrow finally melted and she sang again.
I don’t know if Snowball ever realized the quiet labor of love and healing Sunshine had done for her. But they remained joyously devoted for as long as they both lived. Love does that, you know.
Especially to lovebirds.
Bonnie Compton Hanson
An Experiment in Love
Akitten is the rosebud in the garden of the animal kingdom.
Robert Southey
The dog discovered them—four newborn kittens abandoned in tall grass beside the road. When I returned from my walk carrying the tiny creatures in the palm of my hand, my partner, Mike, said firmly, “No more animals.” Mike had already been saddled with my dog and three cats, and he wasn’t used to a houseful of pets.
“I won’t keep them,” I promised. “Just till they’re old enough to be on their own.” Mike looked dubious. “Word of honor,” I assured him, never dreaming how much I’d come to regret the easily uttered words.
I made a warm nest for the babies by ripping up an old blue blanket and lining a wicker basket with it. Then I set out for the general store in the village to get advice about feeding them. “You can’t raise kittens that young,” the storekeeper told me. But he sold me a set of toy nursing bottles and I went home to try. I warmed milk, and after we all got the hang of it, the infants drank avidly.
Two hours later they woke and set up an insistent chorus of soft little screams to be fed again. And every two hours after that. Four times in the night, I crawled out of bed to warm their milk, and in the morning I congratulated myself that they were looking just a little bit stronger, a little bit bigger.