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timeforbedwolfstar · 4 months ago

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Okay, y’all… let’s do this one more time.

This is the heavily edited version of Finding Home, because I disliked my original work so I decided to reboot it and make it better. So. I hope y’all like this one, and let me know what you think.

Constructive criticism is helpful, but not as it pertains to my storyline. Any grammar, word usage, or other ways to make my writing better, not my story.

Thank you all so very much, and I hope y’all enjoy!

Finding Home - Chapter 1

One day, it occurred to me that the moving things I had to push out of the way and fight for the rich, warm, life-giving milk were my siblings. I cannot express my disappointment enough.

The day I realized this was the day my blurry eyes opened. As my mother, a pure-black dog with pointed ears, blue eyes, and a thick, double coat, licked my teeny body with her warm pink tongue, I blinked up at her, trying to both clear my foggy eyes and beseech her to get rid of my siblings. I wanted her all to myself, now and forever.

It didn’t happen, and it did no good to dwell on a dream.

As my sight cleared, I grudgingly accepted the others’ presence in the nest. Which was just as well — they were fun to play with when sleeping got boring or I needed someone to chew on.

The first time I tottered out from the warmth of Mother, my paw pads came into a rough, scratchy surface. Several steps later, the rough surface gave way to a surface soft and rough at the same time. It smelled very, very good.

Utterly confused, I tried to return to Mother, but I was disoriented from exploring and I yelped with fear. Sharp teeth clamped down on the scruff of my neck, and I whined in pain. But I was returned to Mother’s warmth, which seemed like the important thing. I buried myself under a sister and fell asleep.

I had learned the hard way that I couldn’t return to Mother without her, so the second I woke up from my nap I left her again. She sighed deeply as she set me down, but I could sense that she liked my adventurous spirit.

There was a man who came by our kennel every day. He had a mop of sandy brown hair on his head, deep amber-gold eyes, and scars crossing his hands and face. Some days he entered the kennel and looked us over, running his hands down our backs and talking to us. Other days, he stood just outside it, strange dogs lashed to his waist, checking something off on a thin slab of wood. The black belt he wore had two rings on its front, and dog leashes extending from each one, ending on the dogs’ collars or harnesses.

From the moment I was old enough to see him clearly for the first time, I was mesmerized by the man. I longed to be one of the dogs by his side, going who knows where and loving every second of it. I longed to feel his hand in my fur every single day for the rest of my life. There was a reason I loved him so much. I could feel it deep inside my tiny body.

As a result, every day, I was the first puppy at the kennel door whenever I so much as smelled him, and the last one to leave after he was gone. The days he didn’t enter the kennel were the worst days of my life.

As we entered that stage of life where we never wanted to be near Mother yet always wanted her around, the man began to let us out of the kennel for short periods.

Directly in front of our kennel was a long stretch of grass that I mentally called the Yard. The Yard was grassy and full of excellent smells, which made me jump inside whenever I smelled the man over them. We had a full run over the Yard despite what seemed like hundreds of other dogs’ smells.

A chain-link fence divided the Yard into two parts. On our side, it was Mother, my three brothers, and my four sisters. On the other side, it was what looked like hundreds of dogs, each of them resembling each other in build and general looks, but each of them being completely different. Some of them had lots of black and very little white. Others had lots of white and very little black. A few were a pale, creamy white colour. One of them, who I determined through careful examination to be the Top Dog, was light red-brown with thick strokes of deep red on his shoulders and topline.

Every day after we were let out into the Yard, the man would enter our kennel, clip a leash onto Mother’s collar, and hold her back while he let us run free in the Yard. When we had finished feeding on the soft goop he brought us as food, he would let her run free with us.

As the days stretched into weeks, he began to lead Mother out of the Yard and let her roam in the Big Yard. The first time this happened, we ran like mad on our side of the fence while Mother reacquainted herself with the pack. As this happened more often, we began to not care.

We didn’t notice when Mother never returned.

The man seemed to like me more than my siblings. He always called me “Prongs,” as if that was a special word I was meant to respond to. The name felt natural and familiar, and as the weeks stretched into months, I grew so used to the sound that I turned toward him every single time my sharp ears heard it.

The snow we had grown so used to seeing over the course of our short lives was beginning to melt the day everything changed.

The Man, as I had mentally deemed him, entered the Yard with a collar and leash in hand. The collar was nylon, and fit close to my neck. He had a stiff leash in his other hand, which, after sliding the collar over my head and adjusting it to fit my neck, he snapped on to lead me away from my siblings.

They rushed the fence after The Man closed the gate. In hindsight, I suppose this was good — perhaps if they had escaped that day, I would have never learned where I stood with this man.

Or how much he would mean to me in the end.

The Man turned his back on the other puppies, and I felt the collar and leash shift to match his position. I didn’t move until the pressure on my neck increased, and I adjusted my body to relieve the pressure.

“Good boy, Prongs,” The Man said instantly, offering me a hard nibble of food. I took it carefully, tail wagging. It banged against the chain link fence, but I didn’t mind.

I loved the way this man said “Prongs,” oddly soothing in ways I could never begin to put words to. I had been hearing him speak my entire life, and yet it was only now that I realized just how much he already meant to me.

The Man’s hand brushed my nose as he moved it for another treat, and though I knew his scent by heart, I sniffed it anyway.

It smelled so familiar, yet foreign at the same time.

It smelled of dog, of blood and teeth and pain.

Of friendship, and love, and terrible, terrible sacrifice.

Of a boy I had known, perhaps in another life.

But that was impossible.

Over the next few days, this training progressed. From standing at his side, with no leash pressure between us, I graduated to walking slowly across an empty, grassy plain — his Yard, I guessed. I learned Heel, which meant to stay by his side, not too far back, and not too far forward. My forepaws even with his legs. My body in tune with his. Partnership.

And then, one day, the game changed. The Man took another dog out from the Big Yard, the reddish brown Top Dog, the same one who’d dominated Mother that first day she’d returned to the pack.

This dog was named Thor. Remus told him to Heel, then led him to my Yard, where I sat waiting. Remus slipped a harness over my head, putting my paws through it, and pulling the material tight against my back. Thor watched, a bored look on his face.

Remus clipped a leash to the back of my new harness, and taught me to walk calmly by his left side, even as another dog — a distraction — was on my left. I learned to ignore Thor, all snapping teeth and aggressive demeanor. He didn’t matter in the grand scheme of things.

And then, one day, the game changed again. Thor and I were snapped together by our collars, Remus behind us, and I was taught the command “line out”. Thor, apparently, already knew it — I just copied whatever he did and got rewarded.

The new command was only ever used in harness. I learned to employ the pressure in the harness whenever I heard “Line Out”. It became so natural for me to do it, like I’d been doing it my whole life. (Which, in a way, I had, but I didn’t think about that. Such Deep Thoughts were not for a dog to think about.)

The day my brother was taken, everything changed once again.

Looking back on that day, it wasn’t his fault. The Man had been training him as diligently as he was training me. If anything, it was The Lady’s fault.

Every so often, new people would come to The Man’s house. These people would pace around our Yard, examining the dogs in the Big Yard. Some dogs were shut up in their kennels, while others were let out in the Big Yard. Sometimes dogs left, and sometimes dogs didn’t.

The ones that left never came back.

The first few times they came, my siblings were among those paraded out for the visitors to look at. Eventually, they were kenneled with me and we were taken to a place that reeked of chemicals, and for days afterward I was forced to wear a stupid, flimsy plastic collar and my lower belly hurt terribly. My brothers and sisters, fortunately, all suffered the same treatment that I did, and we were all relinquished by the terrible pain soon afterwards.

The people would admire us, and sometimes certain dogs — sometimes older, with creaky limbs and grey muzzle hairs, but usually young, with springy steps and life-filled eyes — were taken out of their kennels and paraded around by The Man. It never crossed my mind that my siblings would be taken, even as they slowly joined the dogs being shown off.

The Lady pulled up in a blue pickup truck. She and The Man stood outside the sheltered portion of our kennels, watching as me and my siblings played.

Over the course of our short lives, we had grown bigger. We were nearly half the size of most of the adult dogs, slowly gaining their muscle and strength. Thor was beginning to see me as a partner in our training sessions, and The Man was beginning to add a new concept to the game the three of us played.

The Lady watched the eight of us playing, talking softly with The Man. I approached the two of them cautiously, my tail low and wagging. The Lady made soft cooing noises at me, and my ears pinned. What did she think she was doing?

The Man laughed and said, “He’s not for sale.”

The Lady frowned, standing up and crossing her arms. “Whyever not?”

The Man laughed again. “I keep at least one dog from each litter, and he’s the most promising as a sire. I’m keeping him. But I’m selling the others.”

They talked for several more minutes, and finally he and The Lady came to an agreement. The Man entered the Yard, slipping a collar around my brother Koda’s neck and leading him out to give to The Lady.

“I have high hopes for this one, Remus,” The Lady said as she took Koda’s leash. My brother and I exchanged final sniffs through the fence dividing us. “Thank you.”

“My pleasure,” The Man — Remus, she’d called him — said, locking the Yard’s gate. “Koda’s a good dog. You’ll be pleased with him, I reckon.”

The Lady left after a time, taking Koda with her. I watched her blue truck leave from the Yard I’d spent my life in, and I felt a pang of grief for my brother. Me and Koda, only six months old, driven apart by mankind.

I decided I disliked that lady now.

Koda wasn’t my only sibling to leave. Eventually, I was the only dog in the Yard, all of my siblings — Koda, Buckeye, Alice, Buddy, Liberty, Mocha, and Sasha — having been sold to strangers I never saw again.

I hope they lived as good a life as I had done.

Remus continued in my training, teaching me a series of commands that I began to adore, as they brought me my favorite pastime — running.

Thor and I slowly molded into a team, and by the time my first birthday came around, I was hooked up to a sled team for the first time.

Snow lay thick on the ground, and I had spent the better part of the day watching Remus harness various dogs to a contraption he called the sled.

I was harnessed in place next to Thor, at the top of the ten-dog team. Remus was standing on the sled, far behind us, and each dog in the team was pulling at their tug lines and barking in excitement.

I licked my nose, tail wagging. Beside me, Thor was happier than I’d ever seen him, tail high and waving like a flag.

“Ready?!” Remus called out, and Thor jumped into his harness, pulling the tug line taut. I followed suit, panting hard with contagious excitement.

“HIKE!” Remus shouted, and the entire team — myself included — took off running, tails high, barking madly with excitement.

We ran for only half an hour, but it was the best half an hour of my short life. When it was over, I danced with pride when Remus came to remove me from the team.

“You liked that, Prongs, didn’t you?” Remus asked me excitedly, laughing as I jumped up to lick his face. “Yeah, you did. Good boy. Good boy.”

I was a good boy, but I was also something even better.

I was a sled dog.

“And if you were lucky enough to know a great one, they never really leave. Harnessed to your heart, giving their all.”

— Leonhard Seppala, “Togo”, 2019

#finding home #james potter #remus lupin #fanfiction #original content #do not steal

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