Saving Gracie by Carol Bradley Page A

morning as they scoured the kennels yet again. How could they? All their lives these dogs had lived five and six to a cage, caked with feces. They’d had no choice but to tolerate the muck.
    Still, Bair couldn’t bear to see any dog living in that kind of filth. Every time she or her colleagues encountered a mess, they removed the dogs, disinfected the kennel, and installed new bedding, even if the kennel had already been hosed down that morning. Bair vowed to do seventeen loads of laundry a day, if necessary, to keep the dogs’ living quarters presentable. The lingering smell of bodily waste might stir bad memories for these vulnerable survivors, and that was something she wanted to make every effort to avoid.
    A week after getting their first baths, the dogs were bathed again, and this time Engler shaved them down. It was easier to wash excrement out of a shorthaired dog, she’d decided. Dog 132 acquiesced silently as the groomer ran an electric razor carefully up and down her back and sides, across her tummy, and in and around her stubby legs, lopping off the clean but malodorous hair.
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    Shelter techs live for those milestones, those blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moments when they can detect a glimmer of hope in the eyes of an abused animal. It had happened a month earlier, when a Pit Bull who’d been used as bait in a fighting ring was brought in after a raid, bloodied and scarred and lacking any reason ever to trust a human being again. In a matter of days, Prince was lavishing slurpy kisses on Lambert, grateful for the food and water she had given him, for the walks she had taken him on, and for his new and dignified name. Not all dogs rebounded that quickly, however. Some of them never turned the corner.
    Kennel manager Lisa Hill struggled to come to grips with the Wolf dogs’ history of abuse. It infuriated her that people could show such callous disregard for animals. Unlike Bair, Hill was fairly new to rescue work—she’d spent most of her years working in factories—and she’d never learned to move beyond the raw aftermath of cruelty that was manifested at the shelter day in and day out. She often left in tears at the end of her shift.
    Bair grieved, too, for the unlucky dogs, but experience had taught her that their stories didn’t always end badly. Each time a resident of the shelter found a new home, it was cause for celebration. The good news had a way of easing the sorrow of the bad.
    A week passed. Thanks to Hill and Lambert, the dogs now had names. The Bulldogs were Babs and Bubbles. The Havanese was Nicolette. The Cavs were dubbed Charlotte, Thelma Lou, Betsy, Ruthie, Shirley, and Bunny. In an attempt at irony, the pregnant Cavalier was named Jolie after Angelina Jolie, who was as gorgeous as this Jolie was homely. For the next four and a half months, Dog 132 would be called Wilma. Her kennelmate was Patty.
    From the start, the two puppies in the group, Babs and Nicolette, were energetic and cheerful. They hadn’t endured the misery of puppy mill life long enough to be traumatized. Betsy, the smallest of the Cavaliers, had a ravenous appetite for some reason; the techs needed to watch to make sure she didn’t steal her kennelmate’s food. The nine remaining dogs had been penned up for so long that they needed to test their new world cautiously, at their own pace. It was possible to win over a dog who’d been neglected and abused as long as Wolf’s animals had, but it wasn’t going to happen right away. These dogs were as emotionally damaged as any Bair had seen.
    Two weeks after the dogs’ arrival, Jolie gave birth to a litter of puppies and refused to have anything to do with the squirming newborns. Bair found them lying cold on the cement floor of the kennel the next morning. She tried everything she knew to keep them warm, but within a week all six of the puppies were dead. She couldn’t blame Jolie for rejecting her babies. The poor dog had borne litters all her life.