Free My Best Friends Have Hairy Legs by Cierra Rantoul

her anything else about him—or me. I felt that the less I told her about us, the more I would be able to validate because she wouldn’t have any knowledge unless it was something that she had received from Trooper. As she left the line briefly to talk with him I watched Trooper’s sleeping face to see if there would be any indication that someone was telepathically communicating with him. I don’t know what I expected to see… a startled look or his ears perking up, maybe. But he continued to sleep, oblivious to me.
    When she came back on the line, the first thing she said was that Trooper loved me very much. (Duh!) Then what she said to me next stunned me into momentary silence. Trooper had told her that there used to be a man and a boy who lived with us who mistreated him because they didn’t like me. They also didn’t like the fact that he liked me so they did things to him to scare him all the time, and because they couldn’t do anything directly to me. Then he told her that the man and the boy didn’t live with us anymore and he was very happy that they were gone.
    I hadn’t told her about Marc and Ryan.
    Recently when I was relaying this story to my very skeptical brother, he asked whether or not I had given her my name, that perhaps she had researched me as well. I told him that even if she had, all she would have found was perhaps a record of our marriage, but no reference to Ryan because I wasn’t his bio-mom. She also wouldn’t have found anything that would have shown that they didn’t live with me anymore since my divorce had not been final long enough for it to appear in any public records online. The only way she could have gotten that knowledge was straight from … the dog’s mouth.
    When I was able to get a grip on the thoughts that were running wild through my mind after her statement I was able to ask her a question. “What can I do to make Trooper less afraid?”
    After she consulted with him again, she came back on the line and told me that Trooper wanted to go to school, and he wanted to get a job. “Great,” I thought, “how am I going to manage that?” I asked what kind of school he wanted, and she said he just wanted to be trained to do a job. We talked about options that might work for him considering how skittish he currently was. Tink had been a P.A.W.S. (Pets Are Working Saints) dog for a while and I had taken her to visit patients in nursing homes until her bladder surgeries side-lined her. I wasn’t sure if that would be suitable for Trooper at that point because I knew that the equipment in many of the rooms would scare him, and there would be no way I could convince him to ride in an elevator at one of the centers. I told her I would think on it for a while and figure something out, then asked her if there was anything else he wanted to say or anything else I could do to make him happy. She said he just wanted to tell me that he was very happy with me and that Tink was “his” girl. That brought a smile and a laugh from me.
    From the moment Trooper had arrived in the house, Tink had been almost inseparable from him and quickly established herself as the Alpha dog in the house. While he was still the same size as her (even as a nine week old puppy, he was never smaller than her) that seemed to work, but as he grew it became almost comical to see the two of them play or sleep together. Tink could easily run circles under him, and frequently did when they played. She loved to get directly under him and bite his elbows when they were rough-housing. For his part, when we were in the open field near my house, Trooper loved to play-stalk her then run up and roll her in the dirt. She would get so angry at him and would chase him down the road cussing at him. I could almost hear him laughing as he ran at least five lengths ahead of her. As her arthritis caused her more pain I would sometimes see her trying to hide behind a small bunch of weeds when he stopped focusing on bathroom