Free Nature of Jade by Deb Caletti Page A

Stupid me, I let myself get all excited, and look what happened.
    Milo is walking me, instead of me walking him. For a small dog, he's really strong. Since he's a beagle, he's basically a nose on legs. Supposedly, he can pick up a jillion more scents than we can. He puts his nose to the ground and just goes. It's like he's reading a bunch of stories, following timelines in history. If you are in a car and reading a map, tracing a path with your 67
    finger, you are doing exactly what Milo does with his nose--he even takes these little sudden turns and then veers back again. He stops for a while when the story gets a little longer or more interesting. Or else it's just where another dog peed.
    I have to really yank on Milo's leash to get him to break focus and go where I want him to go, and then he gets settled on a new trail and I have to yank him again. Walking him is a whole lot of work, a constant battle of forcing someone to stop doing what they're really into. Like those poor mothers trying to get their kid out of the McDonald's play tubes.
    We arrive at the zoo, and the same round woman with the ASK ME ABOUT BECOMING A ZOO PAL button is at the window, and she smiles at me this time. I feel kind of funny hanging around there with her watching, as if I've done something wrong already. Even though she's smiling, it's the same feeling you get in some stores when the saleswoman follows you around as if you are about to shoplift at any moment. So I decide on another plan, which is to walk Milo around the zoo's rose garden, where dogs are allowed and where there's a clear view of the zoo entrance.
    I haul Milo into the garden, which turns out to be a huge mistake because there are a couple of squirrels jetting around, which drives Milo into a frenzy of pulling and barking and straining at the leash and straining at my patience. I can barely hang on to him, he is yanking so hard, and I get worried he might win the tug-of-war and break the metal clip that connects him to his leash.
    Let me just tell you in case you don't know-- letting a beagle off his leash can have disastrous consequences. They are at the mercy of their nose and this screaming drive to follow the scent to wherever some animal might be. They will
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    follow it into eternity or into a busy intersection or into the wilds or into the path of a truck or a ferocious dog simply because they can't help themselves. Beagles have to be protected from their own instinct. One time Milo got off his leash and flew his fat self like a speeding train through the Chens' yard, across the street, past the center fountain. Mom was chasing him in her robe.
    Luckily, he got pinned in the corner of the front gate, his face bent down in captured shame. He could easily have been Squashed Milo in morning traffic.
    Anyway, he is behaving atrociously. He really needs more practice getting out. It has to be right around three thirty now. It'd be just great if the boy in the red jacket came now. Milo is straining and barking and bulgy eyed and practically frothing at the mouth. He starts making that horrible heck-heck sound, that dying cough he gets when he practically strangles himself. He's so loud, Mom can probably hear him from home. I lean down and pick him up, cart his heavy, squirming self out of the garden, away from the squirrels who make that creepy semi-squeak at him as they cling vertically to the tree trunks.
    Now I am sweaty and covered in dog hair and drool. Milo is not generally a drooler, but get him near an animal and he's a Saint Bernard. I set him down back near the zoo entrance. I decide to handle the whole ticket-saleslady-worry with authority. I give my face that look of determined searching, check my cell phone clock with annoyance as if I'm waiting for someone who hasn't shown, which I guess I am. Milo sits politely and stares off in the distance as if waiting for his bus, as if that crazed, frenzied fiend back there was someone he didn't know and wouldn't care