Free A Small Furry Prayer by Steven Kotler

you had no business being out in the rain in the first place.
    â€”Alan Furst

14
    Salty is a three-pound Chihuahua, handsome, blonde, shell-shocked, and not too unlike Michael Caine near the ragged end of The Man Who Would Be King . Who knows why he was dumped at the Espanola shelter, but that’s where Joy met him. He was enough of a looker that once the shock wore off she figured finding him a home was not going to be much of an issue. Then the vets discovered Salty had heartworm. Untreated, the disease is always fatal, but the cure is arsenic, which is almost as bad. Dying worms can clog the bloodstream. To avoid death by circulation shock, doses are kept low and delivery stretched out—often six months to a year. Even then, few make it through. The secret to survival is keeping the heart rate low and the dog calm, but a year is a long time and few people have the patience to try and few shelters have the space required. Mostly heartworm means euthanasia.
    Of course, Joy wanted to try. I wasn’t so sure. We had arrived in New Mexico with eight dogs. Squirt made nine. Leo was ten. Ten had been our agreed-upon cutoff point. Joy put me in charge of enforcing that limit. After bankrupting herself in Mexico, she felt that I should be in charge of admissions. Her difficulty there had been that she couldn’t say no to dogs in need. My difficulty here was that after visiting a shelter I was starting to share her opinion. Pretty soon we were up to eleven, then twelve, then “How many dogs do you have this week?” became funny to my friends, then thirteen, then I found myself standing in an aisle at Petco, wondering if it was normal to be this terrified buying dog food.
    I must have been standing there a while. The manager walked by twice. Some guy in a blue uniform and a name tag reading “Bob” walked by three times. Then they both walked over to see if they could help.
    â€œMight be a little late for that,” is what I said.
    My cell phone took this opportunity to ring, and I took this opportunity to answer it. Bob and the manager were not amused. I told them I was about to spend five hundred dollars on dog food, then held up the phone up for emphasis: “But I need to speak to my therapist first.”
    That was about the point where Bob and the manager walked away. I put the phone back to my ear. It was my friend Joe Donnelly, sounding incredulous.
    â€œFive hundred dollars on dog food?”
    â€œUh-huh.”
    â€œIt’s a one-time expense?”
    â€œIt’s this month—who knows how many dogs we’ll have next month.”
    And then I told him about Salty and my misgivings and how the shelter was going to euthanize him the next morning, so I needed to make up my mind quickly.
    â€œTen was the limit?” he asked.
    â€œUh-huh.”
    â€œFinancial or emotional?”
    â€œLittle of both.”
    â€œAnd Salty makes fourteen?”
    â€œUh-huh.”
    â€œSo why are you doing this to yourself?”
    I had no answer for him. I had a thousand answers for him. Every one of them sounded stupid aloud. But Joe had introduced me to Ahab and later introduced me to Joy. I felt like he was owed an explanation.
    â€œI fell in love with Joy,” I said. “She was the perfect storm.”

15
    I called Joy from the Petco parking lot and told her to drive over to the shelter and adopt Salty. She started cheering. I started laughing. But when I hung up the phone, Joe’s question, or a version of it, popped back into my mind. What I wanted to know wasn’t why I was doing this to myself; it was why Joy was doing this to herself.
    Every time we get a new dog, Joy disappears down a drain of concern. If there are emotional or physiological problems—and everyone in our pack has these problems—she can’t rest until the dog’s on the road to recovery. Her focus is unbreakable, the toll on her well-being considerable. Usually this period