In this charming collection of nineteen stories, you can't help but fall in love with the unlucky fawn who is saved by a nursing home, the troublesome rabbit who warms her way into a new family and the good (German) shepherd who comforts the sick. These are stories of hope, humor, triumph, loyalty, compassion, life and even death—but most of all, these are stories of love and the extraordinary animals who make our lives the richer for it.
The Dog Who Healed a Family
and over one million other books are available for Amazon Kindle.
Learn more
| |||||||||||||||
Book Description
Frequently Bought Together
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Coudert (Seven Cats and the Art of Living) offers an uplifting collection of true animal tales featuring ducks, geese, deer, and dogs who bring healing and joy to those around them. She introduces us to Snoopy, a 17-year-old dachshund/beagle mix whose family can't afford to transport her from Wyoming to their new home in Indiana. Through the efforts of several animal lovers, Snoopy rides the puppy express and is happily returned to her family. The title story describes a generous family who adopts three siblings haunted by their troubled history and incapable of connecting emotionally with their new parents. Enter Shaneen, a puppy with a preternatural ability to sense what the children need and how to reach them. We also meet Lord Bacon, a remarkable miniature pig, who helps his owner overcome agoraphobia, as well as Dirty Annie and Philip, wild ducks who invade a yard to snack on raspberries and end up charming the yard owner. These touching and engaging vignettes will make animal lovers out of us all.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Curled nose to tail, the little dog was drowsing in Nancy Topp's lap as the truck rolled along the interstate. Suddenly Nancy felt her stiffen into alertness. "What's the matter, old girl?" Nancy asked. At seventeen, Snoopy had a bit of a heart condition and some kidney problems, and the family was concerned about her.
Struggling to her feet, the dog stared straight ahead. She was a small dog, with a dachshund body but a beagle head, and she almost seemed to be pointing. Nancy followed the dog's intent gaze, and then she saw it, too. A wisp of smoke was curling out of a crack in the dashboard. "Joe!" she shouted at her husband at the wheel. "Joe, the engine's on fire!"
Within seconds the cab of the ancient truck was seething with smoke. Nancy and Joe and their two children—Jodi, twelve, and Matthew, fifteen—leaped to the shoulder of the road and ran. When they were well clear, they turned and waited for the explosion that would blow everything they owned sky-high. Instead, the engine coughed its way into silence, gave a last convulsive shudder and died.
Joe was the first to speak. "Snoopy," he said to the little brown and white dog, "you may not hear or see so good, but there's nothing wrong with your nose."
"Now if you could just tell us how we're going to get home," Matthew joked. Except it wasn't much of a joke. Here they were, fifteen hundred miles from home, stranded on a highway in Wyoming, with the truck clearly beyond even Joe's gift for repairs. The little dog, peering with cataract-dimmed eyes around the circle of faces, seemed to reflect their anxiety.
The Topps were on the road because five months earlier a nephew had told Joe there was work to be had in the Napa Valley and Joe and Nancy decided to take a gamble on moving out there. Breaking up their home in Fort Wayne, Indiana, they packed up the kids and Snoopy and set out for California. But once there, the warehousing job Joe hoped for did not materialize, Nancy and the kids were sharply homesick and their funds melted away. Now it was January and, the gamble lost, they were on their way back home to Fort Wayne.
The truck had gotten them as far as Rock Springs, Wyoming, but now there was nothing to do but sell it to a junk dealer for $25 and hitch a ride to the bus station. Two pieces of bad news greeted them there. Four tickets to Fort Wayne came to more money than they had, much more, and dogs were not allowed on the bus.
"But we've got to take Snoopy with us," Nancy pleaded with the ticket seller, tears welling in her eyes. It had been a disastrous day, but this was the worst news of all.
Joe drew her away from the window. It was no use getting upset about Snoopy, he told her, until they figured out how to get themselves on the bus. With no choice but to ask for help, they called Travelers Aid, and with kind efficiency the local representative arranged for a motel room for them for the night. There, with their boxes and bags piled in a corner, they put in a call to relatives back home, who promised to get together money for the fare and wire it the next day.
"But what about Snoopy?" Matthew said as soon as his father hung up the phone.
"We can't go without Snoopy," Jodi stated flatly.
Joe picked up the little dog. "Snoopy," he said, tugging her floppy ears in the way she liked, "I think you're going to have to hitchhike."
"Don't tease, Joe," Nancy said curtly.
"I'm not teasing, honey," he assured her, and tucked Snoopy into the crook of his arm. "I'm going to try to find an eastbound truck to take the old girl back for us."
At the local truck stop, Joe sat Snoopy on a stool beside him while he fell into conversation with drivers who stopped to pet her. "Gee, I'd like to help you out," one after another said. "She's awful cute and I wouldn't mind the company, but I'm not going through Fort Wayne this trip." The only driver who might have taken her picked Snoopy up and looked at her closely. "Naw," the man growled, "with an old dog like her, there'd be too many pit stops. I got to make time." Still hopeful, Joe tacked up a sign asking for a ride for Snoopy and giving the motel's phone number.
"Somebody'll call before bus time tomorrow," he predicted to the kids when he and Snoopy got back to the motel.
"But suppose nobody does?" Jodi said.
"Sweetie, we've got to be on that bus. The Travelers Aid can only pay for us to stay here one night."
The next day Joe went off to collect the wired funds while Nancy and the kids sorted through their possessions, trying to decide what could be crammed into the six pieces of luggage they were allowed on the bus and what had to be left behind. Ordinarily Snoopy would have napped while they worked, but now her eyes followed every move Nancy and the children made. If one of them paused to think, even for a minute, Snoopy nosed at the idle hand, asking to be touched, to be held.
"She knows," Jodi said, cradling her. "She knows something awful is going to happen."
The Travelers Aid representative arrived to take the belongings they could not pack, for donation to the local thrift shop. A nice man, he was caught between being sympathetic and being practical when he looked at Snoopy. "Seventeen is really old for a dog, " he said gently. "Maybe you just have to figure she's had a long life and a good one." When nobody spoke, he took a deep breath. "If you want, you can leave her with me and I'll have her put to sleep after you've gone."
The children looked at Nancy but said nothing; they understood there wasn't any choice, and they didn't want to make it harder on their mother by protesting. Nancy bowed her head. She thought of all the walks, all the romps, all the picnics, all the times she'd gone in to kiss the children good-night and Snoopy had lifted her head to be kissed, too.
"Thank you," she told the man. "It's kind of you to offer. But no. No," she repeated firmly. "Snoopy's part of the family, and families don't give up on each other." She reached for the telephone book, looked up kennels in the yellow pages and began dialing. Scrupulously she started each call with the explanation that the family was down on their luck. "But," she begged, "if you'll just keep our little dog until we can find a way to get her to Fort Wayne, I give you my word we'll pay. Please trust me. Please."
A veterinarian with boarding facilities agreed finally to take her, and the Travelers Aid representative drove them to her office. Nancy was the last to say goodbye. She knelt to take Snoopy's frosted muzzle in her hands. "You know we'd never leave you if we could help it," she whispered, "so don't give up. Don't you dare give up. We'll get you back somehow, I promise."
Once back in Fort Wayne, the Topps found a mobile home to rent, one of Joe's brothers gave them his old car, sisters-in-law provided pots and pans and bed linens, the children returned to their old schools and Nancy and Joe found jobs. Bit by bit the family got itself together. But the circle had a painful gap in it. Snoopy was missing. Every day Nancy telephoned a different moving company, a different trucking company, begging for a ride for Snoopy. Every day Jodi and Matthew came through the door asking if she'd had any luck and she had to say no.
By March they'd been back in Fort Wayne six weeks and Nancy was in despair. She dreaded hearing from Wyoming that Snoopy had died out there, never knowing how hard they'd tried to get her back. One day a friend suggested she call the Humane Society. "What good would that do?" Nancy said. "Aren't they only concerned about abandoned animals?" But she had tried everything else, so she telephoned Rod Hale, the director of the Fort Wayne Department of Animal Control, and told him the story.
"I don't know what I can do to help," Rod Hale said when she finished. "But I'll tell you this. I'm sure going to try." A week later, he had exhausted the obvious approaches. Snoopy was too frail to be shipped in the unheated baggage compartment of a plane. A professional animal transporting company wanted $655 to bring her east. Shipping companies refused to be responsible for her. Rod hung up from his latest call and shook his head. "I wish the old-time Pony Express was still in existence," he remarked to his assistant, Skip Cochrane. "They'd have passed the dog along from one driver to another and delivered her back home."
"It'd have been a Puppy Express," Skip joked.
Rod thought for a minute. "By golly, that may be the answer." He got out a map and a list of animal shelters in Wyoming, Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois and Indiana, and picked up the phone. Could he enlist enough volunteers to put together a Puppy Express to transport Snoopy by stages across five states? Would people believe it mattered enough for a seventeen-year-old dog to be reunited with her family that they'd drive a hundred or so miles west to pick her up and another hundred or so miles east to deliver her to the next driver?
In a week he had his answer, and on Sunday, March 11, he called the Topps. "How are you?" he asked Nancy.
"I'd feel a lot better if you had some news for me."
"Then you can begin feeling better right now," Rod told her jubilantly. "The Puppy Express starts tomorrow. Snoopy's coming home!"
Monday morning, in Rock Springs, Dr. Pam McLaughlin checked Snoopy worriedly. The dog had been sneezing the day before. "Look here, old girl," the vet lectured as she took her temperature, "you've kept your courage up until now. This is no time to get sick just when a lot of people are about to go to a lot of trouble to get you back to your family."
Jim Storey, the animal control officer in Rock Springs, had volunteered to be Snoopy's first driver. When he pulled up outside the clinic, Dr. McLaughlin bundled Snoopy in a sweater and carried her to the car. &...
Product Details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
More About the Author
Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.
Customer Reviews
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Please don't pre-judge the scope of this book by the doggie dominance of its cover.,
By
This review is from: The Dog Who Healed a Family: And Other True Animal Stories That Warm the Heart & Touch the Soul (Paperback)
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
This is not just a book for dog lovers--as a glance at its jacket might seem to suggest. It's for people who love animals of all kinds and want to inspire that love and respect in others, also for those who think they might one day like to work with animals in ways that truly make a difference--rescue work, wildlife rehabilitation, or partnering with a pet to volunteer in children's wards, classrooms or old folks' homes--and anyone who's ever been tempted to take on the challenge of a critter discovered fighting for its life by the side of the road. And anyone who likes good stories well told.
Among the remarkable animals and people you'll find here: a mama deer who risked an up close and personal encounter with humans to get help for her fawn caught in a picket fence; a man who customized a pair of kids' Nikes to make it possible for a goose born without feet to walk (and then go on to win the next goose swim meet), an ad hoc relay team of humane volunteer drivers across five states who transported an elderly dog home to his family, a floppy-eared rabbit who got a housebreaking lesson from a tomcat, a parrot with an amazing vocabulary, a nun who entered a snake race and won enough money to rid her community of its bedeviling termites, an orphan javelina who didn't know he was born to be wild and true tales of other sick and abandoned runts of the litter--a kitten, a cygnet, a raccoon--with incredible wills to live. You'll also find close-up looks at the life and work of a woman-dog disaster relief team and a pair of wildlife rehabilitaters. And, of course, the title story about a how a dog left at the vet's by people who could no longer care for him became the catalyst that helped the vet's three newly adopted abused children learn to trust.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Some good stories, some will make you cringe,
This review is from: The Dog Who Healed a Family: And Other True Animal Stories That Warm the Heart & Touch the Soul (Paperback)
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
The title of this book had me anticipating warm stories, just like "All My Patients Are Under The Bed" or "All Creatures Great and Small". There were some that really did warm my heart, and there were some that made me cry. But not all of the crying was "good" crying.
One story stands out from the others, "An Experiment in Love". I won't recount the details of the story, only that the author of the story went B.F. Skinner on her charges with the expected results. There are some good stories in this book like the story, "Sister Smog and the Windshield Viper". It is a funny story that helps counter the "An Experiment in Love". So think before you get this book and please think *hard* before getting this book for a child, because I could not recommend this book for anyone younger than 13. All Creatures Great and Small All My Patients are Under the Bed Rebecca Kyle February 2011
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
BookHounds [...],
By Mary L. Jacobs "BookHounds" (Huntington Beach, CA USA) - See all my reviews (VINE VOICE) (REAL NAME)
This review is from: The Dog Who Healed a Family: And Other True Animal Stories That Warm the Heart & Touch the Soul (Paperback)
I don't know if it is a good sign or not to be in happy tears by the end of the first story in this collection of essays about animals, but for me, any book that provokes emotion is usually a good one. The story about Snoopy, the dachshund/beagle mix, just hit the spot about the kindness of strangers coming together to get this 16 pup home via a "puppy express" to the family that couldn't afford to get him back after a job loss and travel across country. I was also truly touched by the story of two ducks that adopted a lady and even though she didn't want the ducks around, they quacked their way into her heart.
There are several more dog stories and quite a few about deer and bunnies as well. This would make the perfect gift for any animal lover. The stories are quite heart warming and uplifting. I could also imagine that these would make excellent tales to read out loud to a younger child.
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
|
|
Inside This Book
(learn more)
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
|
|
