A Hounds Nose

Today couldn’t be any worse I thought to myself as I trailed behind my 100 pound bloodhound in the pouring rain. Don’t get me wrong I love the mischief making boy, but days when the weather sucks and he still needs a walk are starting to wear a little thin. Pain slices through my shoulder, pulling me out of the misery in my head and into a new one as Karl yanks hard to cross the street as we enter into the park. I try to slow him down but if I’m being honest with myself he’s stronger than I am and when he finds a scent like this the best thing to do is to just hold on tight to his leash. I spend most of our walks being walked by my dog and not the other way around.

All of a sudden Karl is brought up short by his nose and dives his head into a small juniper bush. I try tugging the leash a few times to get him moving again but he just won’t budge, all four feet soundly planted.

“Karl come on!” I grumble as irritation grows and he still won’t move.

The sound of his nose going as he tries to suck in all of the scent that he can is beginning to sound like a feral hog, and I begin to worry that he’s found a rabbit or other small creature. Finally he pulls his face out of the bush and I notice that he has something in his mouth.

“Karl, give it. What do you have there?” I say as I reach for it.

Karl sits at my feet, ears swaying in the wind and tail going so fast it’s almost as though he’s hovering off the ground rather than sitting there. As I reach down to take what he has from his slobbery mouth I can’t help the running monologue in my brain.

Why is Karl always getting us into something or other? I mean just the other day he chased the neighbour’s cat up a tree and stayed at the bottom baying until I dragged him back in the house. If he wasn’t so floppy and cute I swear I would be trying to find a new home for this trouble maker.

He is way too stubborn for his own good though and thinks that we are having a game of tug of war once my hand wraps around the small book in his mouth.

“Karl! No. Drop it!” I demand as I can see the excitement in his eyes.

After what feels like five minutes, and most likely was only a few seconds, Karl finally relents and lets me take what he has so that I can inspect his finding. As it turns out it is a beautiful, black moleskin book with no words on the cover. Karl goes back to sniffing everything around us as I open the cover to see if I can find somewhere or someone to return the book to, for surely something this nice is missed. Upon opening the book to the first page however I see an inscription “if you're reading this, I’m no longer here and have left my fortune to you, should you be smart enough to find it” I lift my head to look around as this must be a joke there is someone nearby with a phone in hand ready to post online the gullible girl and her big black and tan dog. However, the only thing I see through the rain though is my lovable companion so I close the book and start the trek back home, hoping to do more walking of the dog than the dog of me.

Once we get in the door I get my second soaking of the night when Karl decides to shake right after I’ve taken my coat off. By this point all I can do is shake my head and laugh as he looks up at me with his big droopy face and tongue hanging out.

“Do you want some dinner now?” I ask as I’m already moving to his food.

After filling up his dishes with food and water I move on to the kitchen where I turn the kettle on for a glass of tea. As I wait for the kettle to boil I move to my comfy chair by the fire, after adding a few more logs to the embers that I left smoldering. I hope they are still hot enough to get the fire flickering again. I pull open the book once more and skip page one, moving on to the next part “in order to find what I have left I first require you to follow along with my life..” I get so absorbed into the story that the kettle whistling is the only thing that pulls me out. After making a glass of tea I go back to the story of a man who has loved and lost so much in his life, including a wife and kids. With no one left to leave anything to he decided to make a treasure hunt of sorts, but with no mention of what the treasure is at the end. Intrigued I continue reading the journal well into the night until Karl comes over and lays his head on my lap looking up at me with the saddest eyes and begging me to go up to bed.

When I get up in the morning I go back down stairs thinking the whole thing was a dream. There is no way Karl found a treasure hunt, but there on the coffee table where I left it is the little black book. The last page of the story contained a series of numbers which, when I put into google were actual coordinates. They weren’t too far from where we had been walking yesterday either! I looked out the window and saw that for the first time in a week the sun was shining. Looking down at Karl, who was currently stretching himself out like a cat, I said “well buddy, are you ready for an adventure?” He happily stood himself up wagging his tail and made his way to the door, always ready to go out. So we set out on our adventure not entirely sure what it was we were going to find. We followed clue after clue all the way up until lunch, each clue coming with another snippet into life of the man who left them. I found myself so drawn into his story that I didn’t even care if we found anything at the end of this.

The last clue we picked up said: “you’ve made it, this is the end, if you’ve made it this far you’ve been paying attention and smarter than most. Here is the final clue, but make sure you are alone with no one around to see you find it.” Of all the clues that I had been getting this was by far the most bizarre one. But I plugged in the final numbers and saw that they were a little ways out of town near the hiking trails. Karl and I immediately headed home to get the car and go on Karl’s second favourite adventure, a car ride.

Once we were all loaded up in the car Karl began whining and giving me his best big sad dog-eyes while pressing his nose to the window, until I finally gave in and rolled down the window for him. With his head now fully outside and his ears flapping in the wind he gave a contented sigh of pleasure. As we parked the car in the lot and got out I found it strange that on such a beautiful day there was no one around, but even so we began walking until we came to the final spot. However, there didn’t seem to be anything there, it was just as well I figured this was how the adventure would end. Karl chose that moment to go running after a squirrel digging his feet in the ground to pull with all his strength, sending dirt flying. As I got dragged away I caught a glimpse of a wooden box. Once Karl had successfully treed the squirrel and was satisfied with his accomplishment we went back and dug up a small box, taking it back to the car with us. Once I loaded Karl back in and had his window down for him I opened the box to find a cheque. There were more numbers there than I cared to comprehend at the moment. Underneath the cheque was a note from the man who had left me this adventure. It read “thank you for following along with my life, this is all I had left, I want you to have it for listening to my story.” I still can’t believe how one little black book changed my life forever.