The Last Dog on Earth by Daniel Ehrenhaft Page B

that I'm telling you all this in the strictest of confidence,” Harold added. “We haven't made this information public because we don't want to start a panic. I'm telling you now because I want you to understand how bad the situation is. So you have a choice to make. Either you start behaving like a responsible scientist, or you keep hiding out there in the woods.”
    Click.
    “Harold?” Westerly croaked. “Harold?”
    But the line was dead.
    The she-pup had never known contentment until the day she was let out of the shelter. She'd known happiness at different points in her young life: in the forest, before the sickness had wiped out her pack … but this was different. To feel the sun on her coat, to have a full belly, to breathe the scent of the evergreens, to be free—that was what it meant to be alive.
    The boy had rescued her.
    She'd been too dazed to show him gratitude at first. She simply slept as he whisked her off to her new home. But now, at the moment of arrival, she knew she had come to a place where things made sense. Here, she had a companion.
    The boy kept close to her side. He protected her. There was a connection between them.
    The memory of the wild—of Mother and White Paws and the slow death of her pack … all of it began to fade. She was part of a new pack now. A pack of two. The boy had restored order. He had given her safety. He had given her a name.
    She was no longer a starving puppy in the forest, fighting for survival.
    She was Jack.

C HAPTER
SEVEN
    Logan's first order of business was to train Jack to pee and poop outside.
    He already had a specific place in mind: the little grassy area in the backyard, right under Robert's hammock. Jack seemed to want to go there, too. She kept tugging on her leather leash, trying to drag Logan toward that exact spot.
    So far, so good.
    From what Logan could tell, training a dog to pee and poop someplace—or to do anything, really—wasn't all that hard. You just had to be patient. You had to do the same thing again and again, in the exact same place. You had to approach it from a scientific point of view. No cute talk or games or face licking or any of that. Nope. Strictly science.
    Over the past three days (the time it had taken for the shelter to make sure Jack wasn't sick), Logan had buried himself in a bunch of books on dog training. He was going to become an expert. Of course, part of the reason he read so much was to keep Robert off his back. Robert had thrown a major fit about Jack, even worse than Logan had expected.
“What do you mean, you didn't go to the breeder? I had a deposit there! I don't want the money back! I want a purebred! How could you let Logan sucker you into this!”
… blah, blah, blah.
    After the freak-out, though, Robert had kept to himself.Especially when he saw Logan reading. Maybe he really
did
think Logan was trying to shape up.
    More likely, though, he was just saving up for another explosion. Whatever.
    As it turned out, Logan could have read a lot less because most of the training books said pretty much the same thing. He kind of felt ripped off. The books all had lame titles—
I Just Bought a Puppy! So What Do I Do Now?—
and all the covers featured glossy photos of big-haired women with fake-looking dogs. The books were written in stupid, flowery language, too, like romance novels or something.
“Dear dog owner, The most important gift you can give your new mate is your heart….”
Blecch. Logan heard Ms. Dougherty's voice in his head whenever he cracked one open. And they could all be summed up in six words:
Reward good behavior.
Ignore bad behavior.
    That was it.
    Interestingly,
punishing
a dog for bad behavior was the wrong way to go. Punishment only made a dog sullen or withdrawn—or in the worst cases, violent. (Sort of like people, if you really thought about it. Robert could learn a thing or two from these books.)
    Sure, there were a couple of tricks. One was to get the dog to associate good behavior