The Love of a Good Dog: Stories for Dog Lovers

THE LOVE OF A GOOD DOG

STORIES FOR DOG LOVERS

ROBIN BRANDE

RYER PUBLISHING

THE LOVE OF A GOOD DOG

Stories for Dog Lovers

By Robin Brande

Published by Ryer Publishing

www.ryerpublishing.com

Copyright 2025 by Robin Brande

www.robinbrande.com

All cover and story art by Surapoj Creative/Deposit Photos

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-946627-83-4

Paperback ISBN: 978-1-952383-31-1

All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

CONTENTS

Introduction

The Rescue

Introduction

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

The Calling

Introduction

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Bounder’s List

Introduction

Bounder’s List

From the Bones of an Old Dog

Introduction

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

The Slip of a Rib

Introduction

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

More from Robin Brande

A Secret Code for Dog Lovers

A Mind for Mysteries

The Secret Juror

The Miraculous Unknown

Dove Season Series

About the Author

Also by Robin Brande

INTRODUCTION

Two things I’ve loved to read since I was a little girl: dog stories and supernatural stories.

What a joy it is to combine both and write my own.

You will also find in this collection some of my other favorite topics: wilderness survival, the secret lives of veterinarians, country life, mysteries, and psychic communication with animals.

I hope you enjoy these stories as much as I loved writing them. Now let’s go settle in to Nick Falls’s snow-covered cabin in the high mountain wilderness. Enjoy THE RESCUE…

~Robin Brande

INTRODUCTION

Nick Falls and his dog Bruna live alone in a high mountain cabin where Nick has been the caretaker for a remote science laboratory for the past fifty years.

Nick and Bruna have a connection with this wilderness that defies both science and logic. But Nick knows it is real.

So when Bruna alerts Nick that something is wrong, he believes her.

Now the two of them must race across the snow-buried mountains to try to save the victims of a coming disaster. But time is running out. Will Nick’s and Bruna’s secret knowledge of this land be enough to save them?

1

Nick opened the latch at the front of his wood-burning stove and added more tinder to the firebox. He had already shoveled out the ashes from overnight and laid a new fire first thing, so the cabin was plenty warm, but the coffee wouldn’t boil unless the fire was raging hot, so he kept nursing the flames and feeding them more.

The wind had been howling since he first woke up and shaking the walls of his one-room cabin. He wasn’t worried. Miners had lived here before he had, and the place was still as solid as it ever was. Snow had been steadily falling for at least the last half hour, soft and puffy flakes at first, wetter and heavier now.

Avalanche snow. Not the kind of light snow he’d been seeing the past week. Sunny days, freezing nights, thaw-freeze-thaw—put a heavy new layer on top of a weak base like that, and a slab on one of these mountains was bound to break off and go.

The wind shook the cabin again and the dog groaned contentedly in answer. She scratched at one of her ears with a long hind foot and then settled back into her nap on the old wool rug beside the stove. She looked like a half-grown bear cub with all the thick brown fur she grew even thicker in the winters. It made it so she never seemed to mind the snow no matter how long they were out in it, but as soon as they were back inside she’d lie as close as she could to any fire, and at night whenever Nick shifted on his bed she’d shift right along with him to make sure she kept on getting all of his warmth.

The water was boiling now, so he added a few scoops of Folgers and tightened the lid back on the pot. He loved that smell: strong dark coffee on a cold morning. Loved the smell of butter melting on the skillet he had heating up right next to it.

He took out yesterday’s pancake batter from his half-fridge and poured a pool of it onto the steaming skillet. He glanced at the dog, listened for a moment to the soft rumble of her snore, and poured a second small pancake for her.

The wind was blowing sideways now, and heavy snow hurtled itself against the cabin windows. A gust sent the bucket of cooling ash skittering across the wooden porch, and it made enough of a clatter that Bruna briefly opened one eye.

Just a bit, Nick told her as he flipped over both pancakes. Then true to his word he dropped the finished pancake into her metal bowl and broke it into pieces with his spatula so it would cool faster and wouldn’t burn her mouth.

Snow and wind blustered over the compound. There were newer cabins across the one-track road, and there were scientists inside them huddling in their long johns and blankets and fleece this and that, maybe worrying about whether they’d get to take all their measurements today, or else grateful for a day off.

Nick was grateful for the day off, too. A day off from all the yammerers asking him questions or trying to butter him up. Are you the famous Nick Falls?

I’m Nick Falls, he’d tell them. Don’t know about famous. But he knew what they meant. Knew what they wanted to know.

They all wanted to hear the story.

How did he save those people?

2

When you’ve been in a place for fifty years, you know it in ways the day-tourists and the summer grad students and the winter scientists couldn’t possibly understand.

Know it like you start knowing your own face through its changes, every brown spot, the wrinkles, the way your eyelids sink back deeper into their sockets the older you get. Not handsome, not ugly, just an old stump of a tree out in the woods, something reliable and recognizable, a way to measure your distances across the land.

And if you know how to be quiet—really deep down quiet, not just silent, holding your words back, but quiet like the bottom of a lake—then eventually you start to hear things.

Things that aren’t from you.

You start looking at maps. Tracing the contours with the tips of your fingers, feeling the paper, then when you close your eyes—and you’re quiet—you can feel the bumps of the land underneath the map. The rough rock faces. The soft mosses down in the clefts.

You can feel the way the land slopes here, how the edge of this map slips over to the next one, and it’s windy over there now, and you can smell the sticky sap of a summer pine.

Nick had a drawer filled with maps, but that was before he could hear them. Back when they were just paper, just lines, just someone’s idea of how to show what the land looked like.

Nick was out in that land every day. Taking measurements. Wind speed. Temperature. Rain. Snowfall. Recording when he saw the first robin and the first buds on the aspens in the spring.

He wanted to know the place. Know it deep. So he started keeping records long ago, just for himself.

Never dreaming they’d be valuable some day. That they would bring the scientists here all year round, to study the changes, to study his records. To prove what they already suspected about the way the world was going.

Back in the beginning, fifty years ago when he was twenty-four, Nick was supposed to be just the summer caretaker up here. The handy-man fix-it, whatever the scientists and students who lived in the row of rustic cabins for those few months of summer might need. Mouse trapping. Roof leaks. Nursing the fussy electricity.

But as the summer yellowed into fall, and the people all left, and the days got shorter and the nights longer, and it was just Nick and the vast mountains and the woods all around him, he found he had no desire to leave anymore. For what? Go back to what? Doing construction, drinking with his crew or drinking alone most nights, trying to find love, good luck with that—there was nothing.

Whereas here. Everything.

You don’t have to pay me any extra, he told the man who had hired him for just those few months. I’ll keep the place up all winter. Look after it. Just let me live here for free.

It was lonely sometimes that first winter. That was before he got a dog. Now Bruna was the fifth one in a row of the best dogs nature ever made. It always worked out that way, whether he got them from a friend of a friend or off the back of someone’s pickup, Pups4Sale, when he went into town for groceries once a month.

Or, like with Bruna, a reject from one of the ranches down in the valley. Someone saw her listed in the want ads, under Farm Implements. Ranch dog, $1. They called up Nick, knowing he’d just lost old Blue, and he skied into town the next day, all eight miles, to meet the sonofabitch who would give up such a sweet and affectionate dog because she wasn’t mean enough to herd.

As soon as they were clear of town traffic and any of the people, Nick slipped the collar off her neck and Bruna had been a free girl ever since. Trotting happily at Nick’s side everywhere he went, as in love with him as he was with her.

It had been Bruna who woke him up that day. Told him to pay attention.

It was still dark out. In early February, sunrise didn’t reach the cabin windows until after 7:00. Nick normally got up at 5:00 anyway, just to start the coffee and go back to bed to read.

But Bruna started whining around 4:00. It’s damn cold out there, he told her. He could hear the wind beating against the walls of the cabin. But Bruna didn’t want to go out, she wanted him to listen to her, to pay attention.

She paced back and forth, her nails clicking against the wood floor.

Nick clicked on the light and watched her