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47 pages 1 hour read

Ann M. Martin

A Dog's Life

Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 2005

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Part 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 3, Chapter 15 Summary: “Gentle Hands”

The people who hit them, the Becker family, take Squirrel and Moon to the local vet clinic. Dr. Roth, the vet, confirms that Moon is dead. She slides Squirrel onto a table and inspects her.

After Squirrel has x-rays, the vet explains that Squirrel has a badly broken leg. In addition, she has fleas and has tartar on her teeth. The family doesn’t want to pay for Squirrel’s medical treatment, but Dr. Roth donates her time and uses a charity organization.

Over multiple days, Dr. Roth repairs Squirrel’s leg and spays her so that she can’t have puppies. Slowly, the people at the clinic coax her to walk. Dr. Roth and Rachael, her assistant, treat Squirrel with love. Squirrel wears a cast on her leg and a protective collar for a while.

After she’s better, the Becker family returns and adopts her. On the car ride to their house, the children, Donald and Margery, name her Daisy. They mention previous summer dogs.

Part 3, Chapter 16 Summary: “Summer Dog”

At the Becker’s house, “Daisy” (Squirrel) lives in the garage. The family gives her a pet bed and chew toys to use in the garage, but she can also go outside to their large yard. Mrs. Becker feeds her table scraps at breakfast and dinner. Donald and Margery sing her to sleep and play fetch with her in the yard. Squirrel enjoys her new home except that the garage is cold.

Soon, the children don’t play with Squirrel anymore, and Mrs. Becker often forgets to feed her, so she hunts in the yard and drinks from the bird bath. Squirrel feels neglected and lonely.

At the end of summer, the Beckers move back to their home in the city, leaving Squirrel behind. She waits for them to return for a few days and then leaves.

Part 3, Chapter 17 Summary: “Farm Dog”

After days of traveling through fields and staying in barns, Squirrel is walking through the woods when hunters’ guns ring out. The men are hunting deer. Squirrel races away. Finding a farm, she investigates the barns and pasture, which have cows, horses, cats, and other animals. Squirrel finds a compost heap to eat from.

An older couple, Hal and Jean, own the farm, and they treat their animals kindly. Squirrel never reveals herself to the humans but lives in their barn all winter.

When spring arrives, Squirrel moves on again. Her life becomes a pattern of wandering during warm weather and finding safe shelter on farms during the wintertime.

After four years of roaming, Squirrel smells Bone’s scent.

Part 3, Chapter 18 Summary: “The Scent of Bone”

Squirrel follows Bone’s scent. She ends up at the mall parking lot, where she stayed after George threw her and Bone from his car years ago. Squirrel is excited to feel close to Bone again. She investigates the mall’s lot and then crosses the highway to the woods near the Merrion house, where she and Bone first explored the world as puppies.

Squirrel keeps following her instincts to find Bone but doesn’t smell him again. She walks through neighborhoods that remind her of George and Marcy’s house and then goes further into the countryside.

Since winter is coming, she finds another farm. Years pass in her pattern of traveling in spring, summer, and fall and settling in one place each winter. Squirrel is now an old dog. She has whitening fur, achy bones, and filmy eyes.

Part 3 Analysis

Dr. Roth and Rachael both exemplify kindness, encouraging Squirrel to adapt to humans and highlighting the theme of Human Influence on Animal Lives in a positive way. Dr. Roth reveals her benevolent, gentle character when she agrees to help Squirrel for free: “‘I can donate my time,’ Dr. Roth replied, ‘and I know of an organization that may be able to cover the rest of the cost’” (118). She gives her time and energy for the sake of making animals’ lives better, highlighting the beneficial side of human influence. Likewise, Rachael cares for Squirrel with affection, attention, and patience. Squirrel grows to trust Rachael and Dr. Roth because they never do anything to harm her. In fact, they only help her recover, care for her, and praise her as a “good girl”—a sharp contrast to her “bad dog” scolding from past people like George. The scenes with the vet staff are monumental for Squirrel because she must put her life in human hands, a task that tests her faith in people’s goodness and challenges her self-reliant personality. She adapts to their assistance, learning that humans can cause her direct relief from pain and provide unexpected joy, safety, and comfort.

When the Beckers adopt Squirrel, the tone seems happy, but then an ominous development occurs. The tone shifts from the family making Squirrel feel welcome and loved to her feeling anxious when they admit other dogs. The Beckers mentioning other dogs foreshadows that Squirrel won’t be with them forever, though she thought they had adopted her and that she had found a forever home:

As we drove along, Donald said, ‘You’re so lucky. You’re going to be our new dog. Your name will be Daisy. We already decided. Remember the dog we had last summer, Mommy? Sasha was a good dog.’
 
‘Sasha wasn’t our last-summer dog,’ said Margery. ‘Last summer’s was Shadow. Sasha was two summers ago’ (122).

When Margery and Donald list multiple dogs’ names as their “summer dogs,” they signal that their family only has one dog each summer. Their dialogue suggests that Squirrel won’t be able to escape whatever they did to their past dogs, inciting fear through a cliffhanger chapter ending and leaving readers to wonder about what the Beckers do with their dogs and why they have them only for a summer. This information about the Beckers increases suspense and curiosity as to what will happen to Squirrel next, while continuing to build empathy for her because she’s powerless against the family.

When Squirrel finds Bone’s scent, the use of repetition increases emotional resonance, connects her past with the present, and exhibits her longing for companionship. Squirrel has missed Bone for years. He’s often in her thoughts and memories. Though Moon was her ideal friend, Bone is her only relative, so the idea of their reunion generates a mood of enthusiasm and nostalgia. Squirrel’s investigation leads her to their past: “I watched these houses from hiding places. […] No Bone. […] I nosed into garages. I even sniffed around doorways and porches if the houses were dark. No Bone” (140-41). As she searches for him, the text repeats “No Bone.” This two-word staccato repetition escalates Squirrel’s longing for him. Her loneliness and love for Bone become overwhelming, shifting across time and place hoping to find a reunion. In the end, with the last “No Bone,” the pattern works to finalize Squirrel’s loss. Her hope diffuses, but her need for belonging has become more acute, a need that eventually leads her to Susan.

The use of summary, structure, and syntax enables Part 3 to skip ahead. Squirrel’s nomadic lifestyle resumes (see Wandering in Symbols and Motifs), and her narration quickly elaborates on multiple locations and circumstances. Through summary and sparse descriptions, she moves from place to place. Squirrel adapts to different environments, traveling until she’s an old dog. Most notably, the structure shifts to an even quicker pace and minimalist syntax to move through many years of time: “Winter came and went. Spring arrived, then another winter, then another spring, another winter, another spring, and finally another winter, and I had become an old dog” (142). By summarizing years within a few direct sentences, the novel skips ahead, returning to the point where it started, when Squirrel lives with Susan. This efficient, fast pace completes the novel’s nonlinear structure to return to old Squirrel’s present day.

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