Pete was a big ol’ mutt, a hell of a barker, and a real foul smeller. He must have been part Lab and part German shepherd, with two or three other breeds thrown in for good measure. It was February, and the entire area around his doghouse was unusable, covered in piles of frozen piss and shit. He must have been chained up there for months. His paws were covered in a half-inch of ice, and the skin around his claws cracked. He had enough to eat, but that was surely cold comfort. I knew he’d be in agony when it warmed up and his paws thawed out. I couldn’t do it at his home; it was too delicate an operation. So I took Pete into our garage one Wednesday morning during school holidays. My parents were at work. Since their respective offices were practically next door to each other, they drove together in my mom’s car. My dad’s is a “collector’s item,” far too sensitive to expose to winter conditions. It had a reserved spot in the garage. My mom and I thought the car was ridiculous, but as she liked to say, you have to choose your battles. The dog spent three days in the garage. I had to move him at one point because the smell got too strong. Apart from eating and doing a little moaning because his paws were killing him, all he could do was sleep. Pete even had the decency to go to the bathroom on the cement floor instead of the back seat of the Toyota Cressida. He didn’t even yap when my parents came home the first night or the next night. That surprised me. I’d resigned myself to having to explain what a dog was doing in our garage and concocted a story about finding a stray. We set off very early Saturday morning, around 6:00 a.m. We walked for a long time. It was a beautiful day: the sun in the sky, the snow melting. It smelled like spring. The plan was to take him out to Saint-Bouvier, a village fifteen kilometres from our house. I’d written a letter just in case I didn’t manage to find a place to leave Pete. I had to make sure he’d be welcomed home if I had to take him back. I didn’t exactly expect the owners to kill the fatted calf, but I was going to make it clear they had to let their dog in when it got below –15 degrees Celsius. I’d traced the letters with a stencil, which I hated because it made me look amateurish, childish. Cutting words out of the newspaper would have had the opposite effect, though: too scary, like in movies about psycho killers. They’d call the police. Plus, newspaper collages took way too long. I’d run the risk of my parents discovering my pile of paper scraps.