My Rescue Tail: From Trailer Park to Cover Dog

For our annual Pet Guide, we asked our pets to tell their own stories. Here, Lily Bear Traverse, who has been a cover dog for this magazine, makes her editorial debut.

Editor's Note: While people working from home may be struggling to adjust to their new daily routines, perhaps no group is more chuffed by this development than pets. Under normal circumstances we would have asked our editorial staff to take charge of this year’s Pet Guide, but these are far from normal circumstances. Keeping a routine and staying busy are supposed to help us humans stay steady during these turbulent times, so we figured the same logic must apply to our pets. They need tasks! Goals! To learn new skills! (Yes, we are projecting. They are perfectly content just to have us home.)

So we asked our pets to take on some of the labor themselves. Lily Bear Traverse and Ampersand Davis make their authorial débuts here; we have a hunch it won’t be long before The New Yorker snaps up one or both of them. You can rest assured that both Ampersand and Lily Bear have been compensated fairly for their work. Oddly, we’ve never paid freelancers in head-scratches and treats before.

If you noticed me before, on the cover of this magazine’s May 2019 issue (above), you might have thought to yourself: Why, look at that cover dog. I was, as it happens, born with it! I was also the first dog ever to grace the cover of Memphis, and – can you believe this? – I did it while eating a rainbow sno-cone. (Tough to imagine a cat pulling that one off.)

What you could not have known is that I was not born into a lifestyle of luxury. I was not born with a sno-cone-streaked plastic spoon in my mouth. No, I found myself in this marvelous position only a couple of years into my life.

I remember the day it happened. I was in the backseat of Mom’s car – I didn’t know yet that was Mom, but she seemed nice enough, and she had certainly been excited to meet me – and we were driving down Sam Cooper. When we passed the Broad Avenue water tower, Mom glanced into the backseat, where I was sitting at attention, and she said, “See, Lily Bear – you’re a Memphis dog now.” And then she took me to walk by the Mississippi River, and I tried to lap at its overflowing fingers, and it was final – a Memphis dog I had become.

But I wasn’t born here. I really couldn’t tell you where I was born, for that matter. From what Mom has pieced together it was somewhere in eastern Tennessee, or maybe southern Virginia, around Bristol. Mom was born in Virginia, so she likes to think that we have that in common. I was a puppy, and then I was a young dog, and I was adopted by a man we now call my “original owner.”

I don’t know about that whole “owner” concept, but that’s another conversation.

He was nice, and he loved me, and maybe we even went on walks. Then he got sick, though, and we didn’t go for so many walks. And then one day he wasn’t there anymore. His son took me in, kind of. This is the part that makes Mom shudder when she tells it, because that son really did not want me. I know – how could anyone not want me? I am, if you could not tell, a sweet-tempered, fluffy-furred, soulful-eyed little bear cub of a dog, with a flower for a face.

But there it is – want me, he did not. He used to keep me locked up in a trailer for long stretches of time, so I couldn’t run and play like I wanted; I was forgetting how to run and play. He would throw whole bags of food into the trailer and then leave for days and days, so I would eat and eat, and then there would be nothing. I don’t mind telling you that I have some food-insecurity issues to this day.

I don’t really think anymore about where I came from; I think only about where I am now, and where I am now is pretty excellent. Even though I haven’t had a sno-cone in ages.

Oh, the stories Mom could tell – the time I ate a whole bag of flour, except really I couldn’t eat a bag of flour, because if you didn’t know this, when you puncture a bag of flour, it goes everywhere. Now THAT was a fun scene for Mom to see one afternoon when she came home! Then there was the time, when Mom started dating the man I now call Cheese (she calls him her husband), when I jumped up and stole an entire wedge of cambazola cheese off the table; this is when we named his house the House of Cheese and named him Cheese. There was also the time I rooted around in the wee hours of the morning because I had seen one half of a chocolate cake – deemed too dry – chucked into the garbage bin the evening before. Mom and Cheese took me to the emergency vet at dawn, and I was deemed to be perfectly fine, no matter all that fuss about dogs and chocolate. There was also the time I learned how to open a refrigerator door with my nose – with my NOSE! – and ate basically its entire contents. Oh, there are so many more stories. I am such an ingenious girl, and so hungry.

Oh, I was telling you about my rescue story – not about food. Okay, okay. So, back in rural east Tennessee a neighbor saw me running in a field, and she asked around and found who I belonged to, and then she asked him – the son – what I was doing running around by myself all the time? And he said yes, I was his dog, and no, he did not want me, and in fact, did the neighbor know anyone who might want me? Because he was thinking, well, if no one else wanted me he might just shoot me. He might shoot me. That is what he said. About me. Have you seen my sweet face? Do you know how soft and fluffy I am, and how devoted?

The neighbor got me into a wonderful organization called Imminent Danger German Shepherd Rescue, which is how Mom found me, one evening several years ago scrolling through adoptable dogs on her phone. She filled out an application then and there, and was approved the very next day. Mom’s stepmom, Kathy, brought me home to Memphis – she was driving home from Pennsylvania and I was kind-of-not-really on the way, and she is very sweet – and I met my mom for the first time in a Waffle House parking lot off the highway, which I’m pretty sure is where all great love stories begin?

We’ve been together for almost three years now, Mom and I. Now I have Cheese too, and a brother-dog, Puck, who teaches me patience (he is a wise old man of 15), and a brother-cat, Lucky Boots, who teaches me style (he wears a tuxedo all the time). I don’t really think anymore about where I came from; I think only about where I am now, and where I am now is pretty excellent. Even though I haven’t had a sno-cone in ages.