The puppy came to them in a cardboard box on a Thursday in April.
Henry Cole remembered that later. The box. The day. The way the little thing looked up at them from a nest of old towels with its ears too big for its head and its paws too big for its body.
“Oh, Henry,” Lorraine said. “Look at him. He looks like a little bear.”
He did. He was black and tan, round and fuzzy, with a wrinkled forehead and dark brown eyes that seemed much older than eight weeks. He sat in the bottom of that box and looked at them both very seriously, like he was deciding whether they’d do.
“Bear,” Lorraine said. “That’s his name. Bear.”
“Lorraine,” Henry said gently. “You know we don’t name them. The county names them. They’ll give him a real name when he goes to the academy.”
“I know,” she said. She picked the puppy up out of the box and held him against her chest. He licked her chin. “But he’s ours for now. And for now, he’s Bear.”
Henry and Lorraine Cole had been raising puppies for the Monroe County Sheriff’s K9 program for twenty-two years.
It started by accident. Their neighbor at the time, a deputy named Frank Delgado, was a K9 handler. He mentioned one evening over the fence that the county needed volunteer families. People who would take in a German Shepherd puppy at eight weeks, raise it for a year, teach it to be calm and confident and good around people. Take it to grocery stores and parks and baseball games. Get it used to loud noises and strange places. Love it. And then, when it was about fourteen months old, give it back so it could go to the academy and become a police dog.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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