Kara Keyes bought the black-and-white pit bull as a puppy five years ago, intended as a Valentine's Day gift for her husband. But the dog -- named Crown for the C-shaped mark on her head -- soon came to adore Keyes.
When Keyes sat on the porch of her New Orleans home, the dog would wriggle between her legs and rest her head on Keyes' lap.
"If I move, Crown moves," Keyes said. "If I stop, Crown stops."
Dogs came and went, but Crown, as Keyes said, was "my first baby."
Keyes doesn't spay or neuter her animals. "I don't want anyone to spay me," she said by way of explanation. Crown gave birth to a litter of eight in 2004, and Keyes and her husband, Ronald, a forklift operator, presided at their modest Seventh Ward home.
"I know I'm not an M.D., and he's not either, but we were that day," said Keyes, who works as a locksmith at the Medical Center of Louisiana at New Orleans. "She had them in the house. A beautiful litter. . . ."
Three years after Crown came into their lives, Hurricane Katrina hit, and Keyes and her husband were not allowed to return to their home for several weeks. Evacuated to Houston, they got word on Crown from a neighbor who told them he last saw the pit bull sitting on the porch. Waiting.
Meanwhile, Pia Salk, a clinical psychologist from Santa Monica, was one of the legions of volunteers roaming the waterlogged streets of New Orleans rescuing animals stranded by the hurricane. In mid-September of 2005, she spotted a skinny pit bull in front of an evacuated house in the Seventh Ward. There was nothing skittish or ferocious about this canine.
"When I rescued her, she walked past the food and pressed herself against me," Salk recalled.
The pit bull had cropped ears -- a procedure many veterinarians discourage and some rescuers consider cruel -- and was ill, Salk said. She checked the dog into a makeshift temporary animal shelter at the sprawling Lamar-Dixon Expo Center in Gonzales, some 50 miles west of New Orleans. Salk put her name and phone numbers on the dog's kennel, asking to be kept apprised of her fate.
Salk continued through the fall to visit New Orleans, but she was back in Santa Monica when she got a call from a volunteer who had taken several rescued dogs out of the Lamar-Dixon shelter and brought them to Albuquerque. The sickly pit bull was among them.
"I said, 'Why don't I take her?' " Salk recalled.
