I’m Michael Campbell. I was a senior in high school when an underground gas leak led to a massive explosion in my neighborhood. The houses that weren’t immediately destroyed caught fire, and it was a while before they could put all the fire out. Everything for blocks was destroyed.

I was one of the lucky ones. I survived. There were 12 of us, out of hundreds of people who lived in destroyed homes. I was survived because the explosion blew me off my bed, out my window, into a two-story fall cushioned by branches of a tree, and I was able to run away. Most of the other survivors were people who were not home at the time; it was considered a miracle I had survived.

I had some scrapes and burns, but no broken bones, and a week later I was good. Most of the victims were burned alive before they even knew there was a fire, including all my family and friends and my girlfriend. There was a wake held at my school for the many victims who went there. I was still recovering in the hospital, but it was recorded and I got to see it later, and hear the list of names read out. Even my name was called out, correctly mentioned as alive but hospitalized.

Of course, I had no home to go back to. They had put the survivors up in a group of apartments. They had me live with the 70-year-old grandfather who had been the guardian of a student who’d died. It worked; he got me to and from school, and food, and I helped clean up the place on weekends and do any heavy lifting he couldn’t manage. But it was clear to me that the arrangement was temporary, both the apartment and living with him.

I finished school and got a job to save up some money. There were a whole bunch of jobs, because by that time the houses were all being rebuilt with funding from various insurance policies. There was one main company who had this contract, but that company had hired on some other companies due to the size of the job. More than 30 experienced builders, two or three per house, each of them with a crew of temporary workers, were building house after house as quickly as they could. One group would build up the frame and the exterior, then plumbers and electricians would do their part, and then another crew would do all the interior work, including paint. Plumbers and electricians had to be licensed, but I could work in both the framing and interior crews.

My family had some life insurance that paid out about 50 grand, eventually, and with everyone else in my immediate family dead, it came to me. I helped rebuild several of the houses in my neighborhood while I was waiting for it, and then several more because I had already gotten started. Eventually my house was rebuilt, and it also became mine. I moved in, and bought some things. Not too much; I had whole empty rooms.

There was still a mortgage on it, since the insurance paid for the rebuilding and the interest while the house was being rebuilt, but not the debt. The construction work easily paid the mortgage and bills and food, but as the construction was ending and I was going to need some other job, I realized I didn’t want this. It wasn’t my house, my neighborhood, or my neighbors. They were all a bunch of imitations. The unique houses on my street had been replaced with a bunch of cookie-cutter copies sized like the originals, but not really like them otherwise. I was living in an imitation of the house I grew up in, without any of what made it special. I was alone, next to nobody I knew. The neighbors were strangers who bought the other rebuilt houses from the heirs of my former neighbors. It felt completely artificial, and I wanted to get away.

I had always been an outdoorsy type, and enjoyed Boy Scouts. I didn’t get all the way to Eagle Scout but I might have gotten there had I not been interrupted by the blast. I definitely knew how to build a campsite and how to live on my own in the outdoors if needed. I actually thought that was what I was going to do when I got out of the hospital before I found out about the temporary apartments they set up for us. But now I was free to do my own thing.

As the construction job was coming to an end at the start of the following spring, I put the house up for sale. Due to there being a whole bunch of houses up for sale due to most of the former residents being killed, I didn’t get offers immediately, but there were buyers buying these houses, and mine sold after about a month. I had very little, and the old man let me stay with him again for a week while I got my plan together and the paperwork for the house sale went through. He had his whole reconstructed house, after all, and I only had a week’s worth of clothes and a few other possessions, having lived a simple life these last few months.

The Journey

What I decided to do was go on a cross-country hike. People had done that before, and I had the know-how to do it. I figured I’d get some publicity out of it, and some sort of job offer more to my liking at the end of it. So I picked up some maps, a pack, bedroll, and other gear, and planned out a route to Portland, Oregon. It was to take until early fall, but it was just warm enough now to camp out most nights around here, so I said my goodbyes to the man who served as my temporary guardian for several months and even more temporary host just now, and headed out.

The trip was wonderful. I got to be with nature, and camped out a lot. Of course, I didn’t expect that one pack had everything in it I would need, but from insurance, the house sale, and my job, I now had a couple hundred grand in the bank I could draw on. If it was too cold, I could get a room. If there wasn’t readily accessible food growing on trees, which was true most of the early part of of the trip, I could buy food. When I got to the middle of the country, I was camping out most nights, usually spending a night at a cheap motel once a week or so to take a break from that and clean up.

In the dog days of summer I entered Yellowstone National Park. My expectation was that I’d spend two nights in the park. The afternoon of the first day, a large, shaggy, mostly black female dog with some brown and white markings started following me. I assumed she was after food; I was carrying some I’d bought some at the last town, as I would in every town until near the end of the trip. I ran off the main trail to get away from her. In doing so, I passed through an area with some sort of glow in the air. Whatever it was gave me the creeps, and I probably would have stayed out if I hadn’t been chased by the dog. She seemed to stop just outside the glow, and I continued on, hoping to find a place I could turn back to the main trail later.

That didn’t work out, but I had GPS, and continued on, parallel to and I believed about 900 feet south of the main trail. Eventually I had to settle down for the night, and just as I did, I saw that the dog had been following me after all, just from a greater distance. I tried to shoo the dog off, and for a bit I thought it had worked. But as I bedded down, she was back and lay down next to me. She didn’t dig into my stuff to get at my food, nor attack me, so I let her stay.

The dog started rubbing against me, and since I had taken most of my clothes off in the warm night, I was actually getting aroused with the motion of the dog’s body against my underwear. Then the dog turned and started licking me there, pushing my underwear down to actually expose my dick. When she turned around again and continued the rubbing, I realized what part of her she was rubbing against me. The dog was in heat, and was trying to get me to satisfy her! Why she was unable to attract another dog, I didn’t know, but then again, I hadn’t seen any other dogs that day.

What the hell, I figured. I slid down my underwear and stuck my dick into her. The dog was big enough to take it, and actually seemed to be really enjoying it. And I enjoyed it, too. I felt some weird things as I dozed off, though, but did not understand what until morning.

I woke up the next morning as a dog. I wasn’t the same breed as her, and was maybe even a little larger than her. Or I should say, her breed and size last night, because the dog was now a girl, fully naked. Young woman, I guess. Probably a little older than me; I figured early 20s. What, was this some kind of curse where she was going to steal my humanity?

My erection had subsided, but the tip of my dog-penis was just inside her, until she rolled over and shakily got up. She hadn’t been carrying anything as a dog, but now she grabbed and raided my pack, ripping open a pack of beef jerky and a pack of fruit snacks. She gave me about half the beef jerky, though.

She left the empty packages on the ground, and stood up and started to walk away. She didn’t try to put on any of my clothes or take any of my stuff. I actually kind of wanted her to take my stuff. While I could probably survive as a dog with what I knew, I wanted to stick with her in hopes I could reverse the change, and it’d be better if I didn’t abandon all my stuff. I barked at her and pawed at my pack and bedroll. She started coming back, but she just ran a circle around me like playing some kind of game. When she moved away again, I followed.

She didn’t actually go far. She went to where there was a stream nearby, and later to an apple tree where the apples were just turning ripe. She pulled down an armload of apples and we had our fill of them. And she didn’t abandon my stuff after all; she went back to our campsite as it was getting dark. After I lay down, she rolled me over on my side and started playing with my dick with her hands. And then she lay down in front of me and put my doggy dick (which was about as large as my human one) into her.

Pretty soon my tie, the big knot that bulges out on a dog’s erection, entered her, and I realized that I must have started turning into a dog before I fell asleep last night, because I recalled that happening just before I dozed off. This time it happened for the main part of our sex. But we both enjoyed it again, the girl letting out some moans which were the only sounds I’d heard her make as a girl; she hadn’t talked to me or anything.

At some point I fell asleep again, and woke up in my human body while she was the dog again. I gathered up all my gear. After getting my bearings, I continued my hike, delayed by a day. The dog followed, and later, still south of the main trail, we camped again and she wanted my dick again.

Predictably, I woke up as the dog again and she woke up as the girl. But she now seemed to understand how I was traveling, and put away my gear, not very expertly but adequately. I picked up and carried to her items she missed, and she added them to the pack. She still didn’t put on any of my clothes, though. We didn’t make nearly the time I would have made, but we were getting closer to the far edge of the park. She stopped near a large rock, and the glow in the air I saw before was there, just past the rock. It was harder to see it in the dim light; it was apparently a reflection of sunlight rather than a light of its own.

She wasn’t interested in sex tonight, though. She dropped my pack on the side of the rock facing into the park, and laid out the bedroll on the far side, outside the glow. When I tried to go be with her, she pushed me back through the glow, to where she had put the pack. It was clear she wanted me to sleep there this night. I hoped this didn’t mean I was going to be stuck as a dog forever, or until she next got the urge for sex.

To my surprise, I woke up as a man, and the girl was still a girl. She was pretty happy about this. Because of how she had acted the night before, I figured she must have known these human-dog changes occurred inside the area with the glowing boundary. She could easily have known that if she’d been living here and changing regularly.

We shared the last of the food I had in my pack and I made sure to gather some apples from another tree before we left the park, walking together. She was still naked, but as I knew we were approaching one of the main trails, I gave her one of my spare shirts and a spare pair of shorts. Even then, she didn’t put them on and I had to put them on her myself. The shorts were too big at the waist, but her hips seemed to hold them up. Obviously, women’s shorts would have been better, but at least she was decent. She didn’t have any shoes, and I had none to offer her; I saw that her feet were heavily callused from obviously having walked a long time barefoot.

I knew I could get to a town by that evening if I made a good pace, and I led the way, happy to see her keeping up. She didn’t talk, even in response to what I said to her. When I got hungry I dug into the apples and shared them with her. We indeed reached the town, West Yellowstone, Montana, before dark, and I was quite hungry and glad to have made it.

I led her to a restaurant first, a burger joint, and she seemed still unable to talk, so I ordered for her the same food I bought myself, figuring she’d be similarly hungry. She started to take the burger apart and eat the ingredients separately, but after I stopped her and showed her how to pick it up and eat it as a unit, she copied me. And then she was a little confused when I dumped out all the fries on one of the burger wrappers between us and started eating them separately, but she copied me in doing that too. She finished her burger but stopped eating the fries when about a third of them were left, so I guess she had her fill, and I finished them off.

While I didn’t always sleep in a bed on this trip even when I had a town, I’d been out for several days and was pretty filthy, and after seeing that she’d apparently never eaten a burger, I wasn’t sure this girl had ever slept on a real bed, so I got us a room. Indeed, she showed her ignorance at everything, but I got us into the shower together, then washed out and hung up all our clothes. After I used the toilet, with her standing next to me watching, she managed to do the same, though I had to clean her up. Toilet paper was also clearly new to her.

I got into bed, naked, since all the clothes I had were the ones now drying, and she followed and at first plopped down on top of all the sheets and blankets, but soon realized she should pull them back like I did. Pretty soon she was playing with my dick again, and so we had sex, though I was worried we’d wake up as two dogs.

We were still human in the morning, though. After again helping her with most everything, I checked us out of the motel, and got us breakfast. Again I stuck with food for her she could pick up with her hands, as I didn’t think she was ready for a fork and knife, though she watched me using the plastic ones with my pancakes. Before I left the town, I found a store where I could buy her a proper set of clothes. I had to help her put them on, but she left with clothes actually made for her body, and socks and shoes. I also replenished my supplies, as I knew it would be another night of camping before the next town. Also, I bought condoms. I wasn’t sure how often we were going to have sex, but it felt at times like I was already caring for one baby with this girl. I didn’t need another.

Portland

A few weeks later, before it got too cold for camping again, I made it into Portland and checked into another motel. The next day, a reporter I’d talked to before I started the trip made time to interview me. And I brought the girl with me, not trusting her to be on her own in the city yet.

“I thought you were traveling alone,” he commented at one point, after I’d mentioned starting that way. “You picked up a girlfriend along the way?”

“Um, I guess. She’s a wild girl, doesn’t speak and shows no sign of having lived in civilization, but she learned well from me.” I avoided mentioning that she was a dog when I first met her. Nobody would have believed that anyway.

“Maybe you should take her to the police station. They can see if she’s been reported missing.”

I did that, and told them where I was staying. They interviewed her, well, tried to, but seeing how she didn’t speak and didn’t understand more than a few basic words, it was mostly them confirming the state she was in, and asking me what I knew about her. They took her photo, fingerprints, height, weight, and printed up a temporary Jane Doe ID for her. Seeing how I brought her in, they told me I could either take her with me or leave her there and they would put her in a homeless shelter. I didn’t think she’d do well in the shelter, and she’d probably feel I abandoned her. But I was getting attached to her, and she was very clearly already attached to me. And while I told them she’d been living in the wild, I didn’t want them to learn just how much that was true.

That was the beginning of our life together. The point of this trip was supposed to be for me to start a new life out here. I didn’t expect this girl to be part of it, but there was room for her to live with me almost anywhere I wanted, given that she enjoyed sharing a bed with me. It was a motel the first few nights, while I looked for a job and a more permanent space.

That night, while we were still at the motel, there was an episode of Family Guy in which the dog Brian was in love with a female dog named Ellie. I decided at that point to name the girl Ellie after this dog. I had just been calling her girl, or Jane because of the Jane Doe ID. The next day I got her her first piece of jewelry, a simple necklace and beads to put on it spelling out her name. And more clothes, since I’d only brought three sets of clothes with me and Ellie only had the one. It cost some money, but Ellie was happy with any clothes right now, and I was able to buy cheap stuff so that she would be decent and not have to wear the same ones all the time.

I wasn’t sure exactly what kind of job I expected to get out of the publicity of making this trip, but the only direct offer I got within three days of the news story airing was that one of the local schools needed a gym coach. They were down one and having the girls’ coach do double-duty. So I focused my apartment hunting in that part of the city and within a week I had moved in there and started the job.

Fortunately, Ellie was learning quickly. She could wash herself, go to the bathroom, do simple chores, and make simple meals that didn’t require cooking. She was able to take care of herself while I was working, and she even did most of the cleaning for me. And she’d started speaking, and was able to say my name, her name, “hungry”, “bathroom”, “tired”, “sex”, and a few other words. We only had sex when she wanted to, which was about one night in five, and I always used a condom now.

Our first week in the apartment, her period started, which was both a relief that I hadn’t gotten her pregnant and an opportunity for a lesson. I never expected I would be giving this particular lesson, but I understood what she needed to do well enough to show her, and she did it well enough not to ruin any clothes. She didn’t understand when to stop doing it, at first, but eventually I got her to understand that too, and she did it right the second period.

Another thing I did for Ellie early on was get some care for her callused feet. The first time, I had them do the works, her hair and nails too. After that it was just the soles of her feet. Every weekend we’d spend a little time getting her feet worked on, and after about a month they weren’t perfect, but a lot better.

I wasn’t surprised when the police said they couldn’t find any report of any missing person matching her age and general appearance, and found no fingerprint match. I was pretty sure by this point she had started life as a dog and all the living as a girl she had done before I met her had been in whatever region of the park made us change between dogs and humans each night.

They set up an appointment with a social worker, Rhonda. They had to treat her like an immigrant and started a process to make her a naturalized citizen. This was long, and for part of it they wanted to document my time with her; it was apparently easier if she’d been living in the interior of the country for a period of time as opposed to if she had just arrived on a boat. Over a couple weeks we helped Rhonda and the police find the people who served us at the first restaurant we ate at, the clerk who checked us into the motel there, and several other people who saw us on our journey. There were even security cameras at the entrances and exits of the park, showing me leave with her.

So she officially became Ellie, and as a last name, I chose Yellowstone for where I found her. By their estimates, she appeared at least 18 and perhaps as old as 22. This was important because there were two different processes for minors and adults. If she had been a minor, I would have had to adopt her. As she was an adult, I was her sponsor and she was required to live with me for a period of time. More or less the same thing, but entirely different paperwork.

Ultimately, they listed her age as 20. I wondered if she was really more like 3 dog-years old. Though I’d kept the story secret, I gave them the date of the first day she turned into a girl in my presence, and when I first turned into a dog, as her birthday, August 15th. It was several months later when this process was complete and she had an ID, social security card, and naturalized citizenship papers.

Learning

Pretty quickly, Ellie learned more words of English, and other things. It was much like I had a 20-year-old baby living with me. Just like babies, once she started learning, she picked up things very quickly. She went from speaking her first word to hundreds of words and full sentences in only a matter of four months. Every day I wasn’t working, and for a little time after work on days I worked, I spent time with her on this.

On weekends, I often took her on nature walks through the parks and forests around here. She loved that more than anything, and sometimes I had trouble getting her to leave. Reminding her she could sleep in a bed that night instead of on the ground worked to get her to come home. She had realized that even though the dog body was just fine sleeping on the ground, her girl body was more comfortable in a bed. Wherever we went, though, was an opportunity to teach her more words and more about the world.

As soon as she had learned enough to understand it, I had a talk to her about sex. I was worried she was entirely too loose about it, but it turned out she understood more than I thought about human sex customs. She’d seen other couples come to the park and find secluded places to have sex. She realized those men were claimed by those women, and not candidates for her to have sex with, even when she was human. In the end, she promised not to seek sex with any other men.

I got her more involved in cooking, to the point that she helped with every meal. She was having to get over an inherent sense of “fire bad!” She must have been burned at some point in her life, though I saw no scars. She still didn’t trust herself for cooking when she was here alone, but I bought her food that didn’t need cooking. And she was soon doing all the housecleaning, dishes, and laundry. I told her she didn’t need to do all of that, but she wanted to. When she learned enough words, she explained that she felt like she’d owed it to me for all I’d done. That was a concept she seemed to already understand but didn’t really find the words for until I started teaching her about money.

That was in the summer, after she’d been with me for most of a year. In the spring, I had taught her numbers and some basic math, and in early summer, I started teaching her about money. A great opportunity for that was shopping. I always took her with me and she already recognized the items I usually bought and knew where each was located in the store. Now I was teaching her how much things cost. Once she proved herself by wisely spending a small amount of money I gave her, I started letting her do our shopping trips on her own, using one of those folding shopping carts to haul several days worth of food for us home three blocks from the store in one trip. And sometimes she forgot things, but she learned quickly when it meant some food she liked wasn’t available. It was a little tougher to get her to buy things I needed, and non-food items like her tampons, but I started leaving her a list, and with it empty packages of anything she’d forgotten before, to help reinforce the meanings of the words.

In August, one of the times I went to the store with her I bought us a small cake and one large candle for it, for her “birthday”, or at least the date we were celebrating it based on her new ID. By this point, she could say enough words to put together a short story, and I helped her with some words she hadn’t mastered as she told her story before she met me, including “veil” to describe that phenomenon in the park.

“I was a dog. A couple owned me for more than two years. They said some things I didn’t understand then, but I do now. They said I was too big and ate too much food. They drove to the park one day, and we all got out, but then they got back in the car and drove away and left me there.”

That was sad, but maybe not too surprising.

Ellie continued, “I lived in the park all spring and summer until I met you. It was early summer when I ran through the veil to get away from a bear, and it didn’t follow me through, so I stayed there. I woke up the next day as a person.”

She needed more help with me supplying words to get through the next part of the story, but what she tried to say went like this: “It was strange to me to be a person, but I figured things out. There were few animals inside the veil, mostly small ones, and they didn’t change inside the veil. I don’t know if other large animals changed, because they were all afraid to enter. When I was a dog it was easy to catch and eat some of the small animals. As a person, I learned to eat plants that grew there. It was a nice, safe spot to live, but I was lonely. So I often went outside the veil to look for others, and I learned that the changes happened only when I slept inside the veil. So I could leave, either as a dog or as a person, but I didn’t know where to go.”

I felt sad for her, but she was not done with her story.

Ellie added, “When I first started changing, I was male as both a person and as a dog.”

“What, really?”

“Really! There is a second veil, one that is reddish and much smaller. If you sleep inside that one, you change from male to female or female to male. It works for both dogs and people.”

“Wow! Why didn’t you show me that one?”

“By that time, from watching the people, I had figured out it was much more likely a man would take a lost woman with him than a woman would take a man. So I decided to stay female. I hoped to find a single man coming through while I was a woman, and you were the first who came.”

“You are so smart.”