Colorado

Colorado is both a landscape of distance and a network of communities in Bella’s story: its breed laws force her separation from Lucas, while its towns become places where people remember, search for, and finally welcome her home. The state also anchors Axel’s connection to a family he struggles to recognize as his own.

Communities and Family Ties

In Gunnison, Colorado, Tom explains that Axel’s father had spoken with people in the community before leaving for Afghanistan. He wanted others to look after Axel if he died. Axel rejects the idea that he has a family, but Tom insists that the people gathered around him are his family. Gunnison thus represents a form of belonging that persists even when Axel cannot accept it as such.

Breed Laws, Separation, and Search

In Denver, breed laws lead Lucas and Olivia to send Bella away. By the time Lucas has found a place to live and they return to get her, she has run away. Olivia recalls that they drove all over Durango looking for Bella and put up posters before fearing something bad had happened to her. The sequence makes Colorado’s cities part of the cost of the breed laws: Denver is where the separation becomes necessary, while the search across Durango fails to undo it.

Return to Lucas

Bella’s return brings the state’s distances into focus. Lucas estimates that the drive is almost four hundred miles, while acknowledging that the route Bella traveled on foot through the mountains cannot be measured as a straight line. The scale of that journey sharpens the contrast between her long separation and the ease of her recognition when she finds Olivia, whose scent carries Lucas’s presence.

The reunion concludes in Golden, Colorado, which Olivia describes as pit bull-friendly. Its dog-friendly building allows Bella to live with Lucas and Olivia, unlike the housing circumstances that had contributed to her earlier displacement. In their small bed, Bella settles between them rather than on the blanket carrying Lucas’s scent: the journey across Colorado ends not simply at a familiar object, but in the home and closeness she had been seeking.