In Faith's Pawprints, an Abiding Hope

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Two-legged Dog Takes to the Streets

Faith, a Chow mix, has only two legs. Her ability to walk around like a human has made her a celebrity of sorts. Her owner and agent both say she enjoys being on tour.

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"I want people to understand that you can be imperfect physically and still be perfect through your soul, through your spirit," she said.

While here, Faith visited shopping centers in Manassas and Fairfax, the Washington Monument, the Jefferson Memorial and the Ellipse.

Seeing a wiry dog with a furiously wagging tail and a nose-height of 40 inches confidently strolling through a mall or bouncing through a parking lot can generate some unexpectedly personal and jarring encounters for those new to the Faith scene.

Milling past the socks in a Kids Foot Locker store, she could have been a short shopper. She leans far forward, like the curling lip of a wave, but manages to stay poised, her snout poking around curiously.

Even without her handlers' positioning of Faith as essentially a 27-pound self-help book -- "If a dog can do it, so can a person," Maguire says -- the experience offers a rare license to gawk, touch and find inspiration in a soft take on missing limbs and human hardships.

Plus, a dog that gets around like a human is totally cool. "I had to look two times," said Kim Debellaistre, a mother of two sitting outside a Roman Delight food-court pizza shop. "That dog is walking."

Behind an office park in Reston, Kristine Rzewnicki looked on as Faith hunted for squirrels during some down time.

"My dad has an artificial leg. I have a special place in my heart for her message," said Rzewnicki, who works for an education group. The family had felt lucky that her father, a longtime Fairfax County police officer, was never hurt on the job, she said. Then the tractor accident. Faith pays visits to hospitals along with the pet shows, including one to Walter Reed Army Medical Center. "Her notoriety and the timing just couldn't be better to make people feel whole," Rzewnicki said.

Many were unflinching in the parallels they saw.

"What happened to her?" asked Larry Nixon, a homeless electrician at the Manassas shelter Serve Inc.

Faith walked beside Nixon's son Larry Jr., 11, who is deciding between being a veterinarian and a video game tester, and nosed the food-bank cat Moochie, whose central skill is catching mice.

They ended up at the shelter about a month ago after the owner of the farm in The Plains where they were living died and the property was sold, "which left us kind of flummoxed," Nixon said. The building industry could rebound some this spring, he hopes.