Far West Texas is a hardscrabble place. Vast, rugged, and sparsely populated, you can go for miles and miles without hitting more than a windswept ghost town. Water is scarce, venomous snakes and scorpions abound, and summer temperatures are scorching. It’s a tough place to be a human. And to be a stray dog? Oof.

And yet the region counts lots of strays, because that’s what happens when the nearest vet clinic is two hours down lonely desert roads. Dinner Rolls, a six-year-old shar-pei mix, was one of those strays, found last fall wandering the streets of Marfa, Texas, alongside a younger (and likely related) shar-pei. You might think that Dinner Rolls, who’s now up for adoption in Portland, would bear emotional scars from his past. Not so.

“If anything, he’s an unbothered king,” says Juli Zagrans, executive director of One Tail at a Time (OTAT), a Portland nonprofit that rescues an outsize share of its dogs from far West Texas. Dinner Rolls came to town in November as part of a “Comfort Carbs” pack; others up for adoption include Yams and Kolache.

Dinner Rolls—unless he’s adopted in the coming couple weeks—will next find himself at a January 27th adoption event at OTAT’s shiny new adoption center, which opened on Northeast Sandy Boulevard last month. Zagrans, who founded OTAT in 2015, says it became clear a few years ago that OTAT was near its limit on how many dogs it could save, with 250 to 300 rescued annually. So in 2021, the nonprofit launched a capital campaign to fund the 4,000-square-foot space. Until now, the organization had operated without a brick-and-mortar center, bringing dogs from mostly western US shelters and placing them in volunteer foster homes. OTAT covers all supplies and costs for the fosters and provides dogs with the necessary medical care and behavioral support as they work to find a permanent adoptive home.

None of that will change now that OTAT has a physical home. The space isn’t a shelter—it will have only five kennels, envisioned as landing pads when fosters have an emergency or a dog needs a temporary stay between homes. But it will house supplies, allow OTAT to give dogs an immediate wellness exam, and serve as a location for training classes, adoption events, and less formal meet and greets. Zagrans is confident it will streamline what’s occasionally been a clunky process, helping dogs to be adopted more quickly and thus increasing the overall number that can be rescued; 500 is the new annual goal.

While shar-peis can tend toward aloofness, the compact, 48-pound Dinner Rolls—or Rolls, or Din, or Din Din—has bonded quickly with the two humans and large Great Pyrenees mix in his foster home.

“He’s a very good balance of, like, let’s go on a walk and play a little, and let’s snuggle on the couch and eat potato chips together,” says OTAT community engagement manager April Saban. “He does great with other dogs, but when given the choice he really wants human affection. He wants scritches for his rolls, and you will also find it therapeutic to scratch his rolls.”

Those rolls, of course, are a shar-pei signature. But those floppy folds of skin can create trouble: shar-peis are prone to entropion, an inward rolling of the eyelid that can cause pain and impair vision. Dinner Rolls—who, it must be said, isn’t all that wrinkly for a shar-pei—had two surgeries performed in Texas but will need a third corrective procedure, already scheduled for February. OTAT will cover those medical expenses, even if Din has been adopted by then. “We don’t send dogs to adopters in the middle of something and expect them to cover the cost of what we’ve started or what needs to be done,” Zagrans says.

That ongoing commitment is also reflected in OTAT’s promise to take a dog back at any time, for any reason, even years down the line. But our unbothered king? (Who was also described, in a truly inspired Instagram post penned by Zagrans, as “a mini melted black bear buffalo” and “as if a manatee was an accordion.”) We suspect he’ll be a keeper.