Or her. This child was a girl, actually.
I had found her (she thought she had found me, but the reverse was actually true) after roaming the countryside for two days and nights. At first I had wandered joyfully, feeling myself to be a truly free and untamed creature, sharing my world with deer, raccoons, hawks, and countless other inhabitants of the outdoors.
But after two days I realized I was having difficulty with the food. My first cuisine had been French, as I was weaned from mother's milk to the world of pâtés and terrines and gâteaux. I knew a béchamel sauce from a Hollandaise, and the difference mattered to me. My early poetry had had a Gallic influence; remember " Adieu to Jack..."? Not a mature work, of course, but one that played with bilingualism.
My stay with Jack, though never in the least luxurious, had nonetheless had a certain standard as far as food was concerned. Sorting through discarded garbage after the market had closed, Jack had carefully carved away spoilage from apples and pears with his penknife. He had examined each morsel carefully before slicing it into portions for himself and me. Jack was a fastidious man, though hard times had caused him to be less selective than he might once have been.
It was while sharing discarded pizza remains that Jack had first alerted me to the delights of Italian cuisine.
"This isn't bad, Lucky," he had said (for I was still Lucky then), "but wait till you taste a real good pasta. Maybe a linguini with clam sauce, or a fettucini Alfredo. Then you'll know what Italian cooking's all about."
And so I had, through the photographer, before our life was ruined by fame and fortune. Oh, the puttanesca sauce! The funghi and the carbonara!
Dogs don't weep, but the memory of those sauces, French and Italian both, almost brought tears to my canine eyes during those two days in the woods. I thought of tender asparagus—perhaps a crème d'asperges vertes —when I found myself, ravenous, nibbling at slimy swamp cabbage; and when I shared a rotting rabbit carcass with a roaming possum, I remembered lapin au saupiquet with ineffable sadness.
It was, in fact, while gnawing at rabbit that I remembered watching Scar devour rat remains, and the disgust I had felt at the time. Suddenly I felt with horror that I had been reduced to a creature as primitive as my enemy, and I resolved to turn my life around once again.
Those two days had taught me that I was not cut out for a survivalist existence. The romance of it was false. Carefully I found my way back to a road. I shook myself to rid my fur of the reek of rotting lapin, took a deep breath, and set out at a trot to seek a more amenable life somewhere.
It was not very long before I saw the little girl, who was carrying schoolbooks and just turning into a curving dirt driveway that led to a small brick farmhouse covered with ivy. Obviously well brought up, she spoke softly in greeting and held her hand out politely for me to sniff. Then, gently, she stroked my head and neck. I moved my lovely tail back and forth for her to admire.
She had a similar tail of hair at the back of her head, and she swung hers back and forth in reply. I looked at it carefully, assessing it as a rival tail. But human tails do not compare with those of dogs. Hers was tied rather messily with a band of ribbon, and there was something that looked like a wad of chewing gum near the end. I do have to deal with burrs and other intrusions from time to time, so I understood the problem. Still, it did not appear that she had even tried to gnaw it loose.
When she smiled at me, I saw that her front teeth were missing, which obviously accounted for her failure in adequate grooming. Perhaps she had been in a terrible fight.
Thinking of battles reminded me of Scar, my enemy, and I glanced apprehensively around. But I was far from the city now. Scar was in my past, both geographically and chronologically. Alas, I thought sadly, so was Wispy.
The little girl invited me to walk beside her, and I stayed obediently at her heels as she continued the length of the driveway and opened the back door of the house. By her side I entered the kitchen.
"He followed me home," she told her mother.
"Really?" her mother replied skeptically, and looked down at me. I sat very still, using my best posture: cocked head, arched neck, attentive look. I flicked my tail to the side, hoping it was in a flowing, silky state. I tried to arrange it into a question-mark shape, but as you know, we dogs do not have as much control as we would like over our tails.
"Can I keep him?"
Her mother chuckled. "I'm sure he belongs to someone."
"He doesn't have a collar."
"Well, he must have lost it. We'll have to try to find his owner. Actually," she said, leaning down to look at me more closely, "he looks familiar." She patted my head and peered into my face. I liked her pat and her smell—she was without perfume but had a little cake batter on her fingers—but I feared her perceptions. I knew why she found me familiar. She had seen me sneering on magazine covers, billboards, and TV commercials. It would only be a matter of time before she remembered that.
I arranged my lips in something of a smile, wanting no hint of the famous expression to betray my identity. Fragments of a desperate little poem began in my mind.
Smile, lips! Hide, sneer!
I was running through the possible rhymes (there were some spectacular ones— souvenir, pioneer, chandelier— but in truth I thought using fear would reflect my feelings more accurately) but had not yet completed the couplet to my poetic satisfaction when my creativity was interrupted by the placement of a glass bowl near my feet. Then, beside it, a second. One was a bowl of water, and the other appeared, to my amazement, to be boeuf bourguignon. I touched my tongue to it in rapture.
"Leftover stew," the girls mother explained to me in a soft voice. Turning to the girl, she said, laughing, "Hope he likes mushrooms, Emily!"
Ah, if she only knew my history. Champignons! They had been among my first and favorite solid foods. My brothers had disdained the delicate little morsels, but Wispy and I had tasted them with delight, and Mother had been pleased at our discernment.
Daintily I nudged the mushrooms out of the stew with my tongue and nibbled them one by one with appreciation. Then I consumed the remaining beef and gravy, even eating the carrots—not my favorite vegetables—with enthusiasm. I followed lunch with a long drink of water from the companion bowl. Surely a good boeuf bourguignon is second only to a fine spaghetti bolognese; at least, that is my opinion.
I tried to remember the polite way to inquire about the location of the facilities. Living in the woods, it had not been a matter of importance. Living with the photographer, I had been taken outdoors, to curbside, twice a day. And in my days with Jack, we had each morning shared companionably the amenities of the river and its banks.