I walked with dignity to the door and stood beside it with a questioning look. Avoid the sneer, I repeated to myself. At any cost, do not sneer.
"He wants to go out, Emily. Open the door for him." The mother was mixing her cake batter again.
"But what if he runs away?" the little girl asked in a tremulous voice.
I laughed inwardly, but the mother echoed my laughter aloud. "Why on earth would he run away, Emily, when he has just been fed a bowl of beef stew?" Ah, a woman who understood me completely. My heart leapt.
Emily let me out and I investigated the bushes with their various smells. No dogs lived here. That was good. I wasn't ready for a territorial battle.
However, I perceived that there were cats. I sniffed Cat—that distinctive, oily, pungent odor, quite disagreeable to a dog—everywhere. That could be a bore, dealing with cats. But I decided on the basis of the stew, the child, the kind voice of the woman, and the fact that I was exhausted after two days and nights of wilderness adventure that I could compromise on the cat issue. Carefully I lifted my leg against the thick leaves of an evergreen Raphiolepsis, relieved myself, and marked this place as mine.
Then I went back and scratched politely on the door of the house where my new family was waiting.
Stay!: Keeper's Story
Stay!: Keeper's Story
Chapter 11
THERE DIDN'T SEEM TO BE A FATHER. My new family resembled, in that way, a dog's family: the mother, caring attentively for the young, and the father long gone. I did not want to reflect too deeply on the failure of my own beloved mother to stay with her offspring, the way Emily's mother obviously had. It was simply the way of dogs. I had to remember that.
Unlike a dog's family, there was no litter. The little girl, Emily, seemed to be the only child. Charmingly, she showed me around the house, pointing out the most comfortable places. There was a corner in the hall where sunlight from the window warmed the wood floor to just the right temperature. I lay there for a moment, curled in a semicircle, testing the spot, and almost drifted off to sleep, still exhausted from my time in the woods. But Emily urged me up to look around some more.
"See, here's a fireplace!" she said, leading me into the living room. "In the winter we have a fire here, and it smells wonderful. You could—"
She was pointing to the hooked rug in front of the hearth, indicating that I could doze there before the fire. It created a very inviting picture in my mind, something worthy of a calendar: "By the Fireside," or some such domestic title. The image was less sophisticated than my previous calendar work, for which I had mustered a sneer for each month (December had me sneering at Santa's Workshop—imagine), and I found the quiet domestic scene infinitely more appealing.
But I continued to smell cats. It was unnerving. I glanced apprehensively around the living room. Something mounded and dark on a chair caught my attention, but on closer examination I could see that it was simply a folded sweater. Alert, my nose! Be watchful, eyes!
Don't let—
I was working on the next line, planning to use surprise as the rhyme at the end. But again Emily urged me on. She was eager for me to see everything.
"Come on," she said, and pranced toward the stairs. "I'll show you my room, and you can see Bert and Ernie. They're on my bed."
Padding up the narrow staircase behind her, I gave a little inward dog-chuckle. It is a thing that dogs have in common with human young: the love of, the need of, stuffed animals to carry about, tussle with, and sleep beside. The photographer, in what I was already beginning to think of as my previous life, had provided me with various sheepskin toys: a fleecy bone, a human form, and a ball. I had licked and worried them into dingy disrepair, but I had missed them during my days in the woods, and I missed them now.
Maybe, I thought, Emily would let me have one of hers: Bert, perhaps, or Ernie. I knew them both from television. They were goofy-faced and garishly colored, not as satisfying as the sheepskins of my past, but I knew that they would be soft and chewable. I had seen some stuffed Berts and Ernies while I was doing a Toys "R" Us commercial once.
She led me down a pleasant hallway, and I followed her trustingly when she turned into a bedroom thickly carpeted and filled with books and toys.
"Look, Bert! Look, Ernie!" she chirped. "This is our new dog! He doesn't have a name yet, but—"
I froze. The two mounds of fur heaped on her bed near the pillows froze as well. Two sets of pale, hostile eyes glittered, reminding me of my frightening nights among the hordes of rats. But even as the cats (Siamese, the absolute worst for a dog) remained motionless, they began to swell. Their bodies enlarged as Emily and I watched, and they began, in unison, to make a terrifying sound. It was a low and ominous growl. Their eyes did not leave me for an instant.
I, too, am capable of growling. But my growl would have been nothing compared to the ferocity of theirs. It would have been a pathetic joke. So I remained mute. I tried to think, through my panic, what to do.
Somehow, throughout my life to this point, I had lived under the protection of humans and had never faced grave danger. The only similar situations in my memory were the confrontations with Scar so long ago. What had saved me the first time, when I was still just a pup, was my intuitive knowledge of how to address a superior when the odds were against me. The second time, the battle in the night, I was fortified in courage by the need to protect Jack; even then, it had been not a victory but a draw, from which I emerged bleeding.
Now I was faced again with a fearful enemy—a pair, actually, of enemies—and I could draw no courage from the need to protect the little girl. She was merrily prancing about the room, unafraid, chattering to the growling creatures whose attention was entirely focused on me.
Shameful though it is to admit it, the odds were against me, even though I was fully grown and had led a successful and financially lucrative life. There were two of them, and one of me. They were cats, and I am a dog.
Carefully, moving slowly so that they didn't take my movement as a threat, I lowered my body to the floor. Then, still in slow motion, I rolled over to my back and exposed my belly to the beasts.
This is the way a dog admits defeat. It was degrading. But it was absolutely necessary in order to survive, caught as I was in a small room with two predators.
Frantically, I tried to create a conciliatory poem that I might present to them as a kind of homage, acknowledging their superiority, so that they would allow me to live. Noble felines! O beasts supreme!