Gun Shy Page 5

  I said, “Hero, sit.”

  Without looking at me, he sat.

  I was impressed. Most dogs, after even the most rudimentary lessons, are fairly reliable on the “sit” command—as long as they are standing right in front of you or beside you and are watching your body language when you say it. If you really want to test how well trained your dog is, give him a command while you are lying on the ground, or sitting in a chair with your back to him—or while his back is to you.

  I said, “Come.”

  He didn’t move.

  A really well-trained dog will respond only to specific words, not to a beckoning tone or to generalizations such as “Come on,” or “Come here.” I tried again. “Here.”

  He got up, plodded toward me, circled behind me, and came to a stop in perfect heel position with his shoulder adjacent to my knee. I let out a breath of surprised appreciation.“Good boy,” I said, stroking his shoulder blades. “Somebody’s been to obedience school.”

  I bent down and offered my hand. “Shake,” I invited.

  He placed his paw in mine. “Curiouser and curiouser,” I murmured.

  I stroked under his chin, a gesture most dogs love, but he was indifferent. I stood up. “Okay, kennel up,” I said, but made no move to lead him to the car. He turned to the car of his own volition, leapt into the crate and lay down.

  I walked thoughtfully back to the house.

  “There’s something strange about that dog,” I said as I came into the big, sun-filled front room. Aunt Mart was carrying a tray filled with a coffee service and dessert plates, and I quickly went to help her. A chocolate layer cake was already waiting on the coffee table, displayed beautifully on a cake plate decorated with autumn leaves.

  “He didn’t try to bite you, did he?” she asked in quick alarm, and Uncle Roe looked up from the newspaper he was crumpling underneath the logs in the fireplace.

  “No,” I assured them both. “The opposite, really.” I set the tray down next to the cake, trying not to jostle the pretty china dessert plates. “Somebody went to a lot of trouble to train him—maybe even to competition level. I mean, a lot of people take their dogs to obedience class, and some people even keep up with their training so that the dogs have good manners in public. But you just don’t see a lot of pet dogs who are so well trained that they will obey commands even from a stranger, in an unfamiliar environment, under stress. It’s just odd, that’s all.”

  Uncle Roe struck a match and the newspaper caught, sending blue and yellow flames dancing around the logs. “I don’t suppose there’s any way you could figure out who trained him, is there? Or where?”

  I smiled regretfully. “Sorry. It’s a long list.”

  Aunt Mart said, “I know it’s early in the season to light a fire, but I just love the look of it, don’t you?”

  “You’ll be sick and tired of it come January,” said Uncle Roe, straightening up from the hearth. “And I’ll be sick of chopping wood.”

  “I had a fire this morning,” I said, remembering how nice it had been to come down and find the woodstove in the kitchen already glowing.

  “Well, of course you’re in the shadow of the mountain over there. It’s a lot cooler.”

  “That cake looks wonderful, Aunt Mart.” When Aunt Mart serves dessert, you don’t complain about how stuffed you are from the meal, or how you’re trying to lose weight, or how you really wish you’d worn a skirt with an elastic waistband. You sit down with the giant wedge she places on your plate and you count your blessings.

  Uncle Roe settled down in his easy chair with his own giant wedge of cake and a cup of coffee resting on the end table at his elbow. He took a bite of the cake, complimented the baker, and then asked me, “What are you going to do with the dog?”

  I gave him the same answer I had given my aunt earlier. “If the next of kin doesn’t want him, or can’t be found, I’ll turn him over to Rescue. There are a lot of great groups out there, and as well trained as he is, he’ll be a snap to place.”

  Uncle Roe speared another forkful of cake and nodded thoughtfully. “Meantime, I guess you’d better keep a close eye on him.”

  At my questioning look, he smiled. “Right now, that dog is the only one who knows what really happened up at that cabin.”

  I know it’s silly, but I couldn’t stop thinking about what Uncle Roe had said: The dog really was the only one who knew what had happened. He knew whether or not he had arrived in a car with a husband and a wife, and whether or not they had stopped for dog food. He knew where he came from. He knew what had happened just before the shot was fired that had taken the life of the woman in the bedroom and had begun his nightmare. It was strange, to imagine all that knowledge locked up inside the brain of a living being, but to have absolutely no way to retrieve it.

  So naturally I called my friend Sonny Brightwell.

  Sonny is a well-respected attorney who also happens to be an animal lover. One of the animals she loves is a sweet little border collie named Mystery, who managed to find her way to Sonny from the evil clutches of none other than Reese Pickens. That was how we had first met. But during the course of our meeting I had also discovered something else about Sonny. She claims she can communicate with animals, in particular—as far as I’m concerned—dogs.

  This is what I think. Dogs are intelligent, imaginative creatures. They know how to plan, to form social relationships, to work in groups. There is even compelling scientific evidence that they dream, and they process information while dreaming in much the same way we do. And if “sentient” means self-aware, I’ve never known a living being more self-aware, and in fact, self-interested, than a dog. Do they think in the same way we do? They absolutely do not. They think better. They are in a dozen or more ways much more efficient, more alert, and more adapted to their environment than we are. But can they talk?

  I don’t think so.

  That did not, however, keep Sonny from being the first person who popped into my head when I thought about Hero being the only witness to the tragedy about which there were so many questions. It wasn’t that I exactly believed that she could talk to dogs—or rather, that they could talk to her—but if I were to be perfectly honest, I’d have to admit there had been too many coincidences concerning Sonny and the messages that she had purportedly received from animals for me to ignore. Whether it was because she was talking to them, or because of her natural empathetic personality, she did have a demonstrably calming effect on most dogs. Besides, Aunt Mart had sent home enough leftovers to feed an entire kennel club, Buck was working late and Sonny was pleasant company.

  When I told her that my aunt, not I, was in charge of the kitchen, Sonny didn’t hesitate to accept my invitation to supper. I’m sure the chocolate layer cake had nothing to do with it.

  When introducing a new dog to the household, the best thing to do is to arrange a first meeting on neutral ground—in a park, on a street corner, or some other place where neither the resident dogs nor the new dog has a territorial stake. My version of neutral territory was the kennel play yard, which hundreds of strange dogs passed through every year, and where all of my resident dogs were accustomed to playing with visitors.

  I placed Hero the Lab in the play yard and, one by one, brought out my own dogs to meet him. Part of my evaluation, before placing him with a rescue group, would be to determine how he reacted to strange dogs. His reaction was completely noncommittal. First I brought out Majesty, who is the most inoffensive dog I own, who did the whole circle-and-sniff bit while Hero just stood there stoically, ignoring her. Then I let Cisco have a turn; he was far more interested in sniffing out the aroma of chicken and dressing that clung to my hair and my clothes than he was in the stranger in the play yard. After all, he had seen them come, and he had seen them go. The Australian shepherds did their best to entice Hero to play, leaping, twirling and play-bowing, but he just gave them a long-suffering look and lay down on the ground with his head on his paws.

  I had intended to
keep the Lab in the boarding kennel, as was my usual custom with rescues, but something about his brokenhearted demeanor changed my mind. The other dogs obviously did not feel threatened by him, and I thought he could benefit by some hands-on interaction inside the house. So I dragged out another big wire crate and washed and sterilized another dog bowl.

  When Sonny came knocking at my door around six that evening, there were five, not four, dogs waiting to greet her. Some were better behaved than others.

  The happy chaos of welcoming a visitor began with Cisco spinning and play-bowing his greeting, Majesty barking, and the Aussies bouncing from sofa to chair to floor and back while awaiting their turn to be petted; Mystery, the border collie, who accompanied Sonny everywhere she went, playfully pawed and tugged the ears of each dog who crowded around Sonny. Sonny sank quickly into a chair by the door, her long silver braid swinging over her shoulder as she bent forward with outstretched arms to give each of my pushy pets the greeting they demanded. I let this go on for about ten seconds, because Sonny would have scolded me if I had not, and then sent each of the girls to their separate crates, where they found a peanut butter-stuffed rubber toy waiting for them. Cisco, who tended to panic in small enclosed spaces like dog crates, was sent to his rug in front of the hearth, while Mystery pranced around the room picking up toys and trying to tempt him to come play. Some people might have said that was unfair to Cisco, but I thought it was good for his self-control.

  Laughing, Sonny held up a bottle of wine to me. “My contribution to the meal. Maybe I should have brought dog biscuits.”

  In all this time, Hero, who had been lying quietly in his crate with the door open, had not moved or made a sound. As I took the wine and thanked her, Sonny noticed the newcomer. “Well,” she said, rising, “who is this?”

  Sonny was a tall, slim-built woman whose prematurely gray hair and porcelain skin gave her a kind of natural beauty that she never enhanced with makeup or artifice. She was probably in her fifties—only about fifteen years older than I was—but she suffered from a debilitating form of rheumatoid arthritis that sometimes was so severe it actually immobilized her. She had had a good summer and claimed a noticeable improvement in her symptoms since Mystery had come into her life. But I noticed tonight she had brought her cane and used it to balance herself as she stood. Immediately I felt a pang of chagrin for letting my dogs jump all over her.

  I said, “I’m calling him Hero. We don’t know his real name yet. He’s just visiting.”

  I would tell her the full story, of course. But, I admit, I wanted to get her initial reaction to the dog before I said anything more.

  She went over to the crate, and I thought she was going to bend down to pet him. It’s never a good idea to invade the personal space of a strange dog, and I started to say something to that effect, but I didn’t have to. She suddenly drew in her breath and straightened up, closing her eyes. I moved quickly toward her, thinking she was in pain, but she opened her eyes then and looked at me. She said, “What happened to this poor fellow?”

  I answered cautiously, “What do you mean?”

  She looked at the dog again. “Such despair,” she said softly. “Oh, you poor, poor thing.”

  I said, hesitantly, “I don’t suppose . . . I mean, you’re not getting any impressions of what might have happened, are you?”

  She was silent for a moment, and then I saw her repress a shudder. “Just terror, confusion and a noise like thunder. I’ve never known such a . . . a dark chaos. Oh, it’s so sad.” She looked at me gravely. “He says his life is over. Everything is all over. For heaven’s sake, Raine, don’t you have any idea where he came from?”

  For a moment it was hard for me to speak. I had to clear my throat. “I think I’d better open the wine,” I said.

  As I poured the wine, I told Sonny about yesterday’s gruesome find and Hero’s ordeal. When I was finished, she nodded, unsurprised. “So that’s the thunder I keep hearing.”

  It took me a moment. “Oh. The gunshot.”

  She sipped her wine, watching Hero from one of the two chairs I had drawn up in front of the fire. The old house was drafty, and in the winter I had all of my meals in front of a fire. “What an awful thing for him. He must have felt so helpless, being locked outside the door.”

  “I don’t even like to think about the kind of person who could do something like that.”

  “We can never know another person’s heart, Raine. She must have been very deeply disturbed.”

  I suppose she was right, but I couldn’t seem to find much sympathy for the deceased under the circumstances. I was spared from answering by the distant sound of the oven timer. I took a quick sip of my wine and set the glass on the occasional table. “Be right back.”

  “Do you need any help?”

  “No, just relax.” I grinned. “Even I can manage paper plates and leftovers.”

  A beseeching look from the hearth rug was Cisco’s way of reminding me what a very good dog he had been—particularly considering the fact that Mystery had settled down not three feet away from him with one of his favorite toys—so I said, in passing, “Okay, boy, release.”

  And then the oddest thing happened. Predictably, Cisco bounded to his feet and went straight for the toy with which Mystery was teasing him. But at the same time, Hero emerged from his crate just as though he too were responding to the word “release.” He stood there for a moment, looking confused. Sonny extended her hand to him and called his name softly, but he didn’t even glance at her. He turned around and went back into his crate.

  I shook my head helplessly and continued to the kitchen.

  “I’ve been kind of working with him,” I explained to Sonny as we settled with our plates of warmed-over chicken and dressing at the little table I’d drawn up before the fire. “Just trying to see how responsive he is, you know. The thing is, I think someone really put some time into training this dog. For one thing, look.”

  I gestured toward the canine population that surrounded us. Cisco, the dog in whom I had invested countless hours of training, lay obediently at my feet, his eyes fixed upon my fork, long strings of drool hanging from his jowls. Begging at the table is, by any other name, still begging. Mystery was a bit more subtle about it. She sat prettily a few feet away, but the way she watched every bite Sonny took indicated that she was by no means a stranger to the good things that come from human plates. Even my three crated dogs were sitting at attention, rubber bones forgotten, hoping for a morsel to be tossed their way. But Hero lay quietly in his crate with the door open, indifferent to tantalizing aromas and the other dogs’ interest, while we enjoyed our meal. That was the way a dog with perfect manners was supposed to behave.

  Sonny pointed out, “He’s probably too depressed to be interested in food.”

  “Well, there’s that,” I agreed. “But watch this.”

  Without getting up from the table, I said, “Hero, here.”

  Hero slowly got out of his crate and came over to me. Ignoring both Mystery and Cisco, who were actually distracted enough from their fixation upon the plates of food to turn and sniff him as he passed, Hero sat beside my chair.

  I said, “Down.”

  He shifted his weight to one hip and lay down.

  “Roll over,” I said.

  The dog obligingly showed his belly.

  “Impressive,” agreed Sonny, raising an eyebrow. “And if he does all this for a stranger, imagine how well he’d perform for the person who actually trained him.”

  “Exactly,” I said. I knew she would understand. “It’s not every day you meet a dog like this.”

  To Hero I said, “Release,” and he got to his feet.

  He started to go back to his crate, but Sonny stretched out her hand. “Come here, sweet boy.”

  “Don’t feed him from the table,” I warned, unnecessarily.

  Hero turned his head toward Sonny’s outstretched hand and sniffed it disinterestedly. She ran her hand over his big, blocky head,
tugging at his ear. He tolerated her petting, but did not respond to it. Mystery, however, was starting to look annoyed, so I said, “It’s probably better not to give him too much attention while we’re eating. We don’t want to start a dogfight.”

  “That’s the last thing this poor guy needs,” agreed Sonny, and then she hesitated. “Wait a minute. What’s this?”

  Her gentle stroking had pushed one of his floppy ears backward, and even from my seat across from her I could see a darkish smudge against the pale pink underskin of his ear. I left my chair and sank down to my knees to examine it.

  “It’s a tattoo,” I said, looking up at her.

  She looked as surprised as I felt. “A tattoo? Who tattoos their dog’s ear?”

  “Actually,” I said slowly, “it used to be a fairly common practice before microchipping. People with field champions, expensive breed stock, any kind of valuable dog, wanted to be able to identify it if the dog was stolen.”

  “Good heavens. Is that what he is, then, do you think? A field champion?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t think so. Hardly anybody tattoos anymore.” I didn’t think it was necessary to add that the reason the practice had been mostly abandoned was because thieves had discovered that the simplest way to eliminate a tattooed dog’s identification was to cut off its ear.

  “Well, obviously somebody does.”

  My heart was beginning to pound with excitement. “Some laboratories,” I admitted, “who do research on domestic animals. A few police departments, but none around here. And”—I slid my arm around Hero’s neck as I looked up at Sonny, suddenly filled with certainty— “service dog organizations.”

  Chapter Five

  There are dozens upon dozens of agencies in the United States that supply service dogs to people who are blind or otherwise disabled, and all of them do remarkable work. Most of them actually retain legal ownership of the dogs they train even after they are placed with a person with a disability, and perform regular follow-up visits to make sure the match is still going well. All of them keep excellent records.