In the morning he found a half-dozen black-fingered manikins sitting around the bowl, rolling chunks of kibble in their paws. He shooed them away and stalked to the workshop carrying the desecrated food. His father stood by the cabinets, filing breeding records he’d taken to the house.
Squirrels are getting the food, he signed, indignantly.
His father pushed his glasses up his nose and peered into the bowl. “I wondered when that would happen,” he said. “There’s no point in putting that out anymore. Once they’ve found it, they’ll never let it alone.”
The idea made Edgar wild with frustration. Isn’t there some way we could trap him? he signed. Trick him into a pen? He’d settle down once we worked with him, I know he would. I could do that.
His father gave him a long look. “We might, I suppose. But if we tricked him, he’d just run off again. You know that.” He sighed and ran a hand through his hair. “Every time I think about that dog, something your grandfather used to say comes to mind. He hated placing pups, really hated it. That’s why he started keeping them until they were yearlings—said most people had no idea how to handle a pup. Wrecked their dogs before they were six months old. I remember him taking the truck one night after he’d heard about a new owner holding back food to punish a pup. The next morning the pup was in the kennel again.”
Didn’t they argue with him about it?
His father grinned. “They thought it had run away. And that wasn’t the first one he took back, either. If they cared enough to call, he’d tell them it showed up out of nowhere, give them what for, and maybe let them have the dog back. Most of the time he just sent them a check and told them to get a beagle. Anyway, what I mean is, he hated having to choose where the dogs went. He thought it was pure guesswork. ‘We’ll know we’ve got it right when they choose for themselves,’ he used to say.”
That doesn’t make sense.
“That’s what I thought, too. I asked him what he meant, but he just shrugged. I don’t think he knew himself. But I keep thinking maybe that stray is making exactly the kind of choice he talked about. We’re talking about an adult dog, a dog that’s been out in the woods for a long time, trying to decide whether or not we can be trusted. Whether this is his place. And it matters to him—he’d rather starve than make the wrong decision.”
He’s just scared.
“No question about that. But he’s smart enough to get past that if he wants to.”
What if he does come in?
“Well, if he chooses to, then—maybe—we’d have a dog on our hands worth keeping. Even worth bringing into the line.”
You’d breed him if he came in?
“I don’t know. We’d have a lot of work to do first. Understand his temperament. See how he takes to training. Get to know him.”
But he’s not one of ours.
“How do you suppose our dogs got to be our dogs in the first place, Edgar?” his father said, grinning wickedly. “Your grandfather didn’t care about breeds. He always thought there was a better dog out there somewhere. The only place he was sure he wasn’t going to find it was in the show ring, so he spent most of his life talking with people about their dogs. Whenever he found one he liked—and it didn’t matter whether it was a dog he saw every day or one he heard about halfway across the state—he’d cut a deal to cross it into the line in exchange for one of the litter. He wasn’t above cheating a little now and then, either.”
Cheating? Like how?
Instead of answering, his father turned to the filing cabinets and began fingering through the records.
“Another time. Your grandfather had already stopped that kind of thing when I was a kid, but I do remember one or two new dogs. All I’m trying to say is, we’ve got to be patient. That dog’s going to have to decide on his own what he wants to do.”
Edgar nodded as if he agreed. But something his father had said had given him an idea.
THAT EVENING HE CARRIED a sleeping bag out to the porch along with a flashlight and a book. He had untied and unrolled the sleeping bag in front of the screen door and was settling down to read when Almondine, as if she knew his plan and didn’t like it, stepped into the narrow space between Edgar and the screen door and lay down. He poked her in the flank where she was ticklish and she stood with a harrumph, then stepped over him and lay down again, this time draping her tail across his face.
Okay, I get the point, he signed, aggravated but smiling. He coaxed her into standing, this time more gently, cupping his hand under her belly, and he rearranged the sleeping bag. When he was done, there was space enough for them both to look through the screen, though Edgar had to crane his neck to see the spot behind the garden where the bowl sat. Almondine lay with her head on her paws, panting contentedly and watching Edgar with her flecked brown eyes. He drew his fingers along the soft fur of her ears and through her mane, and soon her eyes drifted shut and her breaths deepened on the exhale. He watched her and shook his head. She could be so vehement at times and, yet, when everything had been put her way, so gentle and accommodating and radiating certainty that the world was in order. After a while he propped himself up on his elbows. Under the glow of the flashlight, he paged through The Jungle Book until he found the passage that had come to his mind over and over that day.
Mowgli put up his strong brown hand, and just under Bagheera’s silky chin, where the giant rolling muscles were all hid by the glossy hair, he came upon a little bald spot.
“There is no one in the jungle that knows that I, Bagheera, carry that mark—the mark of the collar; and yet, Little Brother, I was born among men, and it was among men that my mother died—in the cages of the King’s Palace at Oodeypore. It was because of this that I paid the price for thee at the Council when thou wast a little naked cub. Yes, I too was born among men. I had never seen the jungle. They fed me behind bars from an iron pan till one night I felt that I was Bagheera—the Panther—and no man’s plaything, and I broke the silly lock with one blow of my paw and came away; and because I had learned the ways of men, I became more terrible in the jungle than Shere Khan. Is it not so?”
“Yes,” said Mowgli; “all the jungle fear Bagheera—all except Mowgli.”
He switched off the flashlight and laid his head next to Almondine’s. He wondered if it was like that somehow with the stray, whether it had decided after some terrible moment that it was no man’s plaything, or whether it was some combination of frightened and crazy, like Claude said. In time the television went silent. Claude walked upstairs. His mother leaned out from the doorway.
“Good night, Edgar,” she said.
Good night, he signed—drowsily, he hoped. He could feel her sizing up the arrangement.
“What are you up to?”
It’s hot upstairs. We want to sleep where there is a breeze.
When the house had been silent for as long as he could stand it, he sat up, unlatched the door, and slipped outside. Almondine tried to follow, but he shut the door between them. She could open it, sometimes, by catching her claws at the bottom—but he hushed her, holding her gaze until he knew she understood. He walked to the flower bed beneath the kitchen window, and there he lifted a bread bag from among the green straps of the irises and crossed
