Invisible Beasts (8 page)

The invisible ass is another story entirely. If Balaam had laid a finger on the Wild Rubber Jack, that beast would have gone nose to the dirt and flipped the prophet like a flapjack onto the angel's head, then gone off to crop a thistle. The Wild Rubber Jack takes no abuse, not even from the person with the carrots (or almonds). Unlike Balaam's ass, however, he does not talk. His voice isn't known for good advice. It's only the same outrageous, hilarious, earsplitting bray that wild asses have evolved, over the millennia, to call to each other across the untamed deserts and solitudes.

7

T
housands of years before humans began domesticating livestock, wolves domesticated humans. Enjoying our garbage heaps, wolves who were bold and friendly set out to make us share the warm, safe spots at our firesides where cooking went on, and the choicest scraps were to be had. They learned our body language better than any other nonhuman species, dogging our every move—and they became dogs. Since then, we have evolved in intimate mutuality. Anyone who thinks that dogs are mere servile pets may learn from the following tale how our consciousness is controlled by those whom we think we have mastered
.

The Riddle of Invisible Dogs

A
T THE TIME OF THIS TALE
I was, you might say, between dogs. Because I can't live without a dog, whenever I lose one of these companions whose only unforgiveable fault is growing old so fast, it's just a matter of time until a new dog arrives to lick the bowls of a beloved predecessor. Meanwhile, I volunteer at the Humane Society, where my dogs come from. This time, my duties consisted of riding once a week with Lucas, a retired policeman who worked as a humane officer, to enforce the anticruelty laws. We rode in a van with cages in the back and a sheaf of that day's abuse reports on the dashboard. Most were cases of neglect, and the more I saw, the more I thought about neglect, until I made the discovery recounted here.

Lucas had heavy-lidded eyes, a self-contained manner, and the build of a sea lion. Filling the doorways of rich and poor alike, of dilapidated row houses and pseudo-Tudor “manors,” he politely pointed out the facts.
Sir, maybe you don't take the dog inside enough, because his belly is all hard mud and I see this hole he dug to get out
of the rain . . . Sir, your dog needs veterinary attention, the chain is growing into her neck and the skin is infected, see? . . . Ma'am, the dogs were locked in the house you left, maybe you didn't notice but it's not the realtor's responsibility . . . Ma'am, your son has the right to play paintball, but for the dog's fur to look like this, and shaking like this, it's not good for the animal, no?

We'd ride around all morning. At lunchtime, we'd park outside a donut shop, get coffee, and eat in the van, where Lucas would open his insulated cooler for the stash of steamed tamales his wife made every day. Since he insisted on sharing them, I began bringing homemade fudge. We both licked our fingertips. Briefly, the van lit up with gold and green summery scents of maize and moist corn husks, and in a convivial interlude, the gray scenes of neglect would fade. Then we'd get back on the road, often returning to the Society with confiscated animals. I would wonder if the time had come to bring home one of the rescued pooches. When Dog Day finally arrived, however, it was not at all what I had anticipated.

Lucas and I rode to a suburban household that had been reported by its neighbors many times before. We parked beside a rise, topped by a modest house overlooking a flight of limestone steps appropriate for a museum, and, to one side, a stone cloister with lancet arches. We climbed to the front door, rang, and waited. Below, the cloister disclosed to our view not the swimming pool I
expected, but a giant plaster crocodile and two tall, grappling plaster pandas.

“You can tell he's
un poco loco
,” Lucas said. We exchanged a look. The door cracked open, and Lucas asked a nose-tip and lips for the name of the dog owner.

“I dunno,” said the lips.

“We're taking the dog, it's really skinny.”

“Okay, you take the dog, it's not my dog.”

“Someone is needed to sign, to surrender it.”

The door slammed. We went back down the steps into a yard in which stood a pavilion tent, with scalloped trim, near a flailing black-and-gray banner staked to the ground. The black stripes flashed, the gray stripes shimmered, and walking over to this heraldic vision, we found a German shepherd so thin she was almost two-dimensional—the dark stripes were shadows between her bones. Lucas took a cell phone picture. Then he lassoed the dog's head with a nylon lead, untied her, and hauled her—sniffing and nibbling his pants for biscuits—into the back of the van. She cried as we drove away.

“I love cases like this one,” Lucas confided. “The evidence is right there. One photo in court. I take the dog and go.” We rode underneath the city zoo's footbridge painted with multicolored beasts, all grinning like humans.

“So,” I said, “I looked up the word
neglect
in the dictionary. It comes from a Latin word,
lego
. Guess what that means?”

“‘Lego'? It sounds like you're talking to a big dog bitin' on your leg.”

“It means ‘to choose' and ‘to read.' Two different things. I'm wondering, what do those things have in common?” My companion looked sleepy, thinking it over.

“Paying attention,” he said.

“Ha! So . . . the real meaning of neglecting a dog is, not paying attention?”

“
No prestan atencion
,” Lucas agreed, in the Spanish of sound generalizations. “This guy,” he thumbed backward, “he's already got so many charges—animal cruelty is nothing. He neglects the dog because he can always get another one. And I'll have to go and rescue it again.”

W
HEN
I
CAME HOME
, I lit a fire in my den and sat before it on the hearth bricks. It was October, a good season for contemplation. The walls and ceiling pulsed with ruddy tints. In the bay window, above the woods outside, in a mist of bluish clouds, rose a fiery moon. I drank a glass of wine, made a plateful of bleu cheese on crackers, and heard coyotes yipping to bring the pack together for the night's hunt—cheery, eerie, noisy coyotes, the free canids of the earth, the ones who scorned pethood. Did they have a better evolutionary deal than dogs? I thought about the gray wolves that once lived in my woods; wolves might have denned where I sat now, with their big heads and icy eyes. And I thought about the young
bitch we'd just rescued. Tonight, at least, she was better off than most coyotes: she slept beside a tray filled with more kibble than she could eat. This overfull tray would stay in her cage till she relaxed enough to allow others around her food, without attacking. Then would I be ready to adopt her?

I reached for my cheese crackers—and they weren't there. Absentmindedly, I'd brought an empty plate to the fireside . . . I went back to the kitchen, made cheese crackers, and returned.

The fire, still in its yellow youth, rushed from a bed of breathing embers. I revisited the memory of my last dog, also a German shepherd. Her eyes were intense and sweet, like espresso, and she pushed limits. Forbidden to put her paws on the bed, she'd jump up and put her elbows on the bed instead, her paws scrupulously curled in the air. She had hated closed doors. Every door in the house had been nudged ajar by a slim nose, snuffling through flared nostrils, like a black space probe from a planet of fur . . . I missed a hundred special things about her. Now she was gone out of the universe. How, I wondered, how could anyone live with a dog and
not
pay attention?

I reached for my cheese crackers, and they weren't there. Shaking my buzzed head, I thought I must have eaten them without noticing—shame on me, not paying attention!—and went back to the kitchen to make more, and returned.

By now, my fire had aged to pink cubes, architecturally
heaped, under blue flames chasing their tails. Suddenly, in the darkness, the den shook to a loud thud—my farmer neighbor's twelve-gauge shotgun, aimed at the coyotes. Then the farmer's corgis barked telegraphically across fields and woods, and some Great Pyrenees, from a nearby sheepfold, uttered deep grunts, as if to say, “Uh-huh, we hear you.” These sounds had the aspect of a question put as directly as possible. Which was the better evolutionary deal for canids—freedom and the farmer's shotgun, or pethood and neglect? All the pitiable horrors I'd witnessed streamed through my wine-weakened mind, all the sadness I'd thought I'd gotten used to. Needing comfort, I reached for my cheese crackers.

They weren't there. Again.

“This is getting monotonous!” I yelled aloud. Then I saw, on the softly pulsing wall, the shadow of a wolf.

I looked around and caught a German shepherd—a big tan brute with ears like trowels—in the act of using my sofa for a dinner napkin, running his muzzle along the cushions and back the other way.

“Bad doggie,” I said, with feeling. “Bad!” He startled: his ears wilted, his sandy tail melded to his white belly, and he skulked into the kitchen, where, darting at me looks of shock and awe, he trotted into the gap between the sink and the stove, as far as his shoulders, and drooped his head against the wall. He huddled there, rib cage pumping, panting and yawning with stress. A whiff of dog sweat filled the air. What had I done?

What happened next was predictable. I spent the rest of the evening cooking for a dog. I spent the rest of the year training my new dog. I named him Wolf, for wolfing my snacks. And I discovered that he was invisible.

M
Y DISCOVERY BEGAN
when the postal carrier slid out of her car with a packet in hand, and walked straight into a dog sniffing her sneakers. As I opened my mouth to call him, she stepped forward, and kept stepping, exactly where Wolf was not. I stared openmouthed, missing my cue about the nice sunshine we were having.

“I'm so sorry, he isn't trained yet,” I said. She looked puzzled. “The dog,” I added. “He's new.”

“You got a dog? I'm glad he's not out, I hate it when dogs get out.” She smiled, getting back into the car as Wolf tried to goose her.

Then Mike, of Mike's Raccoon Wranglers, came to install shields in my chimney. Wolf trotted out, tongue shaking like a long jelly, straight toward the braced, separated knees of an unsuspecting Mike, who surveyed my roof . . . and sidestepped, boots suddenly nimble. He unfolded his ladder with the motions, if not the conversation, of a workman avoiding a large dog.

“Sorry about the dog,” I said. Mike looked puzzled. “See the dog?” I asked. Still holding the ladder, with a slightly defensive air, Mike looked all around me. “Oh! Never mind,” I apologized rapidly, “I thought I saw—the
neighbor's dog out there, in the yard, but it was only—oh! Never mind, I must have seen the woodchuck.” Mike laughed and climbed the ladder. All the while, Wolf stood leaning on my legs, panting with pleasure. Conclusions framed themselves. But I knew invisible animals, and I knew people, and this was not the proper behavior of people around invisible animals. They should not be avoiding what they could not see.

A
LL MY LIFE
I
HAD KNOWN
that there were plenty of invisible dogs around; now I faced the surprising fact that I'd never thought seriously about them. I had known that among the unleashed dogs passing me in the street, sniffing behind bushes, or posting liquid messages on trees, a goodly number were not visible to normal humans—but somehow, this had never provoked either wonder, or basic questions. I hadn't paid attention! Perhaps the fault lay with my childhood bedtime stories, which were often about an invisible poodle named Tidbit, who had shyly but persistently dogged Granduncle Erasmus on his extensive travels through Europe, Africa, and what he'd called “the Orient.” At the bottom of my mind, all invisible dogs were Tidbit, whom I had outgrown, and about whom I had no more questions than I did about swing sets. Shame on me, because the basic questions were burning ones—and Granduncle Erasmus was no longer here to answer them.