Creature Discomforts

suppose.
    As to my devotion to animals, observation of my own behavior suggested that my reflexes knew a lot more about my dogs than my brain remembered. For example, after I’d listened to the unknown Bonnie’s arsenical phone message, the dogs had performed an energetic song-and-dance routine that hadn’t fooled me one bit. In response to the performance, which consisted of prancing around while emitting unearthly yet identifiably Arctic yowls and yips, I had not mistakenly decided that the three of us were a vaudeville team. Rather, my legs had taken me to the kitchen, where I’d automatically checked the clock over the stove to make sure that it was after five and thus canine dinnertime. More importantly, I hadn’t just naively doled out dog food. Without pondering the matter at all, I’d led the incredibly gorgeous male—what the hell was his name? I knew it better than my own!—to one of two large Vari-Kennels in the bedroom. Having incarcerated him, I’d then filled two dog bowls, replaced the food bag on the top of the refrigerator, put the beautiful female’s dinner on the floor, and dashed back to the male’s crate, where he quit screaming and thrashing the second I fed him. In other words, empty though my head was, my body wisely expressed a practical knowledge of the malamute vocabulary. It is a lexicon that does not extend to the word share.
    What the hell were their names? How could I have forgotten?! What ingratitude! There I’d been, exposed on a mountainside like a doomed female infant, when these ungodly beautiful dogs had materialized from the mist. Here I was now! Still astounded at heaven’s bounty in blessing me with this massive, furry evidence of hope and strength in an otherwise bewildering and menacing universe! And what had I done in return? Failed to recognize my saviors as my own dogs! Effaced their names from my witless so-called intellect!
    Having staged my own internal revival meeting and confessed myself a sinner before the altar of Almighty Dog, I resolved to atone. I longed with religious fervor to know the dogs’ names. What drove me was, among other things, the conviction that the ability to call the dogs by their own names would somehow release me from the fear that still gripped me.
    Before ransacking the cottage for rabies certificates, dog snapshots, or other artifacts of my lost past that might bear the magic names, I made myself slow down, breathe calmly, and carefully check both dogs for subtle injuries. Neither was limping or bleeding. Still, the female, with her Lone Ranger mask and her air of acute self-possession, struck me as too proud to whine about pain; and the male, with his soft, glowing expression and his debonair charm, seemed capable of ignoring a bodily injury if it competed with his zest for the joys of the here-and-now. I began with the female. She readily sprawled tummy-up on the floor as I ran my fingertips over her, extended and flexed her legs, and peered closely at the pads of her feet. Despite a rivalrous gleam in his dark eyes, the handsome boy suppressed what I suspected was an incipient rumble of complaint about having to watch his chum get all the attention.
    “Okay, Big Boy,” I finally told him. “Your lady friend seems fine. Let’s take a look at you.” Eager to join the game, he dropped to the floor and rolled over, tucked in his chin and forepaws, and let me repeat the examination on him. As I did so, his companion remained on her back, and the two sets of warm, almond-shaped eyes stayed fixed on my face. Finding nothing alarming, I finished by giving the two massive chests and tummies a simultaneous and vigorous rub.
    “I swear to God,” I promised, “that somewhere in this house is something with your names written on it. In the predicament we’re in right now, the crucial thing is to have a plan, right? So, here’s the beginning of it. First, I am going to get myself cleaned up. And then I am going to find out who you two are. And then we’ll take it from there.”
    So, after I’d showered, toweled myself off, and dried my hair with what felt like someone else’s hair dryer, I examined Holly Winter’s clothes, which consisted almost exclusively of jeans, T-shirts, and sweatshirts. The jeans and a couple of fleece tops were free of adornment, but almost every T-shirt was embellished with a team of sled dogs, the head of an Alaskan malamute, the logo of the Cambridge Dog Training Club, a boast about what Big Dogs