Creature Discomforts

even were, you knew you were my dogs!” Running my eyes over Rowdy’s and Kimi’s thick, stand-off wolf-gray coats, admiring their heavy bone, smiling at the over-the-back wagging of their white tails, looking into the deep chocolate of their almond-shaped eyes, I added, “Not that I blame him for paying attention to you. Love me, love my dogs, love my dogs, love me. One and the same. And I am hardly in a position to blame him! This dog thing is obviously hereditary. And if he is totally infatuated with Gabrielle, wonderful! If he has any sense, he’ll marry her now while he’s still her hero and before she comes to her senses, and you’ll woo-woo-woo at their wedding, because he will definitely make sure you’re there, and I might or might not dance, depending on whether he remembers to invite me, which it is painfully clear he might very well not because he might completely forget my entire existence. After all, I’ve forgotten most of it! Why shouldn’t he?” Dogs take everything personally. When I quit ranting about how my father failed to pay attention to me and finally noticed the dogs’ bewilderment and hurt, I promptly apologized. In tones of sweet comfort, I said, “You are good dogs. You have not done anything wrong. I am very sorry that I got carried away.” I bent down, pulled their two big heads together, and nuzzled. “We will get through this,” I promised them. “We just aren’t going to get the help I thought we were, that’s all.” My brain tickled in a familiar-feeling way. “As the saying goes,” I said, “Dog helps those who help themselves.”
    Not that it was the most hysterically funny thing anyone has ever said, although Rowdy and Kimi pranced appreciatively. No, the important thing about the bit of foolishness was that it felt familiar in a new and splendidly specific way: As soon as I spoke, I knew I’d just said the kind of thing I would say. Reveling in the unfamiliar sensation of feeling even a tiny bit like myself, I exclaimed, “In Dog we trust!” Carried away, I cried, “Dog is my copilot! A mighty fortress is our...” I stopped there. Sacrilege wouldn’t offend my canine listeners, who wouldn’t hear it as such. But when you’re on the brink of horrifying yourself, it’s time to quit.
    Fired up by my anger at Buck and the renewal of my normal religious fervor, I dumped the tea remaining in my cup into the kitchen sink and even remembered—remembered!—to wash the cup to discourage the dogs from filching it, licking off the traces of milk and sugar, dropping it on the floor, and breaking it, thereby leaving sharp pieces that might cut their pads. Then, incredibly, I also remembered, if rather belatedly, to investigate the contents of Rowdy’s saddlebags, which I’d carried into the cottage and left on the table. With one exception, the contents of Rowdy’s pack were uninformative. Instead of weighting his pack with rice, as I’d done with Kimi’s, I’d padded his pack with hand towels and loaded it with bottles of spring water. In a zippered bag clipped to the top of the pack, however, were a green steno pad and a ballpoint pen. Oh, Lord! Was I the kind of obnoxious writer who is always prepared in case inspiration strikes? If so, the muse had barely whispered. Only the first few pages of the pad had been used, and what I’d written on those was not writing, properly speaking, but indecipherable scrawl culminating in a rebus that I must have used as a form of idiosyncratic shorthand.
     

     
    It had three elements: two hopelessly inartistic efforts at pictures linked by a remarkably clear equal sign. The rudely triangular image on the left, short scratches emanating from a vertical line, was a childish rendition of an evergreen tree. The figure on the right was a sort of wobbly diamond with two interior lines connecting the opposite points. A kite? Possibly a kite with no tail and no string. Maybe not? By comparison, the tree was an obvious tree. And the meaning of my rebus? Maine is not the Pine Tree State because it’s thick with coconut palms; I wouldn’t have written myself a shorthand note about the presence of pines in Acadia National Park. A pine tree is ...? The Pine Tree Foundation! The kite, however, stumped me. The Pine Tree Foundation can go fly a kite?
    The Pine Tree Foundation, Gabrielle Beamon, the late Norman Axelrod, Florace Livermore, arsenic, Anita Fairley, Steve Delaney, and my father could all go fly kites! With an