Hounded

there anything mysterious about most of my teas; it’s just that I have twenty-one hundred years of experience as an herbalist, so I know a wee bit about drug interactions.
    › You told me once most of your teas don’t involve magic, ‹ Oberon said, › so that means you could make them ahead of time and just have your employees sell them while we’re off hunting somewhere. ‹
    You’re a pretty smart dog .
    › Damn skippy. ‹
    But I only have one employee right now. He’s doing me a huge favor working these two days while we’re gone .
    › So hire more, Atticus! Everybody wants to work because they all have nice dogs to buy steaks for—unless they’re cat people, and then they have kitty litter to buy. Hey, are those trees right there ponderosas? ‹
    Yes, they are . We were driving north on I-17 through Munds Park. The Coconino National Forest shrugged off the scrub oaks and alligator junipers in that area and started to assert itself with some taller trees.
    › They look like a whole lot of fun to run through. Bet you there’s a deer just over the next hill. ‹
    Irish wolfhounds like Oberon were originally bred to hunt down wolves and deer. They were so good at it that Ireland doesn’t have any more of either.
    Yeah, but that’s all private property , I pointed out. We have to play in the national forest. There will be ponderosas there too. And some stands of aspen .
    › Are we driving nonstop? ‹
    No, we’re going to stop in Flagstaff .
    › Aw, no. You’re taking us to that vegetarian place, aren’t you? ‹
    It’s a coffee place. You can’t just automatically classify anything that isn’t a steak house as vegetarian .
    › Yes, I can. This is America. You said Americans assert their own opinions as if they were facts and dismiss inconvenient facts as mere opinions. ‹
    Sometimes Oberon doesn’t process anything I say, and sometimes he listens to me a bit too well. We may be in America, but you’re not an American. You’re the hound of the last Druid in the world. I’m not going to allow you to get away with sloppy logic .
    › It’s not fair of you to hold me to a higher standard than any human in this country. ‹
    Yes, it is. I feed you sausage and steak instead of dry kibble, so I’m entitled to elevated conversation .
    We wrangled happily over my high expectations until we reached Flagstaff. I promptly steered my way to Beaver Street just south of the railroad tracks, where sits Macy’s European Coffee House. It’s a wee place where they roast their own coffee and make all their pastries from scratch. They have metal picnic tables outside painted forest green, and there’s a large utility pole papered over with concert posters and flyers for seminars with visiting Asian mystics. Friendly dogs are routinely hitched to the pole or the tables, and get petted by everyone going in and out. I tied Oberon to the pole to keep people from freaking out and told him to try to look docile. He has to make a special effort since he’s such a huge dog, but wagging his tail and letting his tongue loll out tends to work fairly well.
    › Hurry up, please, ‹ he said. › I always feel so stupid when you’re not around. People either make weird noises or talk to me like I’m an idiot and I can’t tell them to bugger off. ‹
    I promised him I would hurry and stepped through the door into the most marvelous aroma: arabica beans and fresh-baked bread. Macy’s always smelled good like that.
    Its regular customers live on the political left, and they dress like it, wearing cotton, hemp, and wool, applejack caps over thick ropes of Rasta dreads, and thickets of untamed facial hair. Framed watercolors from local artists line the walls, and the menu of sandwiches is scrawled on a chalkboard. The employee dress code seems to be » show up with clothes on, « but employees also seem to be encouraged to express their bohemian sensibility with many exotic facial piercings.
    Macy’s is one of my favorite places to watch people. Half of the customers are self-conscious members of the intelligentsia from Northern Arizona University, much of the rest are Making A Point of some kind, and then once in a while somebody comes in from the street without realizing what kind of place it is. It’s genuinely shocking for such people to walk into a business that’s so anticorporate and independent. Their disorientation is plain—as is their growing horror and guilt that they are the only people there