Sour Grapes

grimaced, looking at the mangled, half-chewed poultry carcass that someone had tied with pieces of rough twine around his neck. A sprinkling of white feathers Uttered the dog’s yard. “Looks like you’re already in trouble for trying to make lunch out of the neighbor’s chicken.”
    Having been raised in the rural South, Savannah had heard of the practice of tying a dead bird around a dog’s neck and allowing it to stay on him until it literally rotted off. A disgusting method, but supposedly an effective one for putting the animal off the idea of chickens. And certainly, this fellow looked as though he hated his situation.
    “Maybe you should just stick with phoning the Colonel the next time you get a hankerin’ for a drumstick, dar-lin’,” she told him.
    He mumbled something in wolf-dog that sounded like a pathetic denial.
    “What’s that?” she said, sticking her finger through the fence and stroking his moist black nose. “You say you didn’t do it? You were framed? That’s what all the bad guys say. Why should I believe you?”
    The big eyes rolled, and he shook his head, fluffing out the magnificent ruff of fur around his neck where his gruesome burden was tied.
    “Well, that’s true. You’ve never lied to me before, but...”
    Savannah stood there, thinking, wondering, evaluating her options. “Hang in there, handsome,” she said. “I’ll be right back.”
    And she was, a couple of minutes later with her Swiss Army knife in hand. “I’ll tell you what,” she said. “If you come back here to the gate... that’s it... right back here, where I can reach you.”
    She leaned over the locked gate that connected the two yards. “Now don’t bite me, okay?” Stretching as far as she could, she could almost reach the animal, but not quite.
    “If you want me to help you, you’ll have to stick those big clodhoppers of yours up here on the fence. That’s a good boy... wolf... dog... or whatever you are.”
    He reared up and lifted his huge front feet onto the gate. She was shocked to see that he was nearly as tall as she was. Images from Jack London’s stories and the Grimm brothers’ fairy tales flashed through her mind.
    “Hm-m-m... what big teeth you have, my dear,” she told him. “Ah, but you’re just a big baby, aren’t you?” Again, more eye rolling and whining.
    “Okay, okay. Hold still.” Reaching across the gate, she slid her knife blade beneath the twine and quickly sliced through it She grabbed the end of the cut string and hauled the carcass over the gate to her side of the fence.
    “But you can’t tell anyone that I cut this off,” she told him. “It’ll just be our little secret. And if anybody asks, it fell off of you and right here into this yard, which, by the way, I was invited to come into by one of the house’s occupants. Got that? I just found this foul fowl lyin’ back here on this side of the gate.”
    Relieved of his albatross, the ancient mariner began to prance about, shaking himself, and grinning a big, toothy, wolfy grin.
    “Feel better now?” she asked, as she leaned over and coaxed him back onto the gate so that she could pet him. Looking at the brass tag that dangled from his heavy leather collar, she said, “Nanook. That’s your name, huh? Well, I’ve done you a favor, which means you owe me. If I ever find myself plagued by a kid in a red cloak or a trio of bothersome pigs, I’m gonna call on you, okay?”
    The blue eyes looked into hers with a depth of intelligence and understanding that took her aback, and the quiet dignity of the creature touched her heart. “ You’re welcome,” she said softly. “It was my pleasure.”
    Moments later, as she was placing the dead chicken into a plastic bag she had dug out of her trunk, she heard Nanook pacing on the other side of the fence. At least he wasn’t whining anymore.
    But as she drove away, an ambulance siren sounded a few blocks away, and she laughed to hear her new friend answer with a comical parody of the siren’s howl.
    Now she had another memory for this neighborhood... the profound experience of looking into a wolf’s eyes and, for a moment, touching a far more noble soul than her own.

Chapter

18

    L ike many California coast towns, San Carmelita had begun its life as a mission, established by Franciscan fathers who had traveled from San Diego to the San Francisco Bay Area, building churches and converting the Native Americans along the way... whether they wanted to be