The Darkest Evening of the Year

each dog’s personality, an individualism uncannily human in its refinement, though with none of the worst of human faults. You see an intelligence and a fundamental ability to reason that sometimes can take your breath away.
    And on occasion, when you’re not being in the least sentimental, when you’re in too skeptical a mood to ascribe to dogs any human qualities they do not possess, you will nevertheless perceive in them that singular yearning that is common to every human heart, even to those who claim to live a faithless existence. For dogs see mystery in the world, in us and in themselves and in all things, and are at key moments particularly alert to it, and more than usually curious.
    Amy recognized that this was such a moment. She stood quite still, said nothing, waited and watched, certain that forthcoming would be an insight that she would carry with her as long as she might live.
    Having dropped the plush-toy gorilla beside the Booda duck, Ethel made a third trip to the toy box in the pantry.
    Nickie peered at Fred, where he watched from behind a bulwark of chair legs.
    Fred cocked his head to the left, cocked it to the right. Then he rolled onto his back, four legs in the air, baring his belly in an expression of complete trust.
    In the pantry, Ethel bit at toys, tossed them aside, thrust her head deeper into the collection, and at last returned to Nickie with a large, plush, eight-tentacled, red-and-yellow octopus.
    This was a squeaky toy, a tug toy, and a shake toy all in one. And it was Ethel’s favorite possession, off limits even to Fred.
    Ethel dropped the octopus beside the gorilla, and after a moment of consideration, Nickie picked it up in her mouth. She squeaked it, shook it, squeaked it again, and dropped it.
    Rolling off his back, scrambling to his feet, Fred sneezed. He padded out from behind the table.
    The three dogs stared expectantly at one another.
    Uniformly, their tail action diminished.
    Their ears lifted as much as the velvety flaps of a golden are able to lift.
    Amy became aware of a new tension in their muscular bodies.
    Nostrils flaring, nose to the floor, head darting left and right, Nickie hurried out of the room, into the hall. Ethel and Fred scampered after her.
    Alone in the kitchen, acutely aware that something unusual was happening but clueless as to what it meant, Amy said, “Kids?”
    In the hallway, the overhead light came on.
    When she crossed to the doorway, Amy found the hall deserted.
    Toward the front of the house, somebody switched on a light in the living room. An intruder. Yet none of the dogs barked.

 
    Chapter
9
    A lthough Brian McCarthy had a talent for portraiture, he was not usually capable of swift execution.
    The human head presents so many subtleties of form, structure, and proportion, so many complexities in the relationship of its features, that even Rembrandt, the greatest portrait painter of all time, struggled with his art and refined his craft until he died.
    The head of a dog presented no less—and arguably a greater—challenge to an artist than did the human head. Many a master of their mediums, who could precisely render any man or woman, had been defeated in their attempts to portray dogs in full reality.
    Remarkably, with this first effort at canine portraiture, sitting at his kitchen table, Brian found the speed that eluded him when he drew a human face. Decisions regarding form, structure, proportion, and tone did not require the ponderous consideration he usually brought to them. He worked with an assurance he had not known before, with a new grace in his hand.
    The drawing appeared with such uncanny ease and swiftness that it almost seemed as if the whole image had been rendered earlier and stored magically in the pencil, from which it now flowed as smoothly as music from a recording.
    During his courtship of Amy, his heart had been opened to many things, not least of all to the beauty and the joy of dogs, yet he still did not have one of his own. He didn’t trust himself to be equal to the responsibility.
    At first he didn’t know that he was rendering not merely the ideal of a golden retriever but also a specific individual. As the face resolved in detail, he realized that from his pencils had come Nickie, so recently rescued.
    He did not have more difficulty drawing eyes than he did any other detail of anatomy. This time, however, he achieved effects of line and tone and grading that continually surprised him.
    To look