Watchers

bleached-wood house on the forested slopes above the Pacific. Because the Hyatts would soon be moving to a new and larger house a bit farther up the coast, they made it a party to remember, not merely a birthday bash but a goodbye to the house that had first sheltered them as a family.
    Jim Keene drove in from Carmel with Pooka and Sadie, his two black labs, and his young golden retriever, Leonardo, who was usually called Leo. A few close friends came in from the real-estate office where Sam—”Travis” to everyone—worked in Carmel Highlands, and from the gallery in Cannel where Nora’s paintings were exhibited and sold. These friends brought their retrievers, too, all of them second-litter offspring of Einstein and his mate, Minnie.
    Only Garrison Dilworth was missing. He had died in his sleep the previous year.
    They had a fine day, a grand time, not merely because they were friends and happy to be with one another, but because they shared a secret wonder and joy that would forever bind them into one enormous extended family.
    All members of the first litter, which Travis and Nora could not have borne adopting out, and which lived at the bleached-wood house, were also present:
    Mickey, Donald, Daisy, Huey, Dewey, Louie.
    The dogs had an even better time than the people, frolicking on the lawn, playing hide-and-seek in the woods, and watching videotapes on the TV in the living room.
    The canine patriarch participated in some of the games, but he spent much of his time with Travis and Nora and, as usual, stayed close to Minnie. He limped—as he would for the rest of his life—because his right hind leg had been cruelly mangled by The Outsider and would not have been usable at all if his vet had not been so dedicated to the restoration of the limb’s function.
    Travis often wondered whether The Outsider had thrown Einstein against the nursery wall with great force and then had assumed he was dead. Or at the moment when it held the retriever’s life in its hands, perhaps the thing had reached down within itself and found some drop of mercy that its makers had not designed into it but which had somehow been there anyway. Perhaps it remembered the one pleasure it and the dog had shared in the lab—the cartoons. And in remembering the sharing, perhaps it saw itself, for the first time, as having a dim potential to be like other living things. Seeing itself as like others, perhaps it then could not kill Einstein as easily as it had expected. After all, with a flick of those talons, it could have gutted him.
    But though he had acquired the limp, Einstein had lost the tattoo in his ear, thanks to Jim Keene. No one could ever prove that he was the dog from Banodyne—and he could still play “dumb dog” very well when he wished.
    At times during young Jimmy’s third birthday extravaganza, Minnie regarded her mate and offspring with charmed befuddlement, perplexed by their attitudes and antics. Although she could never fully understand them, no mother of dogs ever received half the love that she was given by those she’d brought into the world. She watched over them, and they watched over her, guardians of each other.
    At the dark end of that good day, when the guests were gone, when Jimmy was asleep in his room, when Minnie and her first litter were settling down for the night, Einstein and Travis and Nora gathered at the pantry off the kitchen.
    The scrabble-tile dispenser was gone. In its place, an IBM computer stood on the floor. Einstein took a stylus in his mouth and tapped the keyboard. The message appeared on the screen:
    THEY GROW UP FAST.
    “Yes, they do,” Nora said. “Yours faster than ours.”
    ONE DAY THEY WILL BE EVERYWHERE.
    “One day, given time and a lot of litters,” Travis said, “they’ll be all over the world.”
    SO FAR FROM ME. IT’S A SADNESS.
    “Yes, it is,” Nora said. “But all young birds fly from the nest sooner or later.”
    AND WHEN I’M GONE?
    “What do you mean?” Travis asked, stooping and ruffling the dog’s thick coat.
    WILL THEY REMEMBER ME?
    “Oh yes, fur face,” Nora said, kneeling and hugging him. “As long as there are dogs and as long as there are people fit to walk with them, they will all remember you.”