Watchers

talking about, boy? Honest to God, I think maybe you do. But am I crediting you with too much intelligence, too much wisdom even for a magical dog? Huh? Sure, you can do some amazing tricks, but that’s not the same as understanding me.”
    The retriever pulled away from him and returned to the Milk-Bone package. It took the bag in its teeth and shook out twenty or thirty biscuits onto the linoleum.
    “There you go again,” Travis said. “One minute, you seem half human— and the next minute you’re just a dog with a dog’s interests.”
    However, the retriever was not seeking a snack. It began to push the biscuits around with the black tip of its snout, maneuvering them into the open center of the kitchen floor one at a time, ordering them neatly end to end.
    “What the hell is this?”
    The dog had five biscuits arranged in a row that gradually curved to the right, it pushed a sixth into place, emphasizing the curve.
    As he watched, Travis hastily finished his first beer and opened the second. He had a feeling he was going to need it.
    The dog studied the row of biscuits for a moment, as if not quite sure what it had begun to do. It padded back and forth a few times, clearly uncertain, but eventually nudged two more biscuits into line. It looked at Travis, then at the shape it was creating on the floor, then nosed a ninth biscuit into place.
    Travis sipped some beer and waited tensely to see what would happen next. With a shake of its head and a snort of frustration, the dog went to the far end of the room and stood facing into the corner, its head hung low. Travis wondered what it was doing, and then somehow he got the idea that it had gone into the corner in order to concentrate. After a while, it returned and pushed the tenth and eleventh Milk-Bones into place, enlarging the pattern.
    He was stricken again by the premonition that something of great importance was about to happen. Gooseflesh dimpled his arms.
    This time he was not disappointed. The golden retriever used nineteen biscuits to form a crude but recognizable question mark on the kitchen floor, then raised its expressive eyes to Travis.
    A question mark.
    Meaning: Why? Why have you been so depressed? Why do you feel life is pointless, empty?
    The dog apparently understood what he had told it. All right, okay, so maybe it didn’t understand language exactly, didn’t follow every word that he spoke, but it somehow perceived the meaning of what he was saying, or at least enough of the meaning to arouse its interest and curiosity.
    And, by God, if it also understood the purpose of a question mark, then it was capable of abstract thinking! The very concept of simple symbols— like alphabets, numbers, question marks, and exclamation points—serving as shorthand for communicating complex ideas . . . well, that required abstract thinking. And abstract thinking was reserved for only one species on earth: humankind. This golden retriever was demonstrably not human, but somehow it had come into possession of intellectual skills that no other animal could claim.
    Travis was stunned. But there was nothing accidental about the question mark. Crude but not accidental. Somewhere, the dog must have seen the
    symbol and been taught its meaning. Statistical theorists said an infinite number of monkeys, equipped with an infinite number of typewriters, would eventually be able to recreate every line of great English prose merely by random chance. He figured that this dog forming a Milk-Bone question mark in about two minutes flat, merely by purest chance, was about ten times as unlikely as all those damn monkeys recreating Shakespeare’s plays.
The dog was watching him expectantly.
    Getting up, he found he was a bit shaky in the legs. He went to the carefully arranged biscuits, scattered them across the floor, and returned to his chair.
    The retriever studied the disarranged Milk-Bones, regarded Travis inquiringly, sniffed at the biscuits again, and seemed baffled.
    Travis waited.
    The house was unnaturally quiet, as if the flow of time had been suspended for every living creature, machine, and object on earth—though not for him, the retriever, or the contents of the kitchen.
    At last, the dog began to push the biscuits around with its nose as it had done before. In a minute or two, it formed a question mark.
    Travis chugged some Coors. His heart was hammering. His palms were sweaty. He was filled with both wonder and trepidation, with both wild joy and fear