Watchers

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    truck and take them to a gallery. But not yet, Travis. I just can’t . . I can’t handle it yet.”
    He grinned at her. “Sensory overload again?”
    Einstein came to her and rubbed against her leg, looking up with a sweet expression that made Nora smile.
    Scratching behind the dog’s ears, she said, “So much has happened so fast. I can’t absorb it all. I keep having to fight off attacks of dizziness. I feel a little bit as if I’m on a carousel that’s whirling around faster and faster, out of control.”
    What she said was true, to an extent, but that was not the only reason she wished to delay going public with her art. She also wanted to move slowly in order to have time to savor every glorious development. If she rushed into things, the transformation from reclusive spinster to a full-fledged participant in life would go too fast, and later it would be just a blur. She wanted to enjoy every moment of her metamorphosis.
    As if she were an invalid who had been confined since birth to a single dark room full of life-support equipment, and as if she had just been miraculously cured, Nora Devon was coming cautiously out into a new world.
     
     
    Travis was not solely responsible for Nora’s emergence from reclusion. Einstein had an equally large role in her transformation.
    The retriever had obviously decided that Nora could be trusted with the secret of his extraordinary intelligence. After the Modern Bride and baby business in Solvang, the dog gave her glimpse after glimpse of his undoglike mind at work.
    Taking his lead from Einstein, Travis told Nora how he had found the retriever in the woods and how something strange—and never seen—had been pursuing it. He recounted all the amazing things the dog had done since then. He also told her of Einstein’s occasional bouts with anxiety in the heart of the night, when he sometimes stood at a window and stared out at the darkness as if he believed the unknown creature in the woods would find him.
    They sat for hours one evening in Nora’s kitchen, drinking pots of coffee and eating homemade pineapple cake and discussing explanations for the dog’s uncanny intelligence. When not cadging bits of cake, Einstein listened to them with interest, as if he understood what they were saying about him, and sometimes he whined and paced impatiently, as if frustrated that his canine vocal apparatus did not permit him to speak. But they were mostly spinning their wheels because they had no explanations worth discussing.
    “I believe he could tell us where he comes from, why he’s so damn different from other dogs,” Nora said.
    Einstein busily swept the air with his tail.
    “Oh, I’m sure of it,” Travis said. “He’s got a humanlike self-awareness.
    He knows he’s different, and I suspect he knows why, and I think he’d like to tell us about it if he could only find a way.”
    The retriever barked once, ran to the far end of the kitchen, ran back, looked up at them, did a frantic little dance of purely human frustration, and finally slumped on the floor with his head on his paws, alternately chuffing and whining softly.
    Nora was most intrigued by the story of (he night that the dog had gotten excited over Travis’s book collection. “He recognizes that books are a means of communication,” she said. “And maybe he senses there’s a way to use books to bridge the communications gap between him and us.”
    “How?” Travis asked as he lifted another forkful of pineapple cake.
    Nora shrugged. “I don’t know. But maybe the problem was that your books weren’t the right kind. Novels, you said?”
    “Yeah. Fiction.”
    She said, “Maybe what we need is books with pictures, images he can react to. Maybe if we gathered up a lot of picture books of all kinds, and magazines with pictures, and maybe if we spread them out on the floor and worked with Einstein, maybe we’d find some way to communicate with him.”
    The retriever leaped to his feet and padded directly to Nora. From the expression on his face and from the intent look in his eyes, Nora knew that her proposal was a good one. Tomorrow, she would collect dozens of books and magazines, and put the scheme into operation.
    “It’s going to take a lot of patience,” Travis warned her.
    “I’ve got oceans of patience.”
    “You may think you have, but sometimes dealing with Einstein gives a whole new meaning to the word.”
    Turning to Travis, the dog blew air out of his nostrils.
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