A Dog's Life: Night–Part I

I’m lying near the hearth on a plaid bed, which Susan bought for me.

Lindenfield in the wintertime was a bleak place. The air was chill.

Even in early spring, as winter faded, the gardens, tended by humans in warm weather, were barren and silent.

In the spring, when Bone and I were born—in an old garden shed, the one with the unused chicken coop at the back—the Merrions lived in their house sporadically.

There were five Merrions in all. I understand that human children generally are not born in litters like puppies, but one or two at a time like deer.

The nearest neighboring house was a good hour’s trot away, for a grown dog. So the animal communities thrived.

However, when the Merrions bought the big house, they planned to turn the shed into a playhouse for their children, and got as far as insulating two of the walls before Mrs. Merrion decided that a chicken coop was unsanitary and better suited as a garden shed.

She crept forward to investigate. First she surveyed them from several feet away. Then she crept closer, and finally she stuck her nose into one of the holes.

In the rafters above she could see several abandoned nests that had belonged to barn swallows and hornets.

We were born in the wheelbarrow, Bone and I. Mother (her dog name was Stream, but to Bone and me she was simply Mother) managed to climb into it early that first morning, having decided that it was an ideal nest for her puppies.

He was tiny, too tiny, and his legs were misshapen.

The cats trotted back and forth, slinking through the open door.

The shed cats were not our friends, but I think we trusted one another, even as wary as we all were.

She sat planted on her haunches, her brow creased, gazing out at the field beyond the Merrions’ backyard.

I could tell when Mine was in the field, because Mother sat at strict, grim attention.

She didn’t teach her kits to fear the Merrions, she didn’t try to hide her kills, she was reckless, she was bold, she was cheeky.

Every now and then a cat or an older kitten would venture out of the shed and not return.

Mother led us to garbage, to a lovely pile of things I had no names for at the time, but that I now know were old chicken and stale bread and bits of scrambled egg and several olives and some congealed spaghetti and a puddle of sour milk.

“That fox is a menace. My wife thinks it’s rabid.”

The air cooled down after that one blistering day, and sometimes I saw the Merrion children wearing the kind of clothes they had worn in the spring.

Yellow Man and the other cats had retreated to the farthest recesses of the nesting boxes.

The shed mice would forget about us almost immediately. They would register that Bone and I were gone, and then they would continue with their foraging and eating and running about as if we had never lived in the shed in the first place.

They would register that Bone and I were gone, and then they would continue with their foraging and eating and running about as if we had never lived in the shed in the first place.

I was thirsty, too, and presently Bone and I came to a stream and stood at the edge and took long drinks.

“Keep them! They’re cute. They’ll settle down. They’re probably just scared.”
This was true. Bone and I were petrified.

“I wonder what they’re doing on their own.”
“They’re probably feral, you know,” George replied.

The moment Marcy carried us, very gingerly, back to the room where we had eaten our dinner of stolen scraps, Bone squirmed out of her grasp, tore across the floor to another pail of garbage, wrestled it over, and began tossing bits of food to me.

Tentatively I stood up, keeping my injured leg off the ground.

I sidled over to the tree and tried cuddling up among its roots, but they were cool and rough and unyielding.

I sidled over to the tree and tried cuddling up among its roots, but they were cool and rough and unyielding.