mewling of singular and disturbing character.
Now I raised the blind at that same window and saw him in the yard
below. He was busily digging a black hole in the moonsilvered lawn.
This was peculiar, because he was a well-behaved dog and never a
digger.
As I looked on, Orson abandoned the patch of earth at which he had been
furiously clawing, moved a few feet to the right, and began to dig a
new hole. A quality of frenzy marked his behavior.
“What’s happened, boy?” I wondered, and in the yard below, the dog
dug, dug, dug.
On my way downstairs, with the Glock coiling heavily in my jacket
pocket, I remembered that July night when I had gone into the backyard
to sit beside the mewling dog. . . .
His cries grew as thin as the whistle-hiss of a glassblower shaping a
vase over a flame, so soft that they did not even disturb the nearest
of our neighbors, yet there was such wretchedness in the sound that I
was shaken by it. With those cries he shaped a misery darker than the
darkest glass and stranger in form than anything a blower could blow.
He was uninjured and did not appear to be ill. For all I could tell,
the sight of the stars themselves was the thing that filled him with
torment. Yet if the vision of dogs is as poor as we are taught, they
can’t see the stars well or at all. And why should stars cause Orson
such anguish, anyway, or the night that was no deeper than other nights
before it? Nevertheless, he gazed skyward and made tortured sounds and
didn’t respond to my reassuring voice.
When I put a hand on his head and stroked his back, I felt hard
shudders passing through him. He sprang to his feet and padded away,
only to turn and stare at me from a distance, and I swear that for a
while he hated me. He loved me as always; he was still my dog, after
all, and could not escape loving me; but at the same time, he hated me
intensely.
In the warm July air, I could virtually feel the cold hatred radiating
off him. He paced the yard, alternately staring at me-holding my gaze
as only he among all dogs is able to hold it-and looking at the sky,
now stiff and shaking with rage, now weak and mewling with what seemed
despair.
When I’d told Bobby Halloway about this, he’d said that dogs are
incapable of hating anyone or of feeling anything as complex as genuine
despair, that their emotional lives are as simple as their intellectual
lives. When I insisted on my interpretation, Bobby had said, “Listen,
Snow, if You’re going to keep coming here to bore my ass off with this
New Age crap, why don’t You just buy a shotgun and blow my brains
out?
That would be in ore merciful than the excruciatingly slow death You’re
dealing out now, bludgeoning me with your tedious little stories and
your moronic philosophies.
There are limits to human endurance, Saint Francis-even to mine.”
I know what I know, however, and I know Orson hated me that July night,
hated me and loved me. And I know that something in the sky tormented
him and filled him with despair: the stars, the blackness, or perhaps
something he imagined.
Can dogs imagine? Why not?
I know they dream. I’ve watched them sleep, seen their legs kick as
they chase dream rabbits, heard them sigh and whimper, heard them growl
at dream adversaries.
Orson’s hatred that night did not make me fear him, but I feared for
him. I knew his problem was not distemper or any physical ailment that
might have made him dangerous to me, but was instead a malady of the
soul.
Bobby raves brilliantly at the mention of souls in animals and
splutters ultimately into a tremendously entertaining incoherence.
I could sell tickets. I prefer to open a bottle of beer, lean back,
and have the whole show to myself Anyway, throughout that long night, I
sat in the yard, keeping Orson company even though he might not have