drove across the state to the Monterey Peninsula. There, where the continental
shelf met the sea, the natural beauty was, if possible, even greater than that
at Tahoe, and they stayed four days, leaving for home on the afternoon of
Wednesday, August 25.
Throughout their trip, the joy of matrimony was so all-consuming that the
miracle of Einstein’s humanlike intelligence did not occupy their thoughts as
much as previously. But Einstein reminded them of his unique nature when they
drew near to Santa Barbara late that afternoon. Forty or fifty miles from home,
he grew restless. He shifted repeatedly on the seat between Nora and Travis, sat
up for a minute, then laid his head on Nora’s lap, then sat up again. He began
to whimper strangely. By the time they were ten miles from home, he was
shivering.
“What’s wrong with you, fur face?” she asked.
With his expressive brown eyes, Einstein tried hard to convey a complex and
important message, but she could not understand him.
Half an hour before dusk, when they reached the city and departed the freeway
for surface streets, Einstein began alternately to whine and growl low in his
throat.
“What’s wrong with him?” Nora asked.
Frowning, Travis said, “I don’t know.”
As they pulled into the driveway of Travis’s rented house and parked in the
shade of the date palm, the retriever began to bark. He had never barked in the
truck, not once on their long journey. It was ear-splitting in that confined
space, but he would not stop.
When they got out of the truck, Einstein bolted past them, positioned himself
between them and the house, and continued barking.
Nora moved along the walkway toward the front door, and Einstein darted at her,
snarling. He seized one leg of her jeans and tried to pull her off balance. She
managed to stay. on her feet and, when she retreated to the birdbath, he let go
of her.
“What’s gotten into him?” she asked Travis.
Staring thoughtfully at the house, Travis said, “He was like this in the woods
that first day . . . when he didn’t want me to follow the dark trail.”
Nora tried to coax the dog closer in order to pet him.
But Einstein would not be coaxed. When Travis tested the dog by approaching the
house, Einstein snarled and forced him to retreat.
“Wait here,” Travis told Nora. He walked to the Airstream in the driveway and
went inside.
Einstein trotted back and forth in front of the house, looking up at the door
and windows, growling and whining.
As the sun rolled down the western sky and kissed the surface of the sea, the
residential street was quiet, peaceful, ordinary in every respect—yet Nora felt
a wrongness in the air. A warm wind off the Pacific elicited whispers from the
palm and eucalyptus and ficus trees, sounds that might have been pleasant any
other day but which now seemed sinister. In the lengthening shadows, in the last
orange and purple light of the day, she also perceived an indefinable
menace. Except for the dog’s behavior, she had no reason to think that danger
was near at hand; her uneasiness was not intellectual but instinctual.
When Travis returned from the trailer, he was carrying a large revolver. It had
been in a bedroom drawer, unloaded, throughout their honeymoon trip. Now, Travis
finished inserting cartridges into the chambers and snapped the cylinder shut.
‘Is that necessary?” she asked worriedly.
‘Something was in the woods that day,” Travis said, “and though I never actually
saw it . . . well, it put the hair up on the back of my neck. Yeah, I think the
gun might be necessary.”
Her own reaction to the whispering trees and afternoon shadows gave her a hint
of what Travis must have felt in the woods, and she had to admit that the gun
made her feel at least slightly better.
Einstein had stopped pacing and had taken up his guard position on the walkway
again, barring their approach to the house.
To the retriever, Travis said, “Is someone inside?” A quick wag of the tail.
Yes.
“Men from the lab?” One bark. No.