living room of Travis’s rental house, where there was space to spread everything
out on the floor. They had put pillows on the floor as well, so they could work
at the dog’s level and be comfortable.
Einstein had watched their preparations with interest.
Sitting on the floor with her back against the vinyl sofa, Nora took the
retriever’s head in both hands and, with her face close to his, their noses
almost touching, she said, “Okay, now you listen to me, Einstein. We want to
know all sorts of things about you: where you came from, why you’re smarter than
an ordinary dog, what you were afraid of in the woods that day Travis found you,
why you sometimes stare out the window at night as if you’re frightened of
something. Lots more. But you can’t talk, can you? No. And so far as we know,
you can’t read. And even if you can read, you can’t write. So we’ve got to do
this with pictures, I think.”
From where he sat near Nora, Travis could see that the dog’s eyes never wavered
from hers as she spoke. Einstein was rigid. His tail hung down, motionless. He
not only seemed to understand what she was telling him, but he appeared to be
electrified by the experiment.
How much does the mutt really perceive, Travis wondered, and how many of his
reactions am I imagining because of pure wishful thinking?
People have a natural tendency to anthropomorphize their pets, to ascribe human
perceptions and intentions to the animals where none exist. In Einstein’s case,
where there really was an exceptional intelligence at work, the temptation to
see profound meaning in every meaningless doggy twitch was even greater than
usual.
“We’re going to study all these pictures, looking for things that interest you,
for things that’ll help us understand where you came from and how you got to be
what you are. Every time you see something that’ll help us put the puzzle
together, you’ve got somehow to bring it to our attention. Bark at it or put a
paw on it or wag your tail.”
“This is nuts,” Travis said.
“Do you understand me, Einstein?” Nora asked.
The retriever issued a soft woof.
“This will never work,” Travis said.
“Yes, it will,” Nora insisted. “He can’t talk, can’t write, but he can show us
things. If he points out a dozen pictures, we might not immediately understand
what meaning they have for him, how they refer to his origins, but in time we’ll
find a way to relate them to one another and to him, and we’ll know what he’s
trying to tell us.”
The dog, his head still trapped firmly in Nora’s hands, rolled his eyes toward
Travis and woofed again.
“We ready?” Nora asked Einstein.
His gaze flicked back to her, and he wagged his tail.
“All right,” she said, letting go of his head. “Let’s start.”
Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, for hours at a time, they leafed through scores
of publications, showing Einstein pictures of all kinds of things— people,
trees, flowers, dogs, other animals, machines, city streets, country lanes,
cars, ships, planes, food, advertisements for a thousand products— hoping he
would see something that would excite him. The problem was that he saw many
things that excited him, too many. He barked at, pawed at, woofed at, put his
nose to, or wagged his tail at perhaps a hundred out of the thousands of
pictures, and his choices were of such variety that Travis could see no pattern
to them, no way to link them and divine meaning from their association to one
another.
Einstein was fascinated by an automobile ad in which the car, being compared to
a powerful tiger, was shown locked in an iron cage. Whether it was the car or
the tiger that seized his interest was not clear. He also responded to several
computer advertisements, Alpo and Purina Dog Chow ads, an ad for a portable
stereo cassette player, and pictures of books, butterflies, a parrot, a forlorn
man in a prison cell, four young people playing with a striped beach ball,
Mickey Mouse, a violin, a man on an exercise treadmill, and many other things.