The Darkest Evening of the Year

Neither Fred nor Ethel was in the kitchen. They must have been asleep in the bedroom.

From the farther end of the bungalow arose the thump of paws rushing across carpet and then hardwood, swiftly approaching.

Fred and Ethel did not bark, because they were trained not to speak without an important reason—such as a stranger at the door—and they were good dogs.

She most often took them with her. When she left them at home, they always greeted her return with an enthusiasm that lifted her heart.

Usually Ethel would appear first, ebullient and grinning, head raised, tail dusting the doorjamb as she came into the room.

She was a darker red-gold than Nickie, although well within the desirable color range for the breed. She had a thicker undercoat than usual for a retriever and looked gloriously furry.

Fred would probably follow Ethel. Not dominant, often bashful, he would be so thrilled to see Amy that he’d not only wag his tail furiously but also wiggle his hindquarters with irrepressible delight.

Sweet Fred had a broad handsome face and as perfectly black a nose as Amy had ever seen, not a speckle of brown to mar it.

At Amy’s side, Nickie stood alert, ears lifted, gaze fixed on the open hall door from which issued the muffled thunder of paws.

A sudden drop in the velocity of approach suggested that Fred and Ethel detected the presence of a newcomer. She checked her speed first, and Fred blundered into her as they came through the doorway.

Instead of the usual meet-and-greet, including nose to nose and tongue to nose and a courteously quick sniff of butts all around, the Redwing kids halted a few feet short of Nickie. They stood panting, plumed tails swishing, with cocked-head curiosity, eyes bright with what seemed like surprise.

Keeping her own tail in motion, Nickie raised her head, assuming a friendly but regal posture.

“Ethel sweetie, babycakes Fred,” Amy said in her sweet-talk voice, “come meet your new sister.”

Until she said “new sister,” she hadn’t known that she’d decided beyond doubt to keep Nickie rather than placing her with an approved family on the Golden Heart adoption list.

Previously, both kids had reliably been suckers for their master’s squeaky sweet-talk voice, but this time they ignored Amy.

Now Ethel did something she always did with a visiting dog but never until the meet-and-greet was concluded. She went to the open box of squeeze toys and pull toys and tennis balls inside the always-open pantry door, judiciously selected a prize, returned with it, and dropped it in front of the newcomer.

She had chosen a plush yellow Booda duck.

The message that Ethel usually managed to deliver with the loan of a toy to a visitor was this: Here’s one that’s exclusively yours for thelength of your visit, but the rest belong to me and Fred unless we includeyou in a group game.

Nickie studied the duck for a moment, then regarded Ethel.

All the protocols were being revised: Ethel made a second trip to the box in the pantry and returned with a plush-toy gorilla. She dropped it beside the duck.

Meanwhile, Fred had circled the room to put the breakfast table between him and the two females. He lay on his belly, watching them through a chromework of chair legs, tail sweeping the oak floor.

If you are a dog lover, a true dog lover, and not just one who sees them as pets or animals, but are instead one who sees them as one’s dear companions, and more than companions—sees them as perhaps being but a step or two down the species ladder from human kind, not sharing human exceptionalism but not an abyss below it, either—you watch them differently from the way other people watch them, with a respect for their born dignity, with a recognition of their capacity to know joy and to suffer melancholy, with the certainty that they suspect the tyranny of time even if they don’t fully understand the cruelty of it, that they are not, as self-blinded experts contend, unaware of their own mortality.

If you watch them with this heightened perception, from this more generous perspective, as Amy had long watched them, you see a remarkable complexity in each dog’s personality, an individualism uncannily human in its refinement, though with none of the worst of human faults. You see an intelligence and a fundamental ability to reason that sometimes can take your breath away.

And on occasion, when you’re not being in the least sentimental, when you’re in too skeptical a mood to ascribe to dogs any human qualities they do not possess, you will nevertheless perceive in them that singular yearning that is common to every human heart, even to those who claim to live a faithless existence. For dogs see mystery in the world, in us and in themselves and in all things, and are at key moments particularly alert to it, and more than usually curious.

Amy recognized that this was such a moment. She stood quite still, said nothing, waited and watched, certain that forthcoming would be an insight that she would carry with her as long as she might live.

Having dropped the plush-toy gorilla beside the Booda duck, Ethel made a third trip to the toy box in the pantry.

Nickie peered at Fred, where he watched from behind a bulwark of chair legs.

Fred cocked his head to the left, cocked it to the right. Then he rolled onto his back, four legs in the air, baring his belly in an expression of complete trust.

In the pantry, Ethel bit at toys, tossed them aside, thrust her head deeper into the collection, and at last returned to Nickie with a large, plush, eight-tentacled, red-and-yellow octopus.

This was a squeaky toy, a tug toy, and a shake toy all in one. And it was Ethel’s favorite possession, off limits even to Fred.

Ethel dropped the octopus beside the gorilla, and after a moment of consideration, Nickie picked it up in her mouth. She squeaked it, shook it, squeaked it again, and dropped it.

Rolling off his back, scrambling to his feet, Fred sneezed. He padded out from behind the table.

The three dogs stared expectantly at one another.

Uniformly, their tail action diminished.

Their ears lifted as much as the velvety flaps of a golden are able to lift.

Amy became aware of a new tension in their muscular bodies.

Nostrils flaring, nose to the floor, head darting left and right, Nickie hurried out of the room, into the hall. Ethel and Fred scampered after her.

Alone in the kitchen, acutely aware that something unusual was happening but clueless as to what it meant, Amy said, “Kids?”

In the hallway, the overhead light came on.

When she crossed to the doorway, Amy found the hall deserted.

Toward the front of the house, somebody switched on a light in the living room. An intruder. Yet none of the dogs barked.

Chapter 9 (#)

Although Brian McCarthy had a talent for portraiture, he was not usually capable of swift execution.

The human head presents so many subtleties of form, structure, and proportion, so many complexities in the relationship of its features, that even Rembrandt, the greatest portrait painter of all time, struggled with his art and refined his craft until he died.

The head of a dog presented no less—and arguably a greater—challenge to an artist than did the human head. Many a master of their mediums, who could precisely render any man or woman, had been defeated in their attempts to portray dogs in full reality.

Remarkably, with this first effort at canine portraiture, sitting at his kitchen table, Brian found the speed that eluded him when he drew a human face. Decisions regarding form, structure, proportion, and tone did not require the ponderous consideration he usually brought to them. He worked with an assurance he had not known before, with a new grace in his hand.

The drawing appeared with such uncanny ease and swiftness that it almost seemed as if the whole image had been rendered earlier and stored magically in the pencil, from which it now flowed as smoothly as music from a recording.

During his courtship of Amy, his heart had been opened to many things, not least of all to the beauty and the joy of dogs, yet he still did not have one of his own. He didn’t trust himself to be equal to the responsibility.

At first he didn’t know that he was rendering not merely the ideal of a golden retriever but also a specific individual. As the face resolved in detail, he realized that from his pencils had come Nickie, so recently rescued.

He did not have more difficulty drawing eyes than he did any other detail of anatomy. This time, however, he achieved effects of line and tone and grading that continually surprised him.