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He felt totally worthless and having lost his manfulness didn’t help, at all. Things got so bad that Sog Alan began to wonder if it was God’s punishment on him. Under ordinary circumstances he would never have given a thought to such a thing.

Chapter seventeen

E
ven the dumbest of dogs possesses the basic talent for
minding,
which, Yowrfrowr had once explained to her, most decidedly does
not
mean the ability to obey, but rather the faculty of knowing what is in one’s master’s mind. Not exactly mind-reading, Yowrfrowr had said, nor so-called telepathy, no, nothing so magical as that, but purely a sense of being in tune with the workings of the master’s thoughts, which is necessary, after all, as a substitute for verbal communication. So. Hreapha’s
minding
of her master quickly alerted her to the fact that he was sick as a dog, so to speak.

Searching for a reason for feeling like hell, you start with something you ate. And Hreapha didn’t have to look far to find that: he had killed and eaten that nice hen who had kept Hreapha from starvation by providing an egg, and who Hreapha had spared from the clutches of the hawk. For several days after that event, Hreapha had felt morose and angry. And out of sympathy for that hen she had lost her appetite so completely that she wondered if maybe she herself was coming down with something as a result of having eaten the hawk. But she got over that. It remained to be seen whether he would ever get over having eaten the nice chicken. She sort of hoped not. He deserved punishment for numerous wrongdoings, including, Hreapha was beginning to believe, the taking and keeping of a very young female person against her will. Hreapha was convinced that the person, whose name was Robin, had not been a stray at all, nor even a willing companion to the man, but had been
stolen
! Theft should always be punished, and possibly the man’s grave illness was what he had coming for snatching the girl.

Despite the general mood of gloom and doom that had befallen the place along with the impossible rainfall, Hreapha was at least cheered by the fact that the girl was no longer attempting to murder her. In fact, the girl had become caring and even affectionate, and had taken over the chore of making sure that Hreapha always had her dish filled with doggy nuggets once a day. And the girl always gave her a pat on the head and some kind words at mealtimes. This radical change in attitude was obviously the result of Hreapha’s having presented the girl with the pair of scissors.

It was a dirty deal that Hreapha had never received any credit for having rescued the chickens from the woods or for killing the hawk or her various other good deeds, but her first thanks had been for something she didn’t deserve credit for. It had not been she who had found the scissors. She had only brought them to the house and given them to the girl. She might never have known the location of the scissors (although she had looked all over the place, including the dangerous barn) if it had not been for the
in-habit
who inhabited the cooper’s shed.

Hreapha had been asleep and thought she was just having another of her vivid dreams when she distinctly heard the word
scissors,
and looking around but seeing nobody, heard further,
Come go with me, old girl, and I’ll take ye to some scissors.
It was rather difficult to “come go” with him, the
in-habit
, because she couldn’t see him nor smell him, and couldn’t tell which way he was coming or going, but he clucked his tongue occasionally to let her know where he was, and thus she followed him out to the cooper’s shed, and to a dark corner of it where beneath a workbench was a wooden box containing assorted old thingumajigs, whatchamacallits, and diddenfloppies, among the latter a pair of scissors.
I reckon that’s what she’s a-hankerin for,
the
in-habit
said, and sure enough, when Hreapha presented them to the girl she got a
hug,
a real
hug.
Thenceforward Hreapha could take a nap without fear of being slaughtered in her sleep.

In the weeks afterward, as everything went to the dogs, so to speak, Hreapha had to be careful whenever she was in the house not to walk upon or disturb the paper dolls, who were breeding like rabbits. The girl let Hreapha into the house whenever the frequent thunderstorms occurred, having discovered that Hreapha shared her intense dread of thunder, and the two fear-stricken females cowered and quaked together. Ordinarily the man would not have allowed Hreapha in the house so much, but he was too out of it to notice.

When it wasn’t raining too hard, Hreapha spent a lot of time guarding the chickens and the garden, and trying to keep the former out of the latter. She despaired of explaining to the chickens that the various succulent vegetables in the garden were intended for the exclusive use of the poor sick master and the mistress. How do you tell a chicken to leave be the vegetables that are intended to be served with chicken? It took Hreapha days and days of shouting her name at the hens and the two roosters whenever they attempted to wander into the garden until finally the fowl seemed to decide that it wasn’t worth the bother, listening to all that hreaphering in order to grab a bite of lettuce, and they kept out of the garden. Hreapha had more problems with the occasional deer who came down to nibble the veggies, and also the rabbits. But the poor sick master rose up from his davenport long enough to teach the girl how to shoot at and finally hit the rabbits. Your turn is next, Hreapha tried to tell the deer, but they just backed off and waited for her to leave the garden, which, eventually, went to the dogs, so to speak, what little was left of it that the weeds didn’t choke out. Hreapha had never been able to understand the difference between a cultivated vegetable and a so-called weed, many of which were just as edible and tasty as the vegetables. Thus, while Hreapha was very good at protecting the garden from mobile creatures, she could do nothing to protect it from vegetative creatures.

Despite the neglect and assault, the garden managed to produce, in time, some edible produce. Especially the melons: huge watermelons and cantaloupes that almost frightened Hreapha with their looming bulk, and which, once cooled in the springhouse, gave the man the only happiness he knew all summer.

Hreapha, who had never eaten any kind of melon herself, wondered if the melons could possibly be held to account for the latest development in the man’s list of distresses: his inability to do his business. With only one eye open, Hreapha could observe that each morning the man staggered, dragging a foot behind him, out to the outhouse, where he remained forever, and from whence came the sounds of his grunting and straining, which Hreapha easily recognized because she too, like all creatures, suffered from occasional difficulty in emptying her bowels. She knew of certain grasses that could be eaten for the condition, but there was simply no way she could prescribe these to him. His inability to poop contributed further to his melancholy and his unpleasantness. And the only way he could alleviate his mood was by stepping up his consumption of the moonward beverage, so that in time Hreapha’s
minding
could not determine whether he staggered from his drinking or staggered from his illness.

Eventually he began to fall down. Once he fell off the porch. Once he fell repeatedly trying to reach the beaver pond, and gave it up, returning to the house, where the girl drew many buckets of water from the well to fill a large tin tub for him to bathe in. Hreapha could not tell him, or her, that she had discovered the beaver pond no longer existed. The hideous rains had washed away the beaver’s dam, and they had not yet been able to rebuild it. In the middle of one night Hreapha had gone to see if there was anything she could do to help, short of felling or dragging timber, and found a bobcat menacing the beaver family. The bobcat had already killed one of the kits and was trying to catch another one when Hreapha arrived and did battle with the cat. She had never fought a bobcat before and hoped she would never have to do so again. They are bigger than Hreapha and they claw and scratch something awful. But Hreapha inflicted sufficient bites all over the cat’s anatomy to give the cat second thoughts about further disturbance of the beavers.

Mr. and Mrs. Beaver attempted by their body language and assorted unintelligible snorts and squeaks to tell Hreapha how grateful they were that she had spared the other four kits from the snatches of the bobcat. Hreapha wished there were some way she could communicate to them her desire to help in whatever way possible with the reconstruction of their dam and pond. In her teeth she took hold of a long hefty stick and dragged it to the dam site, and the beavers perceived that she wanted to help, and for the rest of the night she worked alongside them. When she got home in the morning she was all worn out, but so was the man, who had fallen on his way to the outhouse and was just lying there resting in the outhouse path. He didn’t seem to mind or even notice that Hreapha had to sleep all day, and that she returned after dark once again to the dam site.

The third night she set out for the dam site, Robin followed her with a flashlight. “Where are you going, B—?” she started to use the not-nice name the man had given her, but caught herself and said “Your name isn’t really Bitch, is it? Did you ever have another name?”

“Hreapha,” she said, matter-of-factly, not barking it.

“Oh?” the girl said, and then she did a wonderful thing: she tried to pronounce it. She didn’t quite get the aspirate correct or trill the
r
as much as it should have been, but she did a good job on the plosive
ph
and the whole thing sounded almost like the way Hreapha herself said it. “I’ll just call you Hreapha then, okay?” Robin said.

“Hreapha!” she said excitedly, and trotted on toward the beaver’s place with Robin right behind her.

“Where are we going, Hreapha?” the girl wanted to know.

“Hreapha,” was the only way she could pronounce “beaver dam.”

“Will you protect me if we meet a bear or wolf?”

“Hreapha,” was the only way she could tell Robin that she would protect her against any harm in this world but that they had nothing to fear from wolves, who didn’t exist hereabouts, and as for bear, they were pretty scarce or at least she had not yet seen one.

At last they came upon the construction site for the new dam, where Mr. and Mrs. Beaver were busy as beavers, working with the help of their four kits. Since the beaver didn’t have the impounded waters of a new pond ready yet, they had nowhere to hide when this human being showed up, and Hreapha could not explain to them that the girl had no intention of causing them any harm. So the family of beaver simply shrank back and trembled as Hreapha demonstrated to Robin how she had been grasping sticks and dragging them up to the dam site.

“What happened to the dam?” Robin asked. And then answered her own question. “Oh, did all that rain wash it away?”

“Hreapha,” Hreapha said. And dragged another limb to the dam site. Fortunately many of the limbs and sticks and logs which had made up the original dam had not been completely washed away but had lodged against boulders further downstream.

“You’re
helping
them build it back?” Robin said.

“Hreapha.”

“You really are a good dog,” Robin said.

Hreapha was pleased and proud. She was even more pleased and proud that Robin herself began to help, and was strong enough to drag larger limbs than little Hreapha could drag. Robin also observed how the beaver were picking up large rocks in their dexterous fingers to anchor the base of the sticks making up the dam, and Robin was able to do this work too. The kits were all four busy dredging up mud from the streambed above the dam and packing it against the sticks, so that step by step the water flowing down would distribute the mud among the sticks, chinking the dam and closing it up. The water began to rise, and as it rose the eight of them—two adult beaver, four baby beaver, a dog and a girl—added more sticks and mud to the top of the dam.

The dam was finished before morning! The new pond began to fill. “That was fun,” Robin said to the beavers. “When the pond is filled, I’ll come back, and you can teach me how to swim.” Then she said to Hreapha, “I’d better get home. He’s going to be mad I was out all night.”

But he didn’t even notice. Robin went into the house and came back out to report to Hreapha that he was sound asleep and snoring, even though the sun was well up in the sky. “Let’s have breakfast,” she said, and filled Hreapha’s dish with the Purina Chow, and got her own bowl of cereal and sat with Hreapha to eat it. There were a few peaches she had found ripened on the old trees up in the orchard, and Robin sliced one of these atop her cereal. “This is almost good,” she told Hreapha. “There’s no real milk, and it’s not my kind of cereal, but I can eat it. Are you okay with the doggy chow?”

“Hreapha,” she assured her.

After breakfast they had a long and chummy chat. Or rather Robin did all the talking, and Hreapha was content merely to listen and to interject occasionally a mild
Hreapha
or a milder whimper, and at a few points a growl to indicate she understood the serious import of what Robin was saying.

“I think he’s dying,” Robin said. “Don’t you?” Actually Hreapha’s
minding
of him had not yet dared reach that conclusion, and she dreaded contemplating it, but already was beginning to feel not that she was losing a master but gaining a mistress, and a good one. “He talks about sending me to find a doctor, but isn’t that silly? He says he’ll tell me how to find a road that leads down the mountain if I will promise to get help for him. Do you know how to find the road?” Hreapha wished that dogs had at least been given the ability to nod or shake their heads as humans do to signify yes or no. But if she could really communicate, she was sorry she’d have to inform Robin that as a result of the recent severe rainstorms the whole east side of Madewell Mountain had been eroded into deep gullies and ravines that obliterated any trace of the old trail. Hreapha had recently attempted to locate the remains of the pickup and had discovered that even its burnt carcass had been washed far down the mountainside. And that precarious narrow ledge along the bluff leading to it had had sections of it knocked out by boulders in mudslides. Hreapha had had to make an elaborate detour along a rock-face that would be impassable by a human being, especially a young girl. Getting down off the mountain in that northern direction was unthinkable. Hreapha had not yet explored the southern direction, but intended to do so in the near future, because she was beginning to miss Yowrfrowr.