It was a big, beautiful busy day that it happened, and oh it had all been so NICE. Goodboy had been driven in the motile vehicle and had been permitted put his head out the window, they had gone to the PARK and Goodboy had gotten to jump in all the puddles he wanted and then had been allowed to jump in THE LAKE which was a VERY BIG puddle INDEED, and he had chased a SQUIRREL, and he had gotten TREATS, and then right as everything was being put away and Goodboy was anxiously waiting at the front entryway to be let in to Home his Owner had sworn and groaned and spoken Bad Words in the Danger Voice.
“Fuck! They got into the trash!”
Oh good this wasn’t Goodboy’s fault. Goodboy remained cautious but drooped less, even as Owner stomped inhome and began searching for bags and a shovel with more force than necessary. It would probably be alright… but just to be safe, he tucked himself in one of his favourite spots under the workdesk, where it was warm and he had a tattered old blanket that smelled comfortingly of himself and Oldgirl.
Oldgirl had beaten him to it, though she only grunted a little as he elbowed a space for himself among her sprawling limbs. “It was fun!” Goodboy told her brightly. “I got treats! I jumped in a pond! Who are They and why did They get into the trash if it makes Owner unhappy? I chased a squirrel!”
“’They,’” said Oldgirl in her creaky wheezy voice, “are undomesticated.”
“Wow!” said Goodboy.
“Domesticated,” continued Oldgirl, mercilessly pre-empting a question before Goodboy could think of it, let alone articulate it, “means you live in Home. You have Owner to look after you and give you treats and walks and take you to parks. They don’t have any of that.”
“Gosh,” said Goodboy. “So what do they eat?”
“Last night? Trash.”
“Geez. Owner never lets ME do that.”
“You have treats instead,” said Oldgirl, rolling onto her back with a noise like a fistful of cellophane wrappers being squeezed and groaning in deep spinal satisfaction. “What’s there to be missed?”
And Goodboy couldn’t argue with that logic, but he did spend much of the evening longing at the trash and thinking of how if he put his nose into it he became Bad, while They got to do it as much as they pleased, somewhere, even if they didn’t get treats.
That could’ve been the end of it.
***
But it wasn’t. It wasn’t because that night, when Goodboy was blissfully asleep on the end of Owner’s bedcoversheets, he slid loose from his dreams like oversized footgloves on cold feet, carried to wakefulness by a godawful, inescapable, impossibly unignorable noise. It was in his ears, it was in his heart, it was making his liver jump up into his mouth.
Then another voice joined in and Owner swore and reared up in bed and banged its cranium on the bedsill and swore and kicked and accidentally booted poor, poor, undeserving, longsuffering Goodboy in his gluteus maximus, for which he whimpered and made pitiful sounds at a very reasonable volume.
“DON’T YOU DARE,” snapped Owner, fishing light and metal tools from shelfdrawers in the dark, fuming at everything its eyes saw for the audacity of existing in a world that dared inconvenience it thus. “Shit-come-stink, don’t you dare join on in, I swear. Bad enough there’s a whole pack of the little bastards out there, don’t you dare-” it trailed off into grumbles and Bad Words and then it stepped out onto the back porchform and began to wave the light and clang the metal tools and holler at the singing.
Goodboy watched, but only a little. He was trying to understand what They were singing, between the clangs and the roars of Owner. It sounded like something he felt he should know, and when it stopped and Owner grunted in satisfaction and stomped off inhome back to bed Goodboy went first to Oldgirl’s rugpile in the corner near the heating duct, where she responded to his nudging with semi-syllabic Bad Words of her own.
“Why would I join in with whatever They’re doing out there?” Goodboy asked her.
“Because They are like us,” she snorted. “They just live less comfy, make more noise, and get louder at night. Owner doesn’t want you to start singing along too, and if you did you’d get less treats. Forget about it and go to bed.”
Goodboy half-listened. He went to bed and thought a lot, until the quiet night broke over his sleepy head like floodwaters overtopping a dam.
That could’ve been the end of it too.
***
But it wasn’t, because when Goodboy got out of bed to see what was going on he did so by following the sound of Owner’s Bad Words, at higher volume and pitch than ever before It was standing in the back yard, holding the broken remains of the birdfeeder and shaking them in rage.
“Suet is for woodpeckers, you thieves!” it shouted. “They’re endangered around here, you aren’t! I should put out poison instead! I should-” and such and so on. Goodboy was nervous listening to this so instead he went and found Oldgirl, who was sitting glassy-eyed by her water dish.
“Why would They eat suet?” he asked her. “What’s poison? What’s endangered? What are you looking at?”
“Hnrgkblrt,” said Oldgirl. “Gn.”
“Why are you falling over? Hey. Hey! Hey! Hey!”
So the day was all very not nice AT ALL and although Goodboy got to ride in the motile vehicle he did NOT get to put his head out the window and then he had to wait in it while Oldgirl and Owner went into the V E T clinic, and then Oldgirl didn’t even bother to come back out, and when he sat there and sulked very very quietly INDEED Owner glared at him and said “don’t you start, damnit” and he didn’t even get so much as an apology treat, and on the way back he saw six and seven squirrels and he didn’t get to chase any of them, and when Home was there the broken birdfeeder was still sitting in the garbage cannister with the trash at the end of the driveway, waiting, which made Goodboy think.
That could’ve been the end of it. But Oldgirl was still someplace else, so Goodboy’s thinking had nowhere to go but back in on itself and within itself and over and over again and when Owner opened the entryway to take Oldgirl’s bed out to the garbage (yes, she’d made a mess when she fell over, but that seemed rude) Goodboy’s curiosity grabbed the reigns and he slipped through behind Owner and away from Owner and into the woods, running as quietly and quickly and excitedly as he’d ever dared.
And even that too could’ve been the end of it, if he’d gotten hungry or bored or found a squirrel. But he didn’t and didn’t and didn’t.
He found where They were.
***
Six, sitting in the little clearing, huddled under a cozy drift of leaves for warmth in the late summer evening, watching the sun set with the suspicion that it was doing it faster than it had a few weeks ago. They looked at Goodboy and he didn’t understand what that meant so he said:
“HI!”
“Hey,” said the nearest one of Them. Quieter than everyone Goodboy met in the park. Cautious. Was he scared of Goodboy? Weird, considering how Goodboy was smaller than anyone else here. Tidier though.
“Why are you dirty?” he asked before the thoughts could finish cooking. “Do you eat suet because it’s your treats? Was the garbage good? What did your singing mean? Have you seen Oldgirl she’s missing right now? How do you not get bored? Won’t you get cold out here in the winter? What does that look mean? The first look. And now you’re doing a second one and I don’t understand it either?”
A laugh slipped out from someone near the back of Their pile. “Boy. You just got away, huh?”
“I didn’t get AWAY away,” said Goodboy defensively. “I just went to visit! Owner will come pick me up, I’m sure.”
“What?” said one of them, sitting up with ANOTHER complicated look.
“It takes good care of me,” explained Goodboy. And just as he said that, off in the distance he heard the crackle of underbrush under big clumsy feet and the call of Owner’s irritated voice shouting his name (that was okay, Owner would be excited to see all the new They he’d met!).
Their new new third look intensified and spread from face to face and back again and only got stronger, and then Goodboy understood all of them. The first expression had been how he looked at a squirrel. The second was how he looked at a treat Owner had put V E T pills in. The third was how he’d looked at the bug he’d caught trying to sneak into the house once, before he pounced.
“Oh I bet it does,” They told him. They sat up without stretching or shaking themselves off, all business. Limbs under torsos, eyes never leaving his. “I bet it does. Let’s give it something to feel useful about, hey? Let’s make your Owner feel responsible.”
Goodboy felt dry in his mouth and wet on his legs and opened his mouth to proclaim he wasn’t scared but it just wasn’t happening.
Then They held him down while one of them raised a tree limb, clutched carefully between both of its dextrous, opposable-thumbed forelimbs.
***
Owner was very upset for a whole weekend, but in the end it went and visited the rescue center downtown to pick up a new pet, even though its hearts still ached. Its spawner had always told it that it was a human person.