Lost & Found - Jacqueline Sheehan [47]
Tess handed the bag of dog food to Rocky. “That’s the hour of the distressed. Why are you waking up then?”
The truth of the situation hit Rocky. The dog woke up because she did. She was the one disturbing his sleep.
When she had been on the mainland, she read a newspaper article about dogs trained to alert people of impending seizures two hours prior to the event. It was speculated that they smelled the chemical change happening in the human. Maybe Lloyd smelled her sadness in a way that others couldn’t sense. Bob used to tell her about the neurotic behavior of dogs who belonged to anxious people. Or of dogs who were overly protective of people who were afraid of everything, who were sure that criminals lurked in every corner. “There’s not much about us that they don’t know,” he had said.
Rocky set the dog food back on Tess’s counter. She knelt by the black Lab. She gave him her hand to sniff. “Lloyd, I think I’m keeping you awake at night. Sorry buddy.”
Chapter 13
The dog still caught old wisps of her scent, once at the food store, again on a beach chair stacked near a restaurant, and when he did, the pain of first loss rose up in him. He knew, in the place where scent traveled through neuron, leaping over synapse to the perfect place in his brain, that she was dead. The smell of death was given to all dogs and it was carried back throughout time from the very first death when dogs came in from the bush to join humans.
It was a primordial scent that announced the end of one human, a different smell than the death of another dog. Once dogs joined the packs of humans, this smell was unlike all others. He knew she was dead, the one he had joined with, slept near, awaited, greeted, licked, cajoled into play, soothed through bad times, lowered her heart rate, her breath, sighed deeply to her to signal that it was time to go to sleep. And she in turn had loved him, remembered him, delighted him with food, thrilled him with car trips where he hung his great black head out the car window, and together they had been majestic.
She was gone. He had failed her, failed to protect her, and save her. An unspeakable tear had ripped through them. His powerful nose tortured him in moments when a thread of her scent caught him off guard and made him halt in his tracks.
The new human who had saved him, and he knew that without her he would have perished, needed extra watching at night. By day he kept a leisurely vigil between her and the door, between her and unknown people. Her thin substance blew in and out of rooms, houses and cars as if she was the alpha one, and he let her. When she slept, her attempt at alpha nature evaporated and her terror began. He smelled it the first night, even groggy from his own surgery, his own disaster. He sensed the alarm, the hunt. Her body restless in sleep, carried traces of an ancient hunter, tracking senselessly, flailing about, sending off waves of scented pain to him.
He had tried to follow humans before into their dreamscapes and the road was treacherous. Following them meant abandoning his watch here, leaving the house unattended, and it was not wise to do so for long. Humans heard nearly nothing while they slept. And they smelled even less. He had experimented many times, walking right up to them in their slumber, holding his nose right up to theirs and still they slept.
To join them in dreaming was a drastic measure, but he feared for this human. He did not want to lose another. He waited until her breathing deepened, then grew quiet. He smelled her sleeping. He crept on her bed, careful to adjust his bulk to not wake her, although any dog would have roused long ago. He lowered his weight and pushed one paw toward her, touching lightly at her back and closed his eyes, chancing that he could find her in their dreams.
He fell through the waking and let himself wash away, perilously so. There, there she was, rushing through houses, opening any door, searching. A wave of acrid smoke caught him, with a flavor of desperation.