Sometimes the people from the cars paid attention to Sadie. “Hello, dog. What do you have today by way of lettuce?” Sadie would wag her tail and get patted on the head or ears. If there was a child with the customer, the child would run right over to Sadie. Then Sadie would run to hide behind Missus’s legs, because who knew what a child might do? “She doesn’t like children,” Missus would explain.
“That’s pretty weird, for a dog,” the customer would say. “She won’t bite, will she? Do you have any of your butter today?”
Am I weird? Sadie asked Angus.
Sort of. But I’m not—no matter what those cats say.
Sometimes, when Mister and Angus came home in the evening after a day of fixing fences or clearing fallen trees or working with the tractor in the fields, and after Mister milked the cows, there would be company for supper. Mister and Missus, Sadie and Angus would all go out to the porch, to welcome the guests.
Some guests came with a dog of their own. The guests would sit and talk, and then have supper and talk some more. They might all take a walk together, or throw Frisbees for the dogs to catch, or practice Sit! and Heel! The guests never brought cats, or children, although sometimes they talked about children and having babies. At the end, when it was dark, the guests would drive away in their car, as Mister and Missus, Sadie and Angus stood on the porch watching.
One evening, it wasn’t a guest who arrived. Angus and Mister were just coming in from the barn when a car, almost as big as Mister’s pickup, drove up. A strange man climbed down from it and waited for them.
Angus didn’t like the smell of him, and Mister didn’t either, Angus could tell, so he barked twice in warning. Hey, you. You!
Sadie and Missus came out of the house to see from the porch what was going on.
You better get away! Angus barked and Sadie echoed him, Get away!
“Sadie, Sit!” Missus said, and Sadie obeyed. “Sit! Angus,” said Mister, and Angus obeyed, but he kept his eye on the stranger.
“Are these working dogs?” the stranger asked.
“This is a farm,” Mister told him. “We all work here.”
“I meant trialing. But I know what you mean, and I won’t waste your time. I know how busy you farmers are this time of year. See, I just bought a condo up on the mountain—we’re great skiers, the whole family—and I’d like to do some hunting here in the fall. Deer,” he said.
“I’ve got cows,” Mister said, “and sheep. And the dogs, too. Our land is posted, no hunting.”
“I saw that. But the property owner can give permission for someone to hunt on his land, can’t he?”
“Well, yes,” Mister said. “But I don’t want to do that.”
“I should have said, I’d pay you for it.”
“I don’t think so,” Mister said.
“I should have said, I’d pay a lot.”
“It’s not that I’m hurrying you off,” Mister said, “but my wife has dinner on the table.”
“Here’s my card,” the stranger said, and passed a little piece of white paper to Mister, who looked at it, and then put it into his pocket. “Call me when you’ve had a chance to think things over.” He climbed back up into his big car and backed it around, then drove away.
Mister and Missus, Angus and Sadie all watched the big car go down the driveway, raising dust behind it. “Good barking, Angus,” Mister said.
I had good barking.
And I helped.
Mister took the piece of paper out of his pocket, and ripped it in half.
“You really took against him,” Missus said.
“He was throwing his money around,” Mister explained. “And he drives an SUV.”
That started Missus laughing. “You really are weird, you know that?”
Mister laughed, too. “No, I’m not. I’m normal. He’s the one who’s weird.”
I don’t understand weird, Sadie said.
It’s what’s not normal, Angus explained. It’s what’s different from me.
5
How Missus, Angus, and Sadie harvest blueberries, while Mister harvests hay and Fox harvests a rat
After summer had been going on for quite a while, Mister said it was time to harvest the hay and alfalfa, to use for winter feed and to sell at the farmer’s cooperative. Missus said it was time to gather blueberries for jam. The machines that came to cut and bale the hay were large, and loud, and dangerous, and Mister had to give all of his attention to that job. So Missus took both Sadie and Angus with her to the blueberry fields, which were on high land in the hills beyond the woods. To get there, Missus needed the tractor, with a cart attached behind it.
“I like driving the tractor on the old logging trails,” Missus said. “It’s an adventure, the way it bounces and lurches. It’s a test of my strength.”
“Stick to the roads,” Mister warned her. “I don’t want to have to come pull you out of some ditch.”
“There are no roads,” she laughed, “so there can’t be ditches. But I’ll stick to the ruts.”
“The dogs should ride in the cart,” Mister decided. “They’ll distract you if they’re in the cab.”
Once Missus was seated up in the tractor cab, and the motor was rumbling, Angus jumped up into the cart. Sadie didn’t want to. Come on, Angus urged her. Everybody’s waiting for you.
You said I should stay away from the tractor.
But this is a cart. Besides, I’m here so you don’t have to be afraid.
I’m not afraid. I don’t think I am. Am I?
Just jump!
Sadie jumped in, and Missus started off. The dogs stood on their hind legs, with their front paws on the side of the cart, so they could watch everything.
The bright air was hot and soaked in sunlight. As the tractor pulled the cart up the dirt road, the dogs were knocked gently around and bounced softly up and down. Every time they fell down, they climbed back up on the wooden sides, waiting to be knocked and bounced again. The picnic basket bounced with them, and so did the two jugs full of water, a bucket for gathering, and empty cartons to hold the blueberries.
Fun! Angus said when he bounced, but Sadie wasn’t sure she agreed. It didn’t feel like fun to her. It felt like horrible loud noises, and horrible falling over, and horrible tractor smells, and she wanted it to stop. She wanted not to be in the cart. She wanted to be back in the quiet house with Patches. Oouff! said Sadie. Ouch!
The tractor went more slowly once it entered the cool, shady woods. In the cart, however, the two dogs and the picnic basket and the bucket and the empty cartons bounced even higher than before. Insects buzzed around them, but the noise of the tractor warned birds and animals away. The tractor lurched through the woods for a long time, climbing until it came out onto a rocky hillside.
Missus drove up to the top of the hill and stopped. She turned off the motor.
For a minute, in that sudden silence, Sadie and Angus couldn’t hear anything. Everybody stayed still for that minute, Missus on the tractor seat with her hands in her lap, listening, Angus staring at Missus, waiting, and Sadie hearing her own heartbeat slow down again. Then Sadie started to hear everything.
She heard the big machines at work harvesting the fields, so far away they were just a soft humming in the distance, as friendly as the wind. She heard birds chirping songs and insects buzzing. She heard how the breeze rustled through the grass before it rattled its way through the bushes. And stretching out behind every other sound, Sadie could hear the deep silence of the boulders that pushed up through the ground, up into the air.
Then she heard Missus speak softly. “All right,” Missus said, and she climbed down from the tractor seat. “Angus, Come!” she said. “Sadie, Come!”
The two dogs clambered over the side of the cart, leaping down onto the ground. Sadie was so glad to be back on the ground she ran in two big circles, and then two more. Angus was not so silly. He poked all around, checking things out, sniffing for smells that could warn of trouble or danger. Missus
reached into the cart for the bucket. “All right,” she said again. “You two have a good time. I’ve got work to do,” and she walked away across the hillside, then crouched down on her heels. Her fingers got to work, pulling the blueberries off their stems and dropping them into the bucket.
I have work to do, too, Angus said, and headed back down toward the woods.
I don’t, said Sadie, and she was not a bit sorry about that.
Sadie looked around her, and sniffed the air. It smelled of grass and dirt, trees and undergrowth in the woods, and a delicate, sharp, sweet something. She raised her nose and smelled old, faded sheep smells, wool and manure, and then she noticed things moving through the air just over the ground, little things with wings, bigger than insects, much bigger than flies and wasps and hornets and bees, but much, much smaller than birds. She noticed all the different shapes of rocks, some tall and huge, some low and flat. She noticed the clear sky. She noticed everything.
Angus had disappeared into the woods, so Sadie went to join Missus. Missus reached down into the grass to pick berries, and then dropped them into her bucket. When the basket was full, she went back to the tractor and gently poured the berries into one of the cartons. She gave one little round berry to Sadie, who liked being fed a treat even though she didn’t particularly care for the treat itself. But the blueberry tasted like that delicate, sharp, sweet smell, so now she knew what it was. She also knew she didn’t want any more, so she didn’t follow Missus back to the field. Instead, Sadie thought maybe she should go into the woods. That was what Angus had done and Angus did things right.
Off in the woods, Angus barked. Sadie wondered what he was chasing after, or chasing off, and decided she’d rather explore everything in the field, in the scrub grasses, and all around the rocks. A crow sat on one of the rocks and Sadie ran up to it, Bark! Bark! When the crow flew off—Caw! Caw!—she ran barking after it, just for fun. You couldn’t catch birds, not if you were a dog. She knew that. If you were a cat, if you were Fox or Snake, you sometimes did, although you could never catch a crow. But Sadie wasn’t a cat. It was easy for birds to fly away from dogs, but Sadie still liked to run as fast as she could after the bird, as if she might catch it.
The sun rose higher in the sky, and the day grew hotter. When Missus brought the bucket back to the tractor cart again, she called both dogs. “Angus, Come!” she called loudly, toward the woods. “Sadie, Come!” she called more quietly, because she could see Sadie with her nose stuck deep into the long grass. “You need water and so do I,” Missus told the dogs. She set down two bowls that she filled with water from a jug, and then she lifted the jug to her mouth and drank, too.
I needed water, Sadie said, and Missus knew it.
There were deer in the woods, Angus reported, and then lapped away at his bowl, five or six times. Big ones and little ones. I almost caught a raccoon. He lapped some more. I saw a fox, too, with cubs. Before Sadie had time to say anything, he told her, I didn’t see any bears, but I smelled one. I think that’s what it was.
What do bears smell like? Sadie wondered.
You don’t want to know, Angus told her. He didn’t like to think of what might happen to Sadie if she ran into a bear. Or a raccoon, for that matter. Stay away from raccoons, too, he warned Sadie. You better stay out of the woods.
All right.
Missus finished her water and the dogs finished theirs, so she went back to her berry gathering. The dogs sat in the shade of the tractor, and Angus stretched out on the cool grass to sleep.
Sadie didn’t want to sleep. She heard Missus in the bushes, talking softly, maybe talking to the blueberries as she dropped them into her bucket. She heard Angus snuffling in his sleep, dreaming. She heard the breeze ruffling along the top of the grass. She saw some more of the little flying things, hovering there, in the breeze just above the grass.
They didn’t fly like insects, busily hurrying someplace. They didn’t fly the way birds flew, soaring up, sweeping down, gliding across. Instead, they fluttered from anywhere to somewhere else, as if they didn’t care where they were or where they were going. Sadie went over to see them close up. They didn’t fly away from her like birds and insects did, or circle around her like the cats did. They just hovered, floating up, floating down.
When Sadie crept even closer, they still didn’t pay any attention to her. So she jumped right into the middle of them and ran with them through the grass. Her feet ran on the grassy ground, and their wings fluttered in the air.
Sadie turned around to follow another bunch, running to catch up with them, jumping through the grass. She couldn’t tell one from the other, and they didn’t smell at all as she moved among them, going first after one, then another, then another and another. It felt wonderful, twisting and running, jumping and turning in the sunny air. She wondered if the little flying things were afraid of her, but she didn’t think so. She wondered if they were playing with her, but she didn’t think so. She wondered if they even noticed she was there, or if they knew she wouldn’t hurt them.
Missus told Mister about it that evening, after they had rumbled and bumped their way back home late in the afternoon, and the blueberries had been washed and put away in the icebox for the next day’s jam making. Mister was showered clean after his day in the hayfields, and the animals lay resting, the dogs on the floor, Patches on the windowsill behind the sink. Missus and Mister were eating supper. Missus said, “It was like she was dancing. Dancing with moths.”
“She was trying to catch them,” Mister decided.
No I wasn’t.
“No she wasn’t,” Missus said. “Most of the time, her mouth wasn’t even open.”
“Then what?” Mister asked. “If she won’t chase a Frisbee or a ball, you have to admit she has no fetching instinct. So what do you think she was doing with the moths?”
“I told you. Dancing. You were having a good time, weren’t you, Sadie?”
Yes!
“Dogs don’t dance,” Mister pointed out. “And not with moths, and they don’t chase insects either. I don’t get it, Sadie. What were you up to?”
Dancing! I was dancing! They were dancing! Were they moths?
I don’t get it either, Angus said, but Patches spoke up from his safe place above the sink and across the room from Angus. I do.
Harvesting the hayfields took the men two days, but picking blueberries took only one, so on the second day Angus and Sadie stayed inside with Missus in the hot kitchen to get away from the noise.
Missus made jam on the stove and poured it into jars. She then sealed the jars with paraffin. Everything she did made it even hotter in the kitchen, so hot that even Patches went outside. He went no farther than the porch, but still, for him, the porch was pretty far out. However, even though it was much cooler there, the horrible noise of the machine—cutting and baling, clanking, roaring, and occasionally screeching—drove Patches back inside. He went upstairs and found a closet to sleep in for the rest of the day.
Sadie went up with Patches for a while, although Sadie went under the bed, not into the closet. She had a little nap, and then she returned to the kitchen to help Missus and keep her company. Then she went upstairs again, and then she came downstairs again, and that was how she spent the day.
When he couldn’t take the kitchen heat another minute, Angus went out onto the porch. When he couldn’t take the noise another minute, he went down to the barn. The barn was shady and not as hot as the yard or the kitchen. The barn was noisy, but not as noisy as the porch. When he entered through the wide doorway, coming into the shade from bright sunlight, he couldn’t see anything at first. He only heard Fox. Fox said, Whatsa matter? Nobody got any use for you?
Not right now. There was a sour, heavy smell in the air. Fox was over behind buckets and shovels and rakes and hoes. There was a crunching sound, smushing sounds, eating sounds. Angus could see Fox now, holding something between her paws.
Got me a rat, Fox said. Have some.
Now that
he could see it, Angus said, That’s disgusting.
My job is to catch them.
And eat them, too? Angus’s meals were good brown, crunchy bits, topped with a spoonful of special soft food from a can, and eaten out of a bright metal bowl. How could Fox eat that thing?
Eating’s part of the job.
I’d rather have my job.
You mean your job as Mister’s slave?
What do you mean, slave?
A slave does what he’s told, like Sadie’s your slave.
I am not, Angus said. So what if I am? So are you.
Oh yeah? Nobody tells me what to do or when to do it. I catch my own food.
Crunch, smush, she went on eating while Angus thought about that.
I could catch my own. I just don’t want to.
Ha. Ha-ha. The way you let them tell you what to eat and what to do?
You aren’t even allowed in the house.
As if I wanted to.
Angus walked away. You could never win an argument with a cat, even if you were right. He decided he’d go find Sadie and make her come with him to watch the big harvesting machine. It wasn’t good for her to be so afraid of everything.
6
How Sadie meets a skunk, dances with light, and locates two sheep
As summer came to an end, the days grew shorter and cooler. Then it was September. Mister used his tractor to bring in the baled hay, stacking it in the barn loft, and Missus no longer sold eggs and vegetables at the farm stand. Instead, in the morning she picked tomatoes in the garden, so that in the afternoon she could skin them and chop them and get them into the freezer for winter. Now that evening came earlier, Mister and Missus liked to sit together on the porch steps after dinner, to talk and listen and watch as the forests and hills, stream, farm, and fields faded away into darkness. But, on one of those evenings, just as they were finishing their supper, Missus said, “It’s about time to board up the farm stand.”