Part 3 (1/2)

Thor stood at the living room window every morning and watched Dad leave, wis.h.i.+ng he'd turn around and come back. And every night, he stood and waited for Dad's car.

And Thor always seemed to know just when Dad would return.

Sometimes Dad left for two or more days, and Thor didn't sit at the living room window until the day Dad came home.

Mom had noticed Thor's apparent awareness of Dad's schedule, but decided he was probably just picking up on her own expectations, which was partly right. Thor did notice Mom's lack of antic.i.p.ation when Dad wasn't due home, but there was more to it than that, as Mom realized the night Dad got a flat tire.

The skies were dark with rain clouds as Tom got in his car to go home. He'd had a hard time getting out of the office, and hadn't looked at his watch until he was already in the car. He was a half-hour behind schedule, due home in ten minutes, with a forty-minute drive ahead of him. He knew he should call to let Janet know he'd be late, but the battery in his cell phone was dead and the nearest landline was in his office, six floors up, and he didn't want to go back. He'd told Janet he had a heavy schedule, so he figured she wouldn't worry too much, as long as he wasn't more than a half-hour late.

About halfway home, doing seventy, his left rear tire went out with a pow! that almost startled his bladder loose. The car lurched across two lanes before he managed to wrestle it onto the gravel shoulder and let it drift to a stop. He cursed under his breath and got out to survey the damage.

The left rear wheel was shot, torn to shreds. And then his situation dawned on him: no one was going to stop to help.

There was nothing but forest on either side of the road, not a building in sight, and, he knew, none within walking distance.

He sighed, took off his jacket, rolled up his sleeves, opened the trunk, and bent down to haul out the spare tire and get to work.

By the time he had the lugnuts off the flat, his s.h.i.+rt and pants were ruined, smeared with road grime, grease, and whatever else sticks to tires. He was pulling the flat off the axle when the skies opened up and dumped what felt like Niagara Falls on him. He cursed and jumped into the car and waited for a break in the rain. It was a long wait.

He ended up spending forty minutes changing the tire.

Janet sat at the living room window the entire time, peering through the rain for headlights, trying to keep her fears under control. Thor lay on the floor at her feet, sleeping calmly. She tried to make Thor's disinterest into a good sign, but in reality, she wasn't sure what to make of it.

A minute before Tom pulled into the driveway, Thor suddenly tensed, sprang to his feet, and pressed his nose against the gla.s.s. Janet thought he must have heard the car coming. She squinted out the window, but saw nothing. Thor squirmed and whimpered. She looked again - still nothing. She decided Thor must have heard an animal outside; then she saw headlights through the rain, and Tom's car came crunching up the gravel driveway. Thor gave a little greeting woof and dashed off to the back door to greet his leader.

Janet wondered about the incident for a long time. For days, she watched Thor whenever Tom was due home. At first she thought Thor's hearing was just that much better than hers, but she couldn't convince herself. Thor had perked up a whole minute before the car arrived. A little arithmetic told her that if Tom had been doing thirty miles an hour (a conservative estimate, but considering the rain, he might have been going that slow), he would have been a half mile away when Thor perked up. Even if Thor could hear the car that far away - through a closed window, in pouring rain - could he have distinguished it from all the other cars on the road?

The question gnawed at her until weeks later, when Tom was twenty minutes late. It was just enough for Janet to start worrying, but this time, she went into the living room to watch the dog, rather than the road.

Thor had made himself comfortable in the window chair, but he wasn't looking out; he was waiting. Janet sat a few feet away with her stopwatch in hand. A few minutes went by and Thor sat up. She hit the stopwatch. Thor squirmed, pressed his nose to the window and whined, then sat rigid and alert. His ears were up, but they didn't twitch the way they did when he heard something in the distance.

The stopwatch ticked off twenty seconds, twenty-two, twenty-five. Thor didn't move. Fifty seconds. Thor stiffened slightly, his ears perked up, and he tilted his head to put his left ear a little closer to the gla.s.s. His eyes were locked on the street.

Thor's face lit up. He'd heard the car for the first time. Janet stopped the watch. Fifty-five seconds. A few seconds later, she heard the car.

The hairs on the back of her neck stood up, and a chill ran down her spine. She'd just witnessed something impossible.

Later, Janet told Tom about it, but to her amazement, he wasn't surprised. His family had always had dogs, and he'd seen similar behavior in more than one of them. His childhood dog, Harmon, for example, had always known when he was going to the vet, despite the family's careful avoidance of ”the V-word.” People casually referred to it as a ”dog's sixth sense.” When Tom was a teenager, he'd looked for other ”psychic powers” in Harmon, but found none. If dogs had any other unexplained abilities, they kept them well hidden.

Eventually Tom accepted the explanation that dogs simply pick up very subtle cues from their masters. No big deal.

Janet was disappointed. She'd never been around dogs before, and thought she'd discovered something truly extraordinary. Thor might become famous, she'd imagined, the Psychic Dog.

But if this ability was so commonplace, why hadn't hard research been done on it?

”Well,” Tom suggested one night, ”a.s.suming dogs do have some psychic ability, maybe scientists feel it's beneath them to research. Who knows?”

Janet spent some time in the library reading all she could find about dogs, but never found any mention of a canine ”sixth sense.”

But she did find numerous stories about a mysterious ability of dogs to find their way home from hundreds, sometimes even thousands of miles away. Sometimes to homes they'd never been to before. In one case, a family moved cross-country, leaving the dog behind. Months later, the bedraggled pooch showed up on their new doorstep.

But as amazing as the stories were, they were just that - stories. Anecdotal evidence only. No research to back it up. Why not?

And Thor showed no other unusual insights. Just apparent premonitions of Tom's return (and her own return from shopping, which she wasn't there to see).

In the end, Janet, like Thor, accepted what she couldn't understand.

Things seem normal because they're familiar, not because they make sense.

”Heeeere, Thor!”

”Thor? Here, Thor!”

Mom's voice, not Debbie's. Calling from the kitchen.

Thor sprang to his feet with his ears p.r.i.c.ked up, listening for the next call to double-check her tone of voice.

”Here, Thor!” A little impatience, but that was normal for a second call. Overall positive, a little residual irritation (also normal at this time of day with the kids home). Her irritation probably wasn't directed toward him. Could be a trip. Could be anything.

He poked the front door with his nose, but it was latched, so he trotted around the house to the kitchen door, briefly checking on Debbie on his way.

As he expected, she was playing with her plastic sand bucket and shovel in the little gra.s.sy strip between the driveway and the house, chatting idly with her favorite doll, which sat watching from the sidelines. Her kitten was nowhere to be seen, which was not unusual. She'd brought some sand from the beach, and was busy discovering that wet sand and dirt make better castles than the ones she'd made on the beach with wet sand alone.

He was glad to see that Debbie was on the Pack's side of the split-rail fence that separated the Pack's property from the neighbors'. The bottom rail was high enough for Debbie (or Thor, for that matter) to pa.s.s under easily, which she quite often did. Thor didn't care for that. He understood the meaning of the fence, and he agreed with it in principle. In fact, he reinforced its meaning every day with his urine.

The kitchen door, which opened onto the driveway toward the back of the house, was slightly ajar. Thor nosed it open and went inside, where Mom was talking to Teddy, who was trying to get out of the conversation.

”Look,” she told her son sternly, ”I don't want an argument. Now I want you to take the dog for a walk.”

”Apletely inappropriate. His attempt to a.s.sume a higher rank had made him a full-time pain in the a.s.s, constantly a.s.serting himself over Thor just for the sake of doing it.

It pained Thor deeply to be involved in any sort of strife within the Pack, but this situation was especially unpleasant, since he and Teddy had been best friends when they were pups. It had never occurred to Thor to wonder how he had gone through puppyhood, adolescence, and adulthood while Teddy remained a child; it had just happened, and now Thor was an adult and Teddy wasn't, and Thor could not be out-ranked by a prep.u.b.escent boy. Teddy could a.s.sert himself all he wanted, but he'd have to grow up before Thor would accept him as a superior.

Ironically, Thor could smell the first signs of hormonal changes in Teddy's crotch. He knew that Teddy would soon be a man, and as soon as he was, he would outrank Thor.

But in the meantime, Thor couldn't understand why Teddy resented Thor's rank. Thor was outranked by Mom and Dad, and it didn't bother him one bit. He didn't even resent it when they forbade him from having s.e.x with b.i.t.c.hes in heat.