IN THE FIRST LIGHT of morning, the dogs came down from the bluffs above the river to forage for leftovers in the dump. Once it had been Toby’s favorite time of day—the grass damp and cool under his paws, the air a jumble of smells from the old and new garbage, always exciting, always different.
Lately those days of abundant garbage were a distant dream. People used the new dump on the other side of town more and more, and all eight of the dogs were thinner and hungrier than they’d ever been. Sometimes Toby didn’t even bother to pick his way downhill only to struggle to climb back up again.
Toby was small, and more and more often the big dogs would take away his best finds. Every now and then, though, he’d gulp down a mouthful or two and then sprint with the rest to a narrow cleft between two rocks where the big dogs couldn’t follow. On this particular morning he counted himself lucky to polish off a few rotting cabbage leaves that he would have walked right by in the old days.
He didn’t see the new dog approach. One minute Toby was sitting, licking his chops, wondering if the cabbage had been a mistake, and the next he was looking up at a huge black Rottweiler that loomed over him. Humans had clipped the Rottweiler’s ears and cut off his tail the way they did sometimes, the entire purpose of which, as far as Toby could tell, was to put them into a permanently bad mood. That certainly was the case with this one.
“Find something?” the Rottweiler said, in a deep, ominous voice.
“Some old cabbage,” Toby said, and burped. “It wasn’t very good.”
The Rottweiler leaned down to smell Toby’s breath and Toby instinctively took a step back. “Oh,” the Rottweiler said. His gaze shifted away when Toby looked at him.
“It’s all gone anyway,” Toby said nervously.
“Oh,” the Rottweiler said again.
Then he, too, was gone.
*
KEVIN HAD NEVER been that sick before. He missed two weeks of school and his fever got all the way to 105. He was so sick, he didn’t feel like watching TV. He just lay in bed with Doug, his big stuffed blue dog, and half-slept all day long.
Kevin had wanted a real dog as long as he could remember, more than anything. His mom had explained that it was not possible. Ever since Kevin’s dad had left, when Kevin was only a baby, they’d had to move a lot. The kind of apartments they stayed in—cheap ones—mostly didn’t allow dogs.
On the first day that he’d felt well enough to go back to school, after supper and homework and a shower, Kevin went to bed early. It was then that he discovered that Doug was gone.
He looked under the bed and in the closet and in the dirty clothes hamper. The search started to get frantic and noisy, and that was when his mother came in. She was wearing the Bad News look that Kevin hated.
“Honey, I had to get rid of Doug. And all the sheets and your toothbrush and even your pillows. You were really sick and I didn’t want to take the chance that you’d get infected again.”
“What do you mean ‘get rid of’? What are you talking about? Doug wouldn’t make me sick again, that’s just crazy.”
“Kevin, you know I don’t like that word. I had to throw all those things away.”
“Throw Doug away? Like a piece of garbage?”
“Now calm down, honey. You’re too old to be playing with stuffed animals anyway.”
Kevin saw that she wasn’t going to change her mind. The deed was done, as she liked to say. And then she did say it, to put an end to the discussion.
All that night Kevin thought about Doug being thrown on some garbage dump somewhere, and it made him so sad he could hardly stand it.
*
SOMETIMES THERE WERE as many as 15 of them, and then, cats being cats, some would get restless and move on and there might be only as many as nine or ten. Rita, a small black-and-gray tabby, had been at the dump more than a year now, living on the mice and roaches and other creatures that thrived in the garbage.
The life was not without its dangers. The city would sometimes put out traps and poison to keep the animal population down. And a pack of wild dogs lived on the bluff above the river. The dogs mostly roamed by day, when the cats had retreated to the woods to sleep, and as long as they stayed out of each other’s way, they were able to maintain an uneasy peace.
So it gave Rita a bad moment the night that she came upon a dog’s face staring at her from a pile of trash. She did a backward somersault and landed with all four legs spread on a flattened cardboard box, facing the wrong way, with the breath startled out of her. She was struggling to get her legs under her so that she could run away when she realized that something was not right about the dog.
She turned slowly. The dog hadn’t moved from where it lay, mostly buried under a pile of cloth and paper. Its fur, she saw now, was blue, and its eyes oversized and shiny and unnatural. She arched her back and hissed at it, and it didn’t react at all.
She crept up to it, sniffing. It smelled of humans and not like a dog at all. She bumped her nose against the dog’s nose and got no reaction, so she grabbed the nape of its neck in her mouth and pulled it free from the pile. It appeared to be some kind of toy, larger than Rita, stuffed with something white and fuzzy that leaked out of a slit in its belly.
Rita knew what toys were. Long ago, when she’d been a kitten, she’d lived with humans. They used to fill small furry toys with catnip and let her play with them. They also fed her and petted her and talked to her in voices she couldn’t understand. One day she’d wandered away and been unable to find her way back, and she’d been living on her own ever since.
Rita looked around. No one else had seen the toy dog. Without knowing why, Rita covered it back up with the pieces of cloth and marked the place in her mind so that she could find it again.
*
FALL HAD COME. The nights felt chilly now, and the dogs slept together in a big pile in the Hollow at the top of the Bluffs. Oak and pine trees and sticker bushes and clumps of dried pine needles made a natural windbreak around the Hollow and on even the coldest nights Toby was comforted by the heat and tangy smells of the other dogs.
The sun had been down for a while and the heat of the day had leached out into a clear sky. Toby was dozing at the edge of the dogpile when Fang, an old part-Husky mutt who claimed her mother was a wolf, sat up and took a couple of tentative yips at the moon. Ilse, a Shepherd mix lying next to Toby, barked at her to knock it off. “If you’re a wolf,” Ilse said, “I’m an iguana.”
Fang was quiet for a while, then she said, “What’s an iguana?”
Ilse was not in the mood. “It doesn’t matter because I’m not one, I’m a dog, and so are you, so be quiet and go to sleep.”
Toby yawned. Sleep sounded good. He closed his eyes and was starting to drift off when he felt something cold and wet on his muzzle. He opened his eyes to see the Rottweiler’s face filling his vision.
“Yipe!” Toby said.
“Hush,” the Rottweiler said. “Come over here, I want to talk to you.”
Toby had a policy that applied to this situation. The policy was, don’t argue with big dogs. He followed the Rottweiler to a rocky outcropping near the Cliff, where a straight vertical rock face dropped all the way to the river far below. Max, a skinny little Dachshund, waited there with shining eyes and a wagging tail. They sniffed each other quickly in greeting and then the Rottweiler said, “My name is Bruno. Do you want to be in our club?”
“Club?” Toby said. “What kind of club?”
“It’s going to be cool,” Max said.
Bruno said, “It’s a kind of a mutual protection society.”
“Whatever that is,” Max said.
“Protection from what?” Toby said. “Nobody bothers us much. Being cold or being hungry, that’s about all we have to worry about.”
Bruno showed him a thin, superior smile. “You’re fooling yourself—what’s your name?”
“Toby.”
“You’re fooling yourself, Toby. You have plenty to be afraid of.”
“I do?”
“You’re a purebred, aren’t you?”
“I don’t know. I never knew my parents. I’ve been here at the dump as long as I can remember.”
“I’ve got a good eye for these things, and I think you’re a purebred Corgi.”
“I am?”
“A very distinguished breed, from the old country. Herding dog. Natural leader.”
“Wow.”
“And I bet some of those big mixed-breed dogs take food away from you sometimes.”
“Well, yeah, but that’s what big dogs do.”
Bruno leaned toward him with a fixed stare. “The mixed breeds have no pride. We must tolerate them because they are fellow Dogs, but they can only serve in inferior ways. They have no nobility.”
“I hadn’t noticed that.”
“You have to pay attention. The worst danger is the danger you don’t see. Then there’s raccoons. Thieves, all of them. And buzzards. Hawks.”
“Gosh, none of them ever bothered me.”
“Consider yourself lucky, then. But the worst of all, the absolute bottom rung of the evolutionary ladder…”
“Yeah!” Max said. “Tell him, Boss!”
“What?” Toby said. He’d always been a happy and easy-going dog. This whole conversation made him very nervous. “What is it?”
Bruno bent down until his muzzle was next to Toby’s ear. He growled a single word: “Cats.”
“Cats?” Toby said.
“Cats!” Max yelped, and started to run around in a circle. “Cats! Cats!”
“What about them?” Toby said. “I mean, I don’t like cats any better than the next dog, but why should I be afraid?”
“Because they’re out to get us,” Bruno said. “They’re sneaky, they’re mean, and their poop smells really, really bad. There’s not enough food for all of us, so why should we have to share with a bunch of stinking cats?”
“They catch mice and eat bugs,” Toby said. “Who wants to share that?”
“You don’t have to believe me,” Bruno said. “Once push comes to shove, you’ll see.”
Toby thought that for a big dog, Bruno seemed awfully scared and lonely. It sounded like he just wanted to have some friends and didn’t know how to go about it. “Who’s in the club so far?”
“Max and myself. It’s very exclusive at the moment. We’re only allowing purebreds in as founding members. You would be our third. If you wanted to, that is.”
“Does the club have a name?”
Bruno looked embarrassed. “Right now it’s called The We Hate Cats Club. We’re working on something better.”
What could it hurt? Toby thought. It would be nice to have a big dog for a friend. He might even get to eat a little better.
“Okay,” he said. “Count me in.”
*
RITA LOVED MIC. They were funny looking, they gave her exercise and thrills, and they tasted good besides. Once you got used to them, anyway.
She’d been on the trail of one particular mouse for a long time now, well into the darkest part of the night. In the old days, there’d been so many mice that the hunt never lasted long. Lately there were not only fewer of them, they were quicker and skinnier and had better hiding places.
This one had led Rita to the edge of the dump, where the land began to rise to the Bluffs where the dogs lived. With no more garbage to hide under, the mouse finally darted out onto open ground, the way Rita had pictured it. Rita pounced, too tired and hungry to play any more with her food. Clamping her dinner in her jaws, she was about to turn back toward the woods when a deep-voiced dog barked, “Halt!”
Rita froze, then, annoyed with herself for obeying a dog, she looked over her shoulder. A big Rottweiler, his eyes reflecting the moonlight in a spooky way, glared at her from a short distance away on the hillside. Beside him stood a Dachshund, a little dog that might be part Corgi, and one of those Chihuahua dogs with the pointy faces. Rita couldn’t talk with the mouse in her mouth, so she merely glared back.
“Hand it over,” the Rottweiler said.
“Yeah, yeah, hand it over,” said the Dachshund.
Rita spat the mouse out and put one paw on its tail to keep it from getting away. “What are you doing down here at night?” She heard the nervousness in her own voice. “This is cat time.”
“We’re Dogs,” the Rottweiler said. “We can do whatever we want.”
“Suit yourselves, but this is my mouse. I’ve been chasing it forever. What do you want it for, anyway? Dogs don’t eat mice.”
“None of your business,” the Rottweiler said. “Your job is to do what you’re told. Now give me the mouse.”
Rita’s legs were trembling. “No way.”
“Then we’ll take it anyway,” the Rottweiler said. “Come on!” he yelled to the other dogs, and suddenly they all rushed at her, the Rottweiler’s huge teeth flashing bright white against the darkness of his coat. Rita had no time to think. She abandoned the mouse and ran for the nearest tree, fifty yards away.
The dogs were all baying now, which was a good thing, because they were using up their breath that way instead of putting it into their running. Just the same, it was a terrifying sound, and Rita couldn’t tell if they were getting closer. She was fear on four legs. She leapt for the tree as soon as it was in range and ran up the side of it. The dogs, unable to stop, skidded past her tree and into the woods, where there was a terrible crashing sound and a startled yip.
Rita was still trying to catch her breath when the dogs tramped back into the clearing. The Rottweiler stopped every few steps to put one paw to his head. “It was a feline trick,” he said. “That cat ran me into that tree on purpose.”
“They’re tricky all right,” the Dachshund said. “You always say that, Boss. How tricky they are.”
Rita, from a high branch, saw them clearly in the moonlight as they formed a circle around her mouse.
“Now what?” the Corgi mix said. “I’m not going to eat that.”
“Maybe not,” the Rottweiler said, “but neither is that cat.” He picked it up in his jaws and made a disgusted face. The other dogs followed him up the hill.
Once she was sure they were gone, Rita went looking for Spike, the toughest cat in the dump. She found him by the river, chasing a fish through the shallows. The fish laughed at him as it flopped out of Spike’s grasp and shot away into deep water.
“I hate fish,” Spike said. He was a big, muscular black cat with white socks and stomach.
“Until you catch one,” Rita said. “Listen, I think we have a problem.”
“No kidding. I haven’t eaten since yesterday.”
“I mean a new problem. With the dogs. A pack of them just now came down and took a mouse away from me.”
“At night? And took a mouse? That’s weird.”
“They’re up to something. I don’t like it.”
“Like it or not,” Spike said, “there’s nothing we can do about it. They’re dogs. We can’t fight them.”
“We can’t let them come down here and take what little food there is.”
“Face it, Rita. They can if they want. If the dogs decide to run us out of here, that’s it. We’re gone.”
*
BRUNO AND MAX talked up their night-time adventure, the story getting more dramatic every time they told it, until Toby no longer remembered exactly how many cats they’d faced down, or how badly they’d been scratched in the fight. Bruno was the only one with obvious injuries, which he claimed he’d gotten when three, no, four huge toms had caught him alone by some big rocks.
Toby wondered whether this was before or after Bruno ran into the tree, because he didn’t remember Bruno ever being by himself. He decided, however, that he would keep quiet for now.
In any case, the adventure got them two more members. With the addition of Pierre, the oversized poodle, they had their first big dog besides Bruno. Then Fang wanted to join, and Bruno made a speech about how membership was now open to wolves as well as dogs.
“Fang,” Toby said, when Bruno finally began to wind down, “is not a wolf.”
“Part wolf,” Fang said.
“I’ve got a good eye for these things,” Bruno said, “and I say she’s a wolf.”
If Bruno could be so wrong about Fang, Toby wondered, what did that say for his belief that Toby was a purebred Corgi?
“What difference does it make?” Toby said. “I don’t care whether she’s a wolf or not. She’s our friend, and that’s all that matters.”
Bruno had been sitting on his haunches. He quickly stood up to his full height and flexed his front legs so that the muscles stood out on his massive neck and shoulders. “Are you questioning my authority?”
“Who, me?” Toby said, squatting involuntarily and releasing a little pee into the dirt. “No, no, not at all.”
“Good,” Bruno said. He sat down again and said, “Fang’s wolf heritage will be very important to us later in the struggle.”
It was getting late, and Toby had been up most of the night before. All he really wanted was to crawl into the Hollow and get some sleep. Unlike Bruno, who was always full of energy and whose eyes always had a fierce, yellow-green glow. Some of the other dogs had wandered over to the Hollow, thinking the same thing as Toby. They began to settle in with a lot of scratching and snuffling and yawning.
Suddenly Bruno marched into the middle of them and said, “I have an announcement. From now on, the Hollow is reserved for club members only.”
At that moment a cold wind came up out of the north, ruffling the dogs’ fur and making Toby shiver.
“What?” Ilse barked. “You’re telling me where I can and can’t sleep?”
Ilse was most definitely not in the club. Toby had been there when Bruno invited her and she’d laughed in his face. “I wouldn’t be in any club,” she’d said, “that would have you in it.”
“Fang?” Bruno said. “Pierre?” Fang and Pierre trotted over and stood on either side of Bruno. Now it was three big dogs against one. Toby saw the first flicker of doubt in Ilse’s eyes.
Bruno saw it too. “Get out,” he said, baring his teeth at her. Max pranced back and forth behind Bruno on his tiny legs, barking and letting out threatening yips.
Ilse looked to King for support. King was the oldest of them, a big yellow dog with intelligent eyes. All the younger dogs respected him, even though the fur on his muzzle had gone gray and his hips had gotten so stiff that he could hardly walk.
“If you let them do this,” Ilse said to him, “they’ll come after you next.”
King looked at her with his sad brown eyes, then stared at the ground in front of him.
Ilse got to her feet. The hair on the back of her neck stood up and Toby found himself wishing she would go after Bruno. This business with the Hollow wasn’t right. Toby was too small to do anything about it himself, but he was sure that Bruno would back down if Ilse attacked.
Ilse must have thought otherwise. She growled one more time and then her tail went down between her legs and she slunk away. At the edge of the clearing she stopped to look back—not at Bruno or King, but at Toby. The look was full of disappointment.
Bruno turned to King. “I’m going to give you a choice. As a mixed breed, you can become an honorary member of the club and stay where you are. Or you can leave with Ilse.”
King licked his chops noisily, something he’d been doing a lot of lately. “What do honorary members have to do?”
“Nothing at all. They can just lie here in the Hollow and sleep if they want.”
“Can I think about it?”
“Yes. But if you sleep in Hollow, that means you’ve made your decision, and you’re one of us.”
“Okay,” King said. “I’ll think about it.” He closed his eyes and was asleep in seconds.
Bruno assigned Max to guard duty. His job was to tell any of the other dogs who showed up that they had to become honorary members too, or get out. If there was a problem, he was to come find Bruno. Since the only dog left who wasn’t in the club was Tippy, a wire-haired terrier who was not too sharp, Max wagged his tail excitedly and began to march back and forth in front of the entrance to the Hollow, ears cocked forward.
Toby sat by himself for a long time. He kept remembering the way Ilse had looked at him. But the night was cold, and before too long he crept silently down into the Hollow, curled up next to King, and went to sleep.
*
A WEEK OR SO after the dogs took her mouse away, Rita woke up in the middle of the day to a sound she’d never heard before. First the Rottweiler would call out something, then what sounded like all of the other dogs would answer back, “Bark bark!” in perfect unison.
At first Rita thought it was a bad dream. She had them sometimes, especially one where a giant mouse held her down and tickled her paws. This particular nightmare, with the dogs shouting, was going on entirely too long, until Rita thought she might start barking too. She went down to the river to get away from the noise and found some of the other cats there.
“We really have to do something,” Rita said.
Spike shrugged and licked one paw. “Maybe the humans will notice the dogs have gone crazy and take them all away to the Shelter.”
“We can’t just wait and hope,” Rita said.
Hooky, a gray male tabby, said, “Maybe we should go away, find another place to live.”
Male cats didn’t like to be called cowards, so instead Rita said, “We have every bit as much of a right to be here as they do.”
Chiang, an old Siamese, said, “Those dogs are so stupid, they’re more likely to hurt themselves than anybody else.”
“Maybe somebody could reason with them,” Rita said.
“Reason?” Spike said. “With a dog?”
“Try it if you want,” Hooky said. “I don’t want to be around to watch what happens next.”
Rita shook her head. “I don’t know. Maybe there’s a way.”
She walked into the dump, not thinking about where she was going. She found herself in the place where she’d discovered the big blue toy dog, and she got an itchy feeling in the back of her brain. She pawed at the papers on top of it in a random way, and then she pulled it free of the nest of used tissues and other trash and laid it out on the piece of cardboard where she could look at it. She walked around it a couple of times, and then she poked and prodded it until it slumped over on its side and the slit in its belly was exposed.
Still in the grip of a mental picture she didn’t fully understand, she pulled at the broken seam with her claws and teeth. It was hard work not to tear the fabric, and once she got the seam open and started pulling out the stuffing, it left a nasty, chemical taste in her mouth. Still, she got it all out, and spat a few times to clean off her tongue, and then she sat and stared at it for a long time with her head tilted to one side.
*
IN THE OLD DAYS, Toby had been bored a lot. The only things to do had been to sleep and to look for food. Now Bruno had them doing things all the time. He said it was part of running things like a business, to which Max had said, “Whatever that is.” Now everyone was on a team, and everyone had a job to do, and if you didn’t do your job, you didn’t eat. A lot of times they didn’t eat anyway, though Toby didn’t point that out.
Tonight, instead of sleeping, his job was reconnaissance, which turned out to be a lot like spying. He had Max for his partner. At first thought, Max seemed like a poor choice for a spy, seeing as how he was unable to hold still or to stop talking. He seemed like a bad choice at second and third thought too.
Nevertheless, down the hill they climbed, Toby creeping quietly, low to the ground, and Max doing the best he could, yelling “Yikes!” and then “Sorry!” every time something startled him and made him jump or run around in circles.
That was when they ran into the strange blue dog.
Toby had never seen a dog that color before. Or, for that matter, a dog that clumsy. He would take three or four steps and then one of his legs would bend at an impossible angle, and down he would go, only to get back up, biting and clawing at himself.
Toby wondered if the strange dog might have rabies. He’d seen a rabid raccoon once, and the memory of it still frightened him. This blue dog was different, though. He didn’t have any foam around his mouth, and wasn’t stiff in his back legs—more like the opposite. Still, it was probably a good idea to give him lots of room, maybe follow him from a distance. He was about to whisper that suggestion to Max, but Max had already jumped onto the path and yelled, “Halt! Who goes there? Friend or foe?”
These were the special words Bruno had taught Max to say when he was on guard duty. Apparently Max had gotten too excited to remember that his job at the moment was spying. In fact, he’d gotten so excited that he was unable to control himself and was running in circles around the blue dog.
The blue dog had looked at first like he wanted to run away. His legs had gotten tangled and he sat down instead, then slumped oddly to one side.
Toby sighed and stepped out from behind the rock that had been protecting him. “Forgive my overexcited friend,” he said. “We’re curious because we haven’t seen you around here before.”
“I’m new,” the blue dog said, in a voice as strange as his behavior, low in the throat and strained. “My name is, uh, Fred.”
“Listen,” Toby said, “I don’t mean to sound rude, but you’re not sick are you? You don’t seem too steady on your feet.”
“Fleas,” Fred said, promptly falling on his chin. He then raised one hind leg and thrashed at the air in the rough vicinity of his neck. He looked like a broken wind-up toy winding down. “They’re driving me crazy, see?”
Toby was anything but reassured. He was trying to think of a good exit line when Max cut in. “Are you going to join the club? Are you? Are you?”
“What club is that?”
“The club,” Max said. “There’s only one. Everybody’s in it. Except Ilse, and she doesn’t count. It’s Bruno’s club. Bruno is the Big Boss.”
“Is Bruno the big Rottweiler?”
“Yep, yep, yep!” Max said. “We’re his most trusted lieutenants, he says. Whatever that is.”
“What does this club do?”
“We hate cats!” Max said.
“Well,” Fred said. “I sure hate cats, all right. Yes sir, I hate cats like poison.”
“Mostly,” Toby said, “we do whatever Bruno tells us to do.”
“Interesting,” Fred said. He was looking at Toby and ignoring Max, who was so excited now that he was springing completely off the ground with all four legs at once. “Sure,” Fred said, “I’ll join your club.”
Reluctantly, Toby introduced himself and Max and they all sniffed each other’s rear ends.
“Max?” Toby said. “Why don’t you go on with the mission while I take Fred to meet Bruno?”
“Okay!” Max said, and pranced down the hillside, starting small avalanches of dirt and rocks.
“Max!” Toby said. Max turned and galloped back up to where they were. “Stealth,” Toby said. “Don’t let them hear you.”
“Yep, yep! Stealth! Right!” He charged down the hill again.
Fred and Toby made their way toward the Bluffs. “You smell kind of like humans,” Toby said.
“I only ran away yesterday.”
“Did they have cats? Because, no offense, you kind of smell like a cat too.”
“That’s why I ran away. Too many cats, always crawling all over me. I hate cats. I sure do.”
Fred was walking better with each step, as if he were just learning how. By the time they got to the top, he was moving almost normally.
They found Bruno in the Hollow, eyes open, staring off into the distance.
“Bruno, this is Fred. He wants to join the club.”
Bruno lifted his head and looked Fred up and down. “What kind of a Dog are you?”
“Um, Australian Blue Heeler?”
“I’ve heard of that,” Bruno said. “And you’re certainly blue enough.”
“Yes, sir. Whatever you say, sir.”
“Hmmmm. I like your attitude. You’ll do well here.” He looked at Toby. “Good job—what was your name again?”
“Toby.”
“Ah, yes. Good job, Toby. Now get on with your reconnaissance, and I’ll explain to Fred here what we’re up against.”
Toby looked back once before he started downhill. Bruno and Fred were deep in conversation.
Bruno had never explained anything to Toby. He couldn’t even remember Toby’s name, even though Toby was only the second dog to join the club.
It wasn’t fair.
*
IN A WAY, Rita liked being in the dog suit. Like most cats, she liked being touched all over, and she was cozy and warm when the wind blew. She’d used pine sap to glue together the edges of the slit in the toy dog’s belly, and that was working well. The holes she’d made above the dog’s glass eyes were less successful, and she had trouble seeing out of them at first. She was falling all over herself when Toby and the Dachshund found her, and she still didn’t believe she’d managed to fool them. Good thing dogs weren’t very bright.
As for Bruno, a little phony respect and he was eating out of her hand. He claimed to base his philosophy on pure logic, then turned around and used logic to justify being at the mercy of his emotions. Once Rita got him talking about his past, the story came tumbling out.
“What does it mean, anyway, ‘cat person’?” Bruno asked her. “I think that’s the stupidest thing I ever heard. Are you not a real person if you’re a ‘cat person’?”
“Tell me what happened,” Rita said.
“My mistress got a new boyfriend who was a ‘cat person.’ He was always complaining about me barking and sleeping in the bed and chewing up his shoes. And, you know, needing to go outside. Not like a cat, who does his business in the house and smells the place up. How disgusting is that? So then he moves in and brings his cat with him, and the cat is always starting fights with me, which I get blamed for. The next thing I know, she gives me away to some total strangers.”
Rita had trouble focusing on Bruno’s story because she was remembering her own long-lost home.
Bruno sighed and lay down with his head on his paws. “The new people made me live in the back yard. And I didn’t even have a doghouse to get out of the rain. They used to put me in the bed of their pickup truck and drive around. One day we were stopped at a light and I saw a cat that looked like the boyfriend’s cat. I got a little crazy and jumped out to chase it. I don’t think they even noticed I was gone.”
“Did you catch the cat?”
“No,” Bruno said. “It tricked me.”
“Cats,” Rita said. “They’ll do that. They’re the worst.”
She’d had this vague idea that if she looked like a dog, she could argue the cats’ point of view and the dogs would listen. Now she saw that Bruno was so full of rage and blame that there was no room for understanding. He’d focused all his disappointment on the feline species and Rita had no hope of reasoning with that.
“Yes,” Bruno said. “They’re evil. They’re down there right now, plotting against us. I don’t know what their plan is, but it’s going to be bad news for us Dogs unless we stop them.”
“Stop them how?”
Bruno sat up tall. “We will drive them into the sea!”
Rita stared at him. “Seriously? How are we going to do that? There’s no sea within a thousand miles of us. Sir.”
Bruno jumped to his feet and barked, “To the sea! We will drive them into the sea!”
Rita jumped, got tangled in the dog suit, and ended up unable to move. When she got her breath back, she said, “Drive them in cars? How do you think you’re going to get them there?”
Bruno sat down again, suddenly calm. “It’s good that you’re not afraid. I was just testing you. ‘Drive them into the sea’ is only a, a…”
“Figure of speech?” Rita suggested.
“Right. One of those.”
Rita knew it hadn’t been a test. Bruno was seriously crazy, and he went in and out of his mind like Rita used to go in and out of her cat door.
“If we drive them into the river,” Bruno said, “it comes to the same thing. You have to put things in a big, dramatic way sometimes to get your point across.”
“I get your point,” Rita said. “Believe me, I get it.”
*
“WHAT ARE YOU sneaking around for?” a voice said.
Toby froze. The voice came from the night sky directly above him, and what’s more, it was a cat’s voice, a kind of mush-mouthed yowl. He looked slowly upward and finally made out a large tuxedo cat lying on a branch of a twisted old oak tree.
“Uh, nothing,” Toby said.
“There’s no food for you in the woods. This is where we sleep during the day. Speaking of which, you’re supposed to be asleep now. What do you want?”
“I’m, uh, just looking around.” Bruno hadn’t told him what to do if he got caught. “I didn’t mean any harm.”
“What’s your name?”
“Toby.”
“I’m Spike.”
Toby bobbed his head. He couldn’t truthfully say that he was pleased to meet a cat.
“Listen, Toby, what do you know about what’s going on up there on the Bluffs?”
“On the Bluffs?” Toby said.
“All the barking and carrying on.”
“Barking?”
Spike sighed. “I suppose this means you’re part of it. Are you going to tell me what it’s all about?”
Toby scratched at some pine needles, circled around a couple of times, lay down, then got up again. He scratched one ear and then said, “It’s this big dog, Bruno.”
“Big Rottweiler?”
“Yeah. He’s got this club, see.”
“What kind of a club?”
He stopped himself from saying the name of the club just in time. He ducked his head and put his tail between his legs and started to walk away, looking mournfully over one shoulder.
“Wait!” Spike said. “It’s something to do with us cats, isn’t it?”
Toby bobbed his head again.
“Good thing I can see in the dark,” Spike said. “He’s planning something bad, isn’t he?”
Toby, utterly miserable, nodded again.
“What is it? What’s he planning?”
“I don’t know!” Toby cried. “He doesn’t talk to me!”
“But you’re in this club, aren’t you? Aren’t you?”
Toby couldn’t help himself. The guilt and the anxiety were too overwhelming. His bladder let go and he peed in the middle of the path.
“That really smells awful,” Spike said. “Do we come up and pee where you guys sleep?”
“Sometimes,” Toby said.
“Yeah, okay, maybe we do, but that’s a territorial thing, it’s not because we can’t control ourselves. I can’t believe you’re part of this club. You don’t seem all that bad, for a dog. Aside from the peeing thing.”
“I didn’t think he was serious about the cat-hating stuff at first. I thought he just wanted us to like him.”
“One of my friends is missing,” Spike said. “A gray tabby named Rita. Do you know anything about it?”
“No.”
“How come you look so guilty?”
“Because I’m a dog! It’s that tone of voice.”
“Okay, okay. What about this Bruno? Would he have done something to Rita?”
“No,” Toby said. “He doesn’t do anything himself, he gets others dogs to do everything for him.” The words sounded disloyal once he’d said them, so now he felt guilty about that, too.
“So now that you know Bruno is up to no good,” Spike said, “what are you going to do about it?”
Toby was still thinking that over when Max came running up. “Hey, Toby, who you talking to? Are you doing reconnaissance? Am I interrupting? What’s going on?”
Spike made a skittering sound as he climbed farther up the tree, startling Max, who began to bark furiously.
Toby lay on his belly and closed his eyes and put his front paws over his ears.
*
THE NEXT DAY, Rita listened in her dog suit while Bruno led an All Dogs Meeting. He announced that the area formerly called the Bluffs would henceforth be known as the Independent Nation of Doglandia. Cats were no longer permitted within its borders. Where exactly those borders were was not entirely clear.
Bruno also revealed that military training was now mandatory, and he ordered all Dogs to report to the training field at noon. It turned out that the training field was the big clearing at the very top of the Bluffs, next to the Hollow, and bounded on the one end by the Cliff, a sheer drop to the river below.
The training itself consisted of everyone chasing sticks that they were supposed to pretend were cats. Bruno had figured out a way to throw them by holding them in his mouth and then snapping his head sharply to one side. The sticks didn’t go terribly far, and with all the dogs chasing them at once, chaos ruled. The dogs ran into each other, knocked each other down, rolled each other into the bushes, and snapped and growled at each other.
Rita didn’t participate. She’d fed Bruno a tale about having a delicate constitution and having to make constant trips to the vet in her earlier life, all because she wasn’t big and strong and rugged like Bruno was. The more flattery she piled on, the more sympathetic he became, until he eventually allowed her to sit on the sidelines.
The dogs enjoyed the play at first, then quickly tired of it. “Maybe,” Rita suggested, “you might want to take it easy on them the first day, sir. Build them up gradually.”
“Oh, all right,” Bruno said. “At ease!”
The other dogs flopped down in the dirt, and Bruno began to pace back and forth, lecturing them. If there was logic to the speech, Rita missed it, though she would be the first to admit she was not paying a lot of attention. The general idea was that Dogs had a special destiny to rule over all other animals, which was why they were Shepherds and Cow Dogs and Hunting Dogs.
Whereas cats were a cosmic mistake that needed to be corrected.
He droned on and on, and the exhausted and underfed dogs one by one fell asleep. As soon as their eyes closed, Max rushed at them, yelling, “Wake up, up, up, up!” The glass eyes on Rita’s dog suit never closed, so she was able to nap a bit between Max’s assaults.
Finally it was over. Some of the dogs went down to the river to drink, and Rita tagged along. She hung back from the others and finally slipped away and got out of the dog suit long enough to catch and eat a vole. The river ran high and fast because of the fall rains upstream, and Rita watched it for a while, thinking how you never appreciated how good you had things until they changed on you, first when she’d had a house and humans to wait on her, and then at the dump before Bruno came along and spoiled everything.
*
TOBY LIKED THE FIRST day of training well enough. The second day left him less than enthusiastic. He snuck away during the speech afterward without Max noticing and stole partway down the hill, moving into the wind. He was looking for a good place to curl up and nap when he picked up a familiar scent.
“Ilse?” Toby said.
“Who’s there?” Her voice came from the far side of a pile of boulders.
“Just me, Toby.”
“Nobody else is with you? Not that yappy little Dachshund or anybody?”
“No.”
Ilse came out slowly from behind the rocks. She’d lost weight and her eyes flicked from side to side nervously. “What was all the yelling up there the last two days?”
Toby explained about Doglandia and the training and the speeches. “I don’t like being in this club anymore,” he said.
“Yes, well,” Ilse said. “Maybe you should have thought about that before you joined. How does everybody else feel?”
“Except for the yappy little Dachshund, I don’t think anybody is especially happy about it.”
“If you all stood up to him at once…”
“You’ve seen him. At least one or two of us would get killed. And we’d have to be prepared to kill him. I don’t know about the others, but me, I don’t have the instinct for it.”
Ilse sighed. “I suppose we could all go live somewhere else.”
“Bruno’s crazy. He’d probably follow us and attack us.”
“Well, you should think it over. I’m ashamed that I ran away the other day. If you decide to make a move, I’ll be close by. Just call my name.”
*
ON THE THIRD day of training, Rita saw the first signs of resistance. Paco, the Chihuahua, and Tippy, the dim terrier, were grumbling from the start. Bruno barked at them and nipped at their legs, but as soon as he chased one, the other sat down. Then King sauntered over under a tree and went to sleep.
Bruno refused to give up, and with Max egging him on, he kept after them. He grabbed Paco by the neck and shook him hard, and he drew blood when he bit King in the tail. Grudgingly, growlingly, the dogs went through the motions of chasing the sticks. Bruno, his eyes glowing yellow-green, looked on with a mixture of pride and madness.
In the end, Bruno chose not to push his luck. He cut the exercise short, and he kept his speech brief and to the point. “Tomorrow,” he said, “is the day we have prepared for. Tomorrow we attack! Tomorrow we drive the cats into the sea!”
“Uh, sir,” Rita said. “I think you mean the river.”
“Whatever,” Bruno said, under his breath, and then he began to bark again. “By tomorrow night our cat problems will be over forever!”
This is it, Rita thought. Time’s up. I’d better think of something fast.
*
TOBY PRETENDED to chase the sticks with the other dogs. Many of them passed looks back and forth as they trotted around, and Toby knew they felt the same way he did, sad and tired and disillusioned.
After his speech, Bruno retreated to the Hollow to make his battle plans for the next day. The rest of the dogs lay down wherever they’d been standing and looked at each other. As soon as Toby’s glance connected with that of another dog, the other dog looked away. They were all, Toby realized, waiting for somebody else to speak up first.
Fred, the weird blue dog who had become best friends with Bruno by sucking up to him, walked over and lay down next to Toby. Toby scooted a few inches away to show his disapproval.
“We have to do something,” Fred said in his strange, gravelly voice.
Toby shot him a quick, reproachful look and put another inch of distance between them.
“I’ve been watching you,” Fred said, “and I think you’re not happy with the way things have been going.”
“Oh no,” Toby said. “I’m incredibly happy.” He thumped his tail in the dirt to prove it. “Bruno is the greatest.”
“You don’t have to lie to me. I’ve only been pretending to get on Bruno’s good side. I came up here in the first place to find a way to stop him.”
“Sure you did,” Toby said.
Fred thought a minute, then he got up and repositioned himself so he was facing away from all the other dogs. Then something really strange happened. It looked like there was another animal inside Fred’s skin, clawing at Fred’s neck from the inside. Then it got even stranger because Fred’s head leaned way, way back and a cat’s head poked through a slash in Fred’s belly.
The cat’s head took a deep breath and whispered, in a cat voice, “My real name is Rita and I’m a cat.”
Toby could not make sense of what his eyes saw. All four of his paws twitched and he began to whine involuntarily. “This can’t be happening.”
“Keep your voice down, please,” the cat head said. “Or there’s going to be a riot.”
Fred—Rita—moved the dog head back where it had been before. “We have to talk to the other dogs,” he—she—said.
“I already went through this with Ilse.”
“Who’s Ilse?”
“A German Shepherd that Bruno ran off. There’s nothing we can do. If we try anything, dogs could get killed.”
“If we don’t try something, cats will die for sure.”
Toby stopped himself from saying the first thing that came into his mind.
“Look,” Fred/Rita said. “At least we can get some other dogs on our side. Maybe one of them will know what to do.”
Reluctantly, Toby agreed. The obvious first choice was Paco, given the way he’d resisted the day’s exercise. Toby made sure Max wasn’t around, then casually sauntered over to where Paco lay and stretched out beside him. Despite his casual posture, Toby was tense and scared. A minute or two later, Fred/Rita lay down on his other side. Paco looked from one to the other. “Uh oh,” he said. “Am I in trouble?”
Fred/Rita explained, using her dog voice, that they were tired of being in the club and were looking for support. And for ideas about how to get out of it.
“Count me in,” Paco said. “Only, I don’t know how you’re going to get Bruno to give up.”
“We’ll think of something,” Fred/Rita said.
“How about your pal Tippy?” Toby asked.
“He’ll go along with anything I tell him to,” Paco said. “But if you’re looking for ideas, he’s not your dog. Let me talk to Pierre. I think he’s pretty fed up.”
“Okay,” Fred/Rita said. “But we need to come up with something fast.”
Paco got up, looked both ways, and then crossed the clearing to where Pierre lay.
“King’s not going to take a stand,” Toby said.
“No,” Fred/Rita said. “That leaves Fang.”
Talking to Fang struck Toby as a bad idea, though he couldn’t say why. “Maybe we should wait, see what Pierre says.”
“I’m going,” Fred/Rita said. “You can stay here if you want.”
Toby thought about Ilse again, and the way she’d looked at him when Bruno ran her off. He thought about the kind of courage it took for a cat to put on a dog suit and walk into the heart of enemy territory. He thought about the harsh things that the cat Spike had said to him. He thought about how he’d spent his whole life doing what big dogs told him to do.
“No,” he said. “I’m coming.”
Fang was sound asleep, and she jumped when Toby gently nuzzled her neck. “What?” she said. “What happened?”
“Shhhh,” Rita said. “Don’t get excited. We just want to talk to you.”
“Talk?” Fang said. She was sitting up now, practically barking. “Talk about what?”
“Please,” Toby said, suddenly afraid. It was all going wrong. “Please keep it down.”
“Why should I?” Fang said. “What are you up to? Why are you whispering?”
“If Bruno hears…” Toby said.
Suddenly Max leapt out from behind a bush, his short little Dachshund hairs bristling, a snarl on his rat-like face. “What?” he yelped. “If Bruno hears what?”
“Nothing,” Rita said, but it was too late.
Max rushed back and forth, barking at the top of his high-pitched little voice. “Treason!” He darted toward the Hollow, shouting, “Boss! Boss, come see! Treason! Traitors!”
“Run for it,” Rita said.
Before Toby could get his feet under him, a black cloud rose into the sky from the general direction of the Hollow. Except that it wasn’t smoke, it was solid muscle and black fur and white gnashing teeth. Bruno landed in the middle of the clearing, so hard that he skidded halfway to the edge of the Cliff. His back legs dug into the dirt and he launched himself toward Toby.
Toby stared up in a paralysis of fear as Bruno’s immense shadow fell on him. Goodbye, everything, he thought. Then a ball of blue fur hit him in the chest and knocked him out of the way. An instant later, Bruno landed where Toby had been, skidding again in the loose dirt and knocking a birch sapling to the ground.
“Help!” Toby shouted, as soon as there was air in his lungs to do it. “Help, Ilse!”
The other dogs started to run around in a panic, barking incoherently.
Bruno shook himself and turned slowly to face the other dogs. His eyes burned yellow-green and his face twisted in uncontrollable rage. His gaze passed over Toby and came to rest on Rita.
“You!” Bruno shouted. “You tricked me! I trusted you! And now you’re plotting against me?”
“Help!” Toby called again, looking around frantically. Where was she? “Help, Ilse!”
Bruno glared at Toby. “Shut up.”
Toby shut up.
“I,” Bruno said to Rita, “am going to tear you into little pieces.”
He charged at Rita and somehow Rita moved just enough, at just the last second, so that Bruno shot past her and slid head-first into the big oak tree next to the Hollow. He shook his head a couple of times, spun around, and charged again. Rita sprinted for the sticker bushes with Bruno gaining on her, but before he could catch her, a streak of yellow-brown roared through the clearing and knocked Bruno off his feet.
“Ilse!” Toby shouted.
Ilse and Bruno rolled on the ground, raising a huge ball of dust. Snarling and snapping sounds came from inside the dust cloud, and the other dogs stood frozen, looking on.
Then, as quickly as it had started, it was over. The dust settled to reveal Bruno with his jaws clamped around Ilse’s throat. He hurled her through the air like one of his training sticks, and Ilse flew half the length of the clearing. She landed hard and she didn’t get up.
“Fred!” Bruno roared. “You’re next!”
He bounded into the bushes in the direction Rita had taken, and a moment later Rita scurried out a few yards away, with Bruno right behind her. She ran straight between Pierre’s legs, which didn’t deter Bruno at all. Instead he smashed into Pierre’s legs so hard that Pierre flipped over in mid-air before crashing into the Hollow. All the while, Max ran in circles as fast as his tiny legs would move him, yelping furiously.
Rita got the big oak between her and Bruno, and for a little while she kept him dancing one way and then the other. Toby knew it was hopeless. Rita couldn’t have more than a few breaths left to take.
Not letting himself think, Toby hurled himself across the clearing and sank his teeth into Bruno’s rear leg.
Bruno didn’t even turn. He simply kicked out, and Toby was knocked backward into the dirt, stunned. From where he lay, he saw Rita running for her life and Bruno chasing her.
“No!” Toby tried to call out. “Not that way!” But he didn’t have enough air to breathe, let alone to talk.
Rita ran straight off the Cliff, and Bruno, insane with rage, ran after her.
And then they were both gone and the clearing fell eerily silent.
•
Rita knew she was done for. Any direction she ran, Bruno would catch her. She was exhausted and the power of Bruno’s hate was endless. Better, she thought, to fall to her death than to be gutted by a monster.
Maybe, she thought, the dog suit would help her glide, the way she’d seen flying squirrels do.
She had no time left to change her mind. She ran to the edge of the Cliff and threw herself into the air with the last of her strength, hoping that Bruno was still behind her.
The autumn wind was strong above the river. She spread her arms and legs as wide as she could, and she felt the breeze lift her up. Something brushed past her, and then she saw Bruno falling beneath her, legs thrashing. The river below was the highest Rita had ever seen it, reflecting the blue of the sky. For a moment she felt completely at peace.
And then she realized that she was falling after all, and falling hard. Almost as hard as Bruno, who hit the water with a giant splash and went under, only to surface downstream, all four legs pumping, his body spinning helplessly as he was swept away.
Then the water rushed at Rita and slammed into her and took her into itself.
*
TOBY GOT SLOWLY to his feet. He joined the other dogs at the edge of the Cliff, though there was nothing to see. Bruno and Rita, whatever was left of them, had been washed downstream.
Toby turned and saw Ilse struggling to get to her feet. He went over to her and licked her muzzle in sympathy. “Take it easy,” he said. “It’s all over.”
“What happened?” Ilse said, sinking back onto her belly. Her voice was scratchy and strained from the damage to her throat. Toby told her about Rita’s sacrifice.
“And she was a cat?” Ilse said. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
Growling from the direction of the Cliff interrupted them. The other dogs had Max backed up to the edge. “I think maybe you need to take the same trip your pal Bruno did,” Paco said.
Toby trotted over. “Leave him alone.”
Fang turned on him. “Who made you boss?”
“No more bosses,” Toby said. “And no punishment for what happened. Everybody here was a Bad Dog in one way or another.” At those words, they all looked down and their tails drooped in spite of themselves. Toby said, “Let’s see if maybe we learned something and we can all get along now.”
Pierre, though shaky, was standing on his own four feet. He nodded. “The little guy is right.” He looked at Max. “But you need to take it down some, buddy. Try to shut up and not get on everybody’s nerves.”
Max wagged his tail furiously. “You bet. Yep, yep, I will be so quiet—”
“Shut up!” King roared, and everybody was so surprised that they all stopped talking, and after that they all wandered away and lay down to rest for a while before they went downhill to look for food.
*
KEVIN HAD KEPT at his mother until she finally agreed to drive him to the dump and let him look for Doug.
“One hour,” she said. “And you have to wear leather gloves and be really careful what you touch. And you have to take a hot shower as soon as we come home.”
But once they arrived at the dump, it seemed hopeless. The dump smelled sour and the air was cold and there were bags of trash everywhere that animals had torn into. After a while, Kevin gave up kicking at the broken bags and let himself wander. His feet took him down to the river, and there, suddenly, he saw it.
“Mom!” he cried out. “Mom, look! It’s Doug!”
Doug had lost most of his stuffing, and he had washed up on a rock on the downstream end of the dump. Kevin, overjoyed, splashed into the shallow water and reached for Doug, then jerked his hand away at the last minute. Doug’s belly had been torn open and there was a real animal’s black and gray leg sticking out.
Kevin’s mom stood on the shore and shaded her eyes. “What on earth?” she said. “How did a dead cat get inside a stuffed dog?” Then her voice changed and she said, “Don’t touch it, Kevin. It could be full of diseases.”
Kevin shook with frustration. To have come this far, and to have actually found Doug, and not be able to touch him, was unbearable. “Mom? Mom, you have to do something. I’m not leaving him.”
His mom let out a long sigh and waded into the river. “Let me see.” She had gloves on too, and she cautiously picked Doug up off the rock and carried him to shore, where she put him down on a patch of sand. Kevin stood behind her as she delicately pulled Doug’s blue fabric away from the cat’s body and laid the cat out on the ground. She took Doug to the river and rinsed him repeatedly, saying, “We can wash him properly when we get home, and I can put new stuffing in him. He won’t be entirely as good as new, but close.”
Kevin barely heard her. He knelt in the sand and looked at the cat. Its chest was moving up and down.
“Mom?” Kevin whispered.
The cat opened its eyes and looked at Kevin. And Kevin felt an instantaneous rush of love, stronger than anything he’d ever felt before. Without thinking, he gathered the cat up and held it to his chest. The cat seemed to smile. It shut its eyes and began to purr.
“Kevin!” his mother screamed. “Put that thing down!”
Kevin looked up at her. “It’s alive, Mom. Something terrible must have happened for it to end up in the river like that, but now it’s found us and it needs a home and we have to keep it. Please, mom? Please?”
The cat opened its eyes again, and blinked at Kevin’s mom, and purred even louder. Kevin saw his mom weaken.
“I thought you wanted a dog,” she said.
“We can’t have a dog because of the apartment,” Kevin said. “But we can have a cat. And Doug found this one for us. Please, mom? Please?”
“We have to take it to the vet and make sure it’s not sick. And get it bathed and dipped and get it its shots. And get it fixed. And you’ll have to learn to clean its litterbox. Twice a day, do you hear me?”
Kevin stroked the cat’s head with his thumb. “It’s okay, kitty,” he said. “You’re going to live with us now.”
The cat smiled again and closed its eyes and purred.
*
THAT NIGHT, Toby came down from the Bluffs and walked into the forest.
“Spike?” he said.
High in the trees, a shadow moved. “What do you want?”
“I came to tell you,” Toby said. “I saw your friend Rita. There was a big fight, and we all turned on Bruno, and it was Rita that saved us. She tricked Bruno into jumping off a cliff. She saved us, but…I don’t think she could have lived through it.”
“She did, though,” Spike said. “One of the other cats saw her this afternoon. Some humans came and took her away.”
“They did?” The thought made Toby happy and his tail started to wag. Then he said, “Oh. If Rita survived…that means maybe Bruno did too.”
“If all of you really did turn on him like you said, he won’t be back. And if he does come back, or another dog like him, you’ll have to run him off again. That’s the way it is. You can’t give in to that kind of a dog.”
“Yeah. I guess you’re right.”
Toby was walking away when Spike said, “Hey, Toby?”
“Yeah?”
“Thanks for coming to tell me. And…good luck.”
“Thanks, Spike. You too.”
For once, the climb uphill was easier than the climb down. The moon was bright and the night was still and Toby was eager to get back to the Hollow so that he could lie down in the warmth of all of his friends.